Epistemology, Structure and Urgency: The Sociology of Financial and Scientific Journalists

This paper, which examines the work of journalists in one field, argues for the value of including journalists’ own understandings and practices in analyses of the role of the media. Moreover it suggests that, in this field, there may be more commonalities between the practices of journalism and social science than is commonly supposed. The paper is based upon a set of interviews with scientific and financial journalists, covering their interpretations of nanotechnologies and their development. Whereas much of the social scientific work to date in this area has been concerned with the public understanding of science, and the role that journalism plays in relation to this, our study addresses the parallel issue of how, in a field characterised by high levels of commercialisation, potential investors get information and make judgments about particular applications, and the extent to which journalism plays a key role in this process. Here, we focus not primarily on the ways in which the media frame understandings of a complex technology, important though they may be, but on the practical epistemological strategies that journalists employ to make sense of it. We argue that journalists can be seen to be engaged in epistemological strategies that are analogous to those of sociologists, and that this dimension is too easily missed by approaches that, for example, recommend that the correct unit of analysis should always be journalism rather than journalists. We conclude by suggesting that, whilst the general applicability of our argument to other fields of journalism is necessarily an empirical question, our approach may have more general significance for debates about the critical role of social science.