Pierre Bourdieu's Critical View On The Field Of Te

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"On television" Pierre Bourdieu's critical view on the field of television © Nicolas Germon, february 2001 Contents 1. Introduction 2. On bourdieu's sociology : society as a social space 3. the social re-construction of reality through television 4. "Invisible censorship" and "fast thinkers" 5. The news as a show 6. The influence of television on all fields of cultural production 7. Conclusion 8. Bibliography 1. Introduction The publication of Pierre Bourdieu's book Sur la Télévision in France in 1996 gave birth to a huge media controversy within the television industry itself, but also among journalists and intellectuals, especially French "media-intellectuals" such as Jacques Attali, Luc Ferry and the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.

The aim of Bourdieu's book is to point out several implicit structural problems that have an important influence on journalism in general, but also on other culturally produced areas such as law, knowledge or art. These structural problems are related to economic constraints on television, as well as other factors scarcely mentioned on television.

One example is the quest for higher ratings to increase advertising revenue. Another is that that NBC is owned by General Electric (which means that interviews with people who live near a nuclear plant would undoubtedly have difficulties appearing on this channel?). In addition, CBS is owned by Westinghouse, or ABC by Disney, indicating "that these facts lead to consequences through a whole series of mediations[1]".

Thus, since television has become increasingly important in today's society as a tool for shaping popular opinion, it is able to influence other fields in the social space with which it interacts and to extend the consequences of those economic constraints ( the " rules of the market " ) to the whole view that we have of the social space. We will try to examine some of...