'LIKE A BIRD IN LIME TWIGS': ON THE STRANGE TANGLE OF POWER AND AUTHORITY

IN COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH

In the early pages of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (still perhaps the greatest theorist of power in the

Western political tradition) launches a linguistic tour-de-force whose combination of clarity and boldness

still retains the ability to shock four centuries after it was written. “Seeing then that truth consisteth in the

right ordering of names in our affirmations,” Hobbes writes,

a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stands for, and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime twigs; the more he struggles, the more belimed. And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.

Always true to his word, Hobbes then proceeds to fire off an increasingly nuanced series of

conceptual definitions, culminating, in Chapter 10 with his complex analysis of power (“THE POWER of a

man, to take it universally, is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.”). Power, Hobbes

argues, can be natural (“the eminence of the faculties of body, or mind”) or instrumental (“those powers

which, acquired by these, or by fortune, are means and instruments to acquire more.”) The greatest of

human powers, contends Hobbes, “is that which is compounded of the powers of most men, united by

consent, in one person, natural or civil, that has the use of all their powers depending on his will; such as is

the power of a Commonwealth: or depending on the wills of each particular; such as is the power of a

faction, or of diverse factions leagued.” (Hobbes 1994)

Most modern theorists of power, authority, and legitimacy-- perhaps more modest, but, at the very

least, more easily embarrassed than Hobbes-- have neglected to make such bold claims about the potential

benefits of definitional clarity. Nevertheless the conceptual consequences for our understandings of power,

as Hobbes feared, have more often than not resembled the fate of the bird in the lime-twigs: “ the more he

struggles, the more belimed.” One can see this confusion extending to the very roots of the earliest

sociological thinking on power and authority; the struggles surrounding the “proper” translation the

Weberian notion of Herrschaft are well known to most students of sociological history, while the

fundamental question of whether Herrschaft should be translated as “domination” or “authority” (and the

corresponding debates about how exactly Weber understood the relationship between “authority” and

“legitimacy”) can be seen as proxy battles for deeply held disagreements about the nature of power itself.

Despite these fairly profound conceptual difficulties, arguments about power, authority, and the

relationship between the two-- from the “three faces of power debate” that dominated much of political

science in from the 1950's to the 1960's; to the provocative writings and interviews of Michel Foucault; to

Bourdieu's more empirically grounded work on symbolic power-- have been some few areas of current

research in which both social scientists and social theorists have felt compelled to produce voluminous and

contradictory materials in equal measure. All, that is, but in the realm of communications and media

research. For while questions of media power (and related questions of media effects and media influence)

have dominated the field since its inception, the theoretical relationship between these questions and

questions of authority and legitimacy have been rarely addressed, especially on a non-normative level. The

few scholarly investigations tackling issues of (usually specifically “journalistic”) authority have been a

theoretical and definitional muddle, often doing more to obscure the concept than illuminate it. All the

while, of course, media-marketers and political communications researchers carry on merrily with their

“media effects” experiments, (still, it seems) convinced that the proof of media power is in the purchasing.

How do I define power, authority, and the relationship between them? On the one hand answering

that question is the very purpose of this essay, and the hope is that my own thinking on this complex issue

will become clearer over the course of the following pages. Knowing, however, that when it comes to power

and authority many scholars are in a position similar to that of the bird in lime twigs, I will jump ahead and,

in good Hobbesian fashion, place my definitional cards on the table at the beginning. Power is defined in

this essay as the latent, not always exercised capacity for A to influence B in a manner contrary to B’s

interests. Authority, on the other hand, marks the manner by which differences in power capacity are

perceived as legitimate by B and / or A. This question of authority can be discussed normatively (as in,

“what can render differences in power capacity legitimate?”) or empirically (as in, “how is a perception of

legitimate authority constructed and maintained?”).

Although my primary concern is with questions of media authority, such a problematic cannot be

properly understood without first coming to grips with the genealogy of media power; in other words,

investigating with the manner in which the notion idea media power has been articulated by

communications theorists and researchers. As media power has remained at the center-- either by its

presence or its absence-- of most scholarship in the field of media studies, such a genealogy inevitably

forces the researcher to take a position within the currently fevered debates over the history of

communications research. The argument is made in the pages which follow that, for most of the history of

the field, media research has concerned itself with the overt exercise of media power rather than the

capacity for such an exercise; furthermore, that most structuralist exceptions to this obsession with

exercised power have remained beholden to a vulgar Marxist conception of power; and finally, that recent

movements in the field towards more complex notion of symbolic power and its relationship with various

other forms of power mark a welcome conceptual advance. Nevertheless, even these theoretical moves

neglect issues of authority in media institutions.

If Part One explores issues of power in media studies, then, Part Two focuses instead on media and

authority. It should be obvious that the definitions of power and authority discussed earlier are generic,

common to the literature of both political science and social theory. In the second section of this essay I will

refashion them, attempting to render their basic distinctions more relevant to communications research. In

this second section, I try to tease out the conceptual distinction between power and authority in the field of

media research and argue that non-normative questions of institutional media authority deserve more

attention than they have thus far received from scholars in the communications field. I argue that while

authority necessarily involves questions of legitimacy and right, scholarship in this vein need not be

necessarily and irreducibly normative. I examine the well-known attempt by Barbie Zelizer to move issues

of “journalistic authority” towards the center of communications research, and conclude by advancing my

own understanding of the relationship between power and authority in communication and media studies

Towards a Genealogy of Media Power

To contend, as I have above, that communications researchers have operated almost exclusively on

the terrain of power and have neglected questions of authority requires a critical overview of the history of

the field of communications research. Such an overview, however, is problematic. Writing about the state of

scholarship in 1993, John Durham Peters contended, “communications, defined with any rigor or

imagination, is not amenable to institutional disciplinizing. It is studied in diaspora.” (Peters, J.D., 1993).

Twelve years later, Jefferson Pooley would echo Peters’ analysis and note that “our fields’ story of its past

is notoriously unreflective—built atop inverted traditions and pleasing allusions.” (Pooley 2005).

Supposedly divided between “European,” “British,” and “American” methodological approaches, between

“critical” and “administrative” research programs, and further balkanized into a host of institutional houses

—journalism schools, schools of communication (“mass” or otherwise), departments of rhetoric, of media

studies, of media ecology, of cultural studies – any hope for a quick, pleasing disciplinary history to serve as

a background for a larger critique (as may still be possible in older fields as diverse as political science,

sociology, and anthropology) is doomed to itself be seen a quasi-political intervention into an emerging and

contested domain of disciplinary collective memory.1

Given these warnings, my own approach in the few pages that follow must be seen as idiosyncratic

and highly provisional. I certainly do not attempt to provide a definitive overview of the role of power in the

“field” of “communications” research. Instead, I opt for a critical interrogation of one line of analysis within

1 There are signs of late that these disciplinary fragments may be beginning to congeal. Both older (Katz [2006], Katz, Peters, Liebes, and Orloff [2003]) and younger (Pooley and Park [2007]; Wahl-Jorgensen [2004]) generations of communications scholars have shown an unusual interest in finally getting the canon problem “right” (or “wrong,” as the case may be). Nevertheless, such coagulation has not yet occurred.

a particular subfield of communications research— generally, with various research formulations emanating

from inside the “mainstream” of political communications research, and more specifically, with the fifty

year conversation surrounding Katz and Lazarsfeld’s famous Decatur study and their hypothesis of the so

called “two step flow.” Nevertheless, this is not an essay about the validity of the two-step flow or yet

another (mis)(re)interpretation of the historical meaning of Decatur. Rather, I argue that Decatur and its

manifold, variegated, and occasionally bastard children have all shared a certain obsession with media

power. Textually, I move from exploring the link between the original Decatur research and what has been

called a “one-dimensional” view of power, to Gitlin’s critique and his own “multi-dimensional view” of

power, to Katz’s own reinterpretation of his own work and its legacy, and, finally, to more recent Marxist

and Bourdieuean conceptions of media power. Conceptually, we move from an understanding of power as

the exercise of force (whether in its one- or multi-dimensional versions) to power as the repository of force

potential. It is then, and only then, that we will be prepared to return to our primary question of media

authority.

Communicative Power in Exercise: One or Multi-Dimensional?

