On Television by Bourdieu - Essay Example

The television media, complaints Bourdieu, has a strong hold over censorship while providing political news. Television journalism has been cemented very well by Bourdieu as restricting or limiting freedom.
He goes on to question whether the television medium presents the topics accurately or imperatively. The problem is that journalists and the news field are focusing on the truth which has a chance to get either approved or disapproved. What has been discussed in the argument is that “television presentations almost automatically dumb down due to cultural –social and technological structures of the field”. But according to Bourdieu the documentary series or program takes little time to reach the likeness or approval of the audience than the storytelling session, or dramas.

The reason he has analyzed is that news reports will be concentrated on emphasizing the true incident which has brought changes in the television production of the news field in a cultural concept, and the relationship that exists between the intellectuals and the public or the political and the social community. The success of journalism in television media seems to depend mostly on the responsibility that the intellectual takes to reach the political and social community.
He mainly argues the role and the impact of the journalistic field in television media with the social and cultural structures. He looks at the solution from the perspective of an individual, and so he says that if an individual takes the role of organizing a news documentary for a television presentation so cautiously keeping in mind the social and political expectations rather than obliging what the television industry has to impose on a cultural circle. Television has changed the role of the journalistic field, though it has all forms of technologies to present the information true to life, the journalistic media remains a decline among the public.
This he finds due to many reasons one would be that television has all the powerful cultural means to present all the recent political as well as social and cultural issues more effectively than the print media, as a result, the television industry and individuals have gained more monopoly over the presentations of any issue. He illustrates an incident that happened in French Schools, where North African children wearing headscarves were captured in the light of these media people and this became a controversy later. This is a sort of contradiction produced under the social and cultural makeup. Certainly, he argues that these types of incidents have raised the chances of the monopoly increasing the controversial remarks against television journalistic media.
In Bourdier’s words “a contradiction that haunts every sphere of cultural production: the contradiction between the economic and social conditions necessary to produce a certain type of work and the social conditions of transmission for the products obtained under these conditions” [ p-37]. The condition that he refers to here is the condition of the effect of this controversial documentation presented in television media.
Bourdier writes that the monopoly has extended among the individuals in the television market and has resulted in the extension of full freedom to all individuals. As a result television journalism media has failed to take responsibility to take a look at how the presentations on a political and social issue would affect society in a cultural and social context. This is again due to the economic expectancy that the television industry imposes over the individuals in the same market, so the individuals had to work concentrating on political and economic success rather than working out on what the public needs. Bourdier finally says that the field of production should extend freedom to the individuals who work in the journalistic field.