FRIDAY 17 MARCH 2023 - ECHO RESEARCH SEMINAR
Power-Interactive Expertise as a form of Journalistic Expertise: Negotiating Journalistic Autonomy during the Catalan Crisis at El País
WITH Zoltán Dujisin (FNRS UCLouvain)
Prestigious center-left daily El País surprisingly positioned itself as an uncompromising voice against Catalan independentism, imposing an editorial line aligned to the Spanish conservative government to a newsroom that experiences hysteresis as a result. Drawing from in-depth interviews with El País journalists, this article argues newsroom hysteresis, precipitated by the field of power’s growing encroachment on the journalistic field, helps reveal an undertheorized aspect of the journalistic profession: power-interactive expertise. The concept conveys journalists’ need to constantly negotiate limitations to their autonomy, all the while developing discursive strategies of autonomy preservation. Usually concealed and couched in technical terminology and newsroom routines, hysteresis foregrounds the ubiquity of power-interactive expertise.
ABOUT THE researcher
Zoltán Dujisin is an FNRS (National Scientific Fund) Post-Doctoral Fellow based at UCLouvain. His research interests include sociology of knowledge, sociology of journalism, memory politics and political sociology. Zoltán obtained his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in New York, was a Marie Curie Leading Fellow based in Erasmus University Rotterdam and holds an MPhil in Political Science from Central European University. He also worked as a journalist for a decade, corresponding for the global news agency Inter Press Service News and leading Portuguese weekly Expresso from Ukraine, Hungary and the Czech Republic.