Within the domain of political communications research, as well as in the larger field of

communications more generally, the importance of Katz and Lazarsfeld’s 1945 study of communication and

influence in the town of Decatur, Illinois cannot be underestimated. The 50th Anniversary of the publication

of Personal Influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955 [2005]) spawned a major and well-attended academic

conference, a special issue of the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

(Simonson 2006), and a number of reinterpretations, revisions, and revisitings of the classic text. In his

overview of the field of political communication in general, Ryfe argues that the disciplines of social

psychology, mass communication, and political science were the primary influences on the field, and these

corresponding disciplinary concerns—with attitudes and opinions, politics as group processes, and media

effects—can be seen in embryo in the Decatur study (Ryfe 2001). One genealogical option, then, is to trace

the contours of the political communications field and elaborate the manner in which each of its major

methodological and theoretical outcroppings (including propaganda analysis, media effects, agenda setting,

and news diffusion [Rogers] x) have articulated a particular understanding of media power. However, this is

almost too easy. Mainstream political communication has always “shared a common intellectual interest in

the effects of mass media communication, and … focused on changes in political behavior (such as voting)

as one of its main dependent variables of study.” (Ryfe 2001, 410) Rather than pick on “political

communications” for its obsession with a (particularly limited) form power, I feel it would more useful to

walk an intellectually meandering path away from Personal Influence, all the while keeping close eye on the

odd similarities amongst its scholarly supporters, detractors, and reimaginers.

That the Decatur study is heavily indebted to a certain understanding of power (called, by Lukes, a

“one-dimensional view”) has become something of a commonplace. Gitlin, most strongly, drew a

connection between the methodology of the Decatur study and the work of Dahl and the “one-dimensional”

power theorists. Indeed, Gitlin’s 1978 essay is as much a critique of this understanding of power as it is an

attack on Lazarsfeld and his administrative research program. “[Katz and Lazarsfeld's] behaviorization of

power is identical to that achieved and insisted upon by the pluralist school of community political analysts

who came to prominence and began to dominate their field in the 1950's,” Gitlin writes (Gitlin 1978, 213).

Compare Lukes’ criticism of Dahl and other pluralistic political scientists (“one-dimensional … power

involves a focus on behavior in the making decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of

[subjective] interests, as seen in policy preferences, as revealed by participation.”) (Lukes 1974 [2005], 19)

to Gitlin’s critique of Katz and Lazarsfeld:

Here too [in the Decatur study] the revolt against an earlier paradigm which emphasized the power of elites (the hypodermic model on the one hand, vulgar Marxism or elite theory on the other). Here too the tacit denial of patterns of structurally maintained power, or what will be called 'non-decisions.' Here too the insistence on studying discrete episodes of the exercise of influence, as if power were a kind of freely flowing marketplace commodity in a situation of equality ... The structural homology of the two paradigms, personal influence and pluralism reveals something more

significant than a coincidental similarity in the shape of their results; it reveals the similarity of problematics and methodologies, the common thrusts of the two fields. (Gitlin 1978, 213)

For Lukes, this simplistic view of power must to be replaced with what he calls a three-dimensional

view. Drawing on Bacharach and Baltz’s writings about power’s “second face,” Lukes argued that since

“power is not solely reflected in concrete decisions, the researcher must also consider the chance that some

person or association could limit decision making to relatively non-controversial matters, by influencing

community values and political procedures and rituals.” (Lukes, 1974 [2005], x). Behaviorism is relatively

useless for understanding power, Lukes maintains. Rather, the analysis of power should focus on both

decision-making and the manner in which the decision-making agenda is set, on both the issues and the

potential issues that are excluded in this agenda. Finally, any adequate understanding of power needs to

acknowledge the possible existence of “latent [social] conflict, which consists in a contradiction between the

interests of those exercising power and the real interests of those they exclude. “ (Lukes 1974 [2005], 28)

Gitlin’s most explicit attempts to follow Lukes in formulating a media-centered counter-model to

Katz and Lazarsfeld’s pluralist hypothesis can be found in his early writings on hegemony (1980; 1987;

2000), which register both the influence of Lukes and the “three faces of face of power” revolution, as well

as the recent import of Gramscian thought into critical American social science. Hegemony, for Gitlin-- in

an understanding indebted not only to Gramsci but to Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall--

“is a ruling class’s (or alliance’s) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and

penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the

systematic (but necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established

order.” (Gitlin 1980, 253)

Pace Lukes, Gitlin here acknowledges the manner in which hegemony secures compliance, not only

through domination, but also through the “penetration of ideology into common sense and every day

practice.” Hegemony limits the extent of the possible by “engineering mass consent to the established

order,” a process unobservable through traditional behavioralist methodologies. Throughout his discussion

of hegemony, Gitlin provocatively alludes to the distinction between “force and fraud,” (in Machiavelli’s

language) or the inability to draw a hard and fast line “between the mechanisms of hegemony and the

mechanism’s of coercion”—the melding of force and consent. (253) It is partly on these terms that Gitlin

has called the hegemony model a “halfway house” between power and authority (Gitlin 2007).

These sporadic allusions to authority, however, is almost immediately undercut by Gitlin’s treatment

of “the media,” a treatment that frames it as one of the key institutions in the establishment of hegemony

and social order. Throughout The Whole World Is Watching, Gitlin details the manner in which “the cultural

industry as a whole, along with the educational system … coherently specializes in the production, relaying,

and regearing of hegemonic ideology.” (Gitlin 1980, 254) In later work on prime-time television, Gitlin

elaborates upon the role of the cultural industries in the construction of this flexible social order:

Through training and reward, the dominant social groups secure the services of cultural practitioners-- producers, writers, journalists, actors, and so on. To articulate ideals and understandings, to integrate the enormous variety of social interests among elites, and between elites and less powerful groups, in a modern capitalist society, the corporate and political elites must depend on the work of skilled groups of symbolic adepts, what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals." In order to make their livings, these practitioners organize their production to be consonant with the values and projects of the elites. (Gitlin 1987, x)

Both the strength and the target of exercised of media power is thus shifted: media power is strong,

rather than weak (cultural producers are the key actors in the production of a remarkably powerful social

order); the target of this media power is not individuals but “the entire social system.” Gitlin’s writings on

hegemony and its relationship to communications systems thus mark an evolution in our understanding of

the media in much the same way that Lukes’ notions of the “second and third faces of power” both expand

and critique earlier scholarly thinking about power in general. Nevertheless, both approaches remain

fundamentally concerned with, as Lukes puts it, the ability of A to affect B in a manner contrary to B’s

interests (Lukes 1974 [2005], 37). In other words, although hegemony is conceptually distinct from the

phenomenon considered by Dahl, Katz, Lazarsfeld, and others, the analysis of hegemony remains, in the

end, the analysis of power.

That the post-Decatur critique did more to refine specific concepts of media power than to challenge

communications’ focus on power in general is echoed in Katz’s own retrospective discussion of “media

research since Lazarsfeld.” Identifying three primary thrusts of analysis and critique— the institutional, the

critical, and the technological—Katz argues that, if the limited effects paradigm can be seen as asking how

the media effect what people think, or what they do, “the institutional model says the media tells us what to

think about, the critical paradigm what not to think about , and the technological, how to think, or where to

belong.” (Katz 1987, 28). “Obviously,” Katz concludes, (and this is the key point) “each of these competing

paradigms is equally interested in with effect—although they sometimes say otherwise—whether the focus

is on agenda, consciousness, or integration, that is, on information, ideology, or organization.” (34) In other

words, each of these post-Lazarsfeldian paradigms is concerned with media power: how the media frames

our conception of what is politically relevant, how it limits and constrains our understanding of the larger

forces that give direction to society, or how it impacts large-scale social organizations over long periods of

time. Or again: A (the media) influences B (the polity, or society, or social organizations) in numerous,

though related, ways, and usually (though not always) in a manner that is contrary to B’s interests.

The of post-1950’s obsession of communications research with questions of power can be seen from

an alternate angle-- though a retrospective analysis of Katz’s own varied intellectual career, a career that

parallels many of the most important developments in communications research. Curran and Liebes state the

matter plainly: “Katz has been pursuing the elusive grail of understanding the nature of media power for

forty years.” (Curran and Liebes 1998, 16) Throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, Katz’s “pivotal concern

remained what the media do to people, until Katz simply reversed this—in uses and gratifications research

—by asking what people do to the media. Yet behind this apparent reversal lay a continuing concern with

media influence, now reconceived as consequence.” (Curran and Liebes 1988, 16, emphasis mine) That

Curran and Liebes argue later in the same chapter that Katz was able to finally “burst out of the media

effects straightjacket” in the 1980’s and, though his examination of Dallas and his analysis of media events,

“ask in what ways the media act as channels of connection between different parts of society,” only proves,

to my mind, the general obsession with media power in the mainstream communications tradition. Media

events, after all, can simply be seen as particularly powerful examples of a certain form of media power

that, though it defies “all of the caveats of media-effects research … have relevance for the formation of

public opinion and for institutions such as politics, religion, and leisure.” (Katz and Dyan, 1992).

Throughout this brief overview of the intellectual detritus littering the field of communications

research, we have seen how each of our examples— political communications research, the limited effects

paradigm, hegemony, uses and gratifications research, media event research—articulate an understanding of

media power primarily understood as exercised power: the media power of A is visible insofar as it is

exercised over B. Each of these examples, “fail to distinguish between the possession and exercise of

power.” (Isaac 1987, 6), and each forgets, in Lukes’ terms, “that power is a dispositional concept,

identifying an ability or capacity, which may or may not be exercised.” (Lukes 2005, 109). This is not the

only conception of media power within communications research, though it is the dominant one. It is to an

alternate notion of media power—of power as potential-- which we now turn.

Communicative Power As Potential: From Marx to Bourdieu

What if we were to begin to think of media power as potential, or capacity rather than as an

exercised force? The image of media power embodied in “waves,” extending out into space and penetrating

the minds of individual subjects and society, is an old and powerful one, even after the unlamented death of

the “magic bullet theory” of media influence. Nevertheless, once we began to conceptualize media power as

a resource, we could start to think of it as embodied or stored in particular institutions; as homologous or at

least structurally related to other forms of concentrated power; and as something produced, capitalized,

distributed, and consumed. In short, we would begin to think like a political economist. Rightly criticized

for economic reductionism and its conflation of economic and political systems (Schudson 2005), more

subtle, nuanced variations of some basic political economy concepts mark a welcome step forward for our

understanding of media power.

Although defined broadly as “how communication relates to political and economic formations,”

most mainstream approaches to the political economy of communications focus on the societal effects of

concentrated media ownership (Graham 2007). McChesney (2004), Bagdikian (1997), and Herman and

Chomsky (1988 ) are only the best known of the political economists focusing on the effects concentrated

patterns of communication ownership in capitalist society; other authors working in this vein include

Garnham (1990), Schiller, (1996), Mansell (2004), and Wasko (2001). McChesney sums up the focus of

the field when he argues that political economy:

First, addresses the nature of the relationship between media and communication systems on the one hand and the broader social structure of society. In other words, it examines how media and communication systems and content reinforce, challenge or influence existing class and social relations. It does this with a particular interest in how economic factors influence politics and social relations. Second, the political economy of communication looks specifically at how ownership, support mechanisms (e.g. advertising) and government policies influence media behavior and content. This line of inquiry emphasizes structural factors and the labor process in the production, distribution and consumption of communication. (McChesney, 2000: 109)

Several points should be noted. First, the question of “effects” is not entire done away with in the

political economy tradition (it examines, after all, “how media and communication systems and content

reinforce, challenge or influence existing class and social relations”) but the focus has shifted; rather than

the behavioralist investigation of measurable, media driven changes, the analysis is projected “backwards,”

as it were, towards media institutions themselves. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the limited

effects tradition takes the social system for grated (it is, by and large, seen as capitalist or quasi-capitalist)

and questions the effects of that (unspoken) system on society, while, in a reversal, the tradition of political

economy sees media effects as largely stable and assumed (they “manufacture of consent,” produce political

quietism, provide poor or deliberately misleading information) with the nature of the sources of these effects

(i.e., concentrated reserves of economic-communicative power) the key question to be investigated. Second,

the specific source of this “reserve system” of communicative power is, in this tradition, presumed to be

economic. In a media system governed by the market and dominated by gargantuan corporate providers of

news and entertainment content, the natural assumption of most political economists has been that media

power, ultimately, reduces to economic power.

The most central element, the ultimate determinant, if one were to strain the core of political economy, is the economic base as it turns into the crucial explanatory factor in social and societal power relations … Nicholas Garnham, who, notwithstanding a careful boundary construction towards economism and reductionism, boldly