University Press Scholarship Online

You are looking at 1-2 of 2 items for: keywords : news commentary

Media Commentary and the Space of Opinion

Ronald N. Jacobs

in The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere

Published in print: 2011 Published Online: May Publisher: Oxford University Press
2012 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199797929 eISBN: 9780199944170 acprof:oso/9780199797929.003.0001
Item type: chapter

Chapter 1 argues that opinion and news commentary are neglected

topics in research literatures about media, democracy and the
public sphere. It offers the idea of the space of opinion as a way of
conceptualizing the role of opinion in contemporary democracies. The
space of opinion is defined as a distinct social space with its own history
and cultural logic, located at the chaotic intersection of the journalistic,
the political and the academic fields. The chapter concludes with a
description of research design, including details about sampling and
data collection strategies from six major opinion formats in print and
television: The New York Times, USA Today, The NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer, Face the Nation, Crossfire, and Hannity & Colmes.

The Space of Opinion : Media Intellectuals and the Public

Sphere
Ronald N. Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley
Published in print: 2011 Published Online: May Publisher: Oxford University Press
2012 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199797929 eISBN: 9780199944170 acprof:oso/9780199797929.001.0001
Item type: book

Opinion is increasingly central in American news media, but there

has been little systematic attention paid to the institutional spaces of
media opinion, or to the role of media commentary in contemporary
civil society. The Space of Opinion fills this gap, offering an insightful
and authoritative account of the newspaper op-ed pages, the Sunday
morning political talk shows on television, and the evening cable news
television lineup. In this major new work, Ronald Jacobs and Eleanor
Townsley describe a complex media environment for opinion and
commentary. On the one hand, largely because of television, the space

Page 1 of 2
of opinion has become more political. On the other hand, because of
the continuing presence of print journalism and the proliferation of new
opinion formats, there has been a significant expansion in the space of
opinion, an open commitment to the principle of diversity, and a clearer
route for voices outside the fields of journalism and politics to participate
in public discussion and commentary. In order to understand this
changing media environment, Jacobs and Townsley investigate who gets
to speak in the space of opinion and what kinds of deliberation are found
in different opinion formats. They analyze styles of writing, forms of
speech, and the types of authority and expertise that media intellectuals
mobilize in their commentaries. Offering in-depth analyses of the Enron
scandal and the “War on Terror”, they find that each opinion format has
developed its own distinctive understanding of politics, journalism, and
critique. The Space of Opinion documents ways that this new media
landscape has challenged the traditional model of detached journalism,
and fundamentally altered the nature of mediated deliberation.

Page 2 of 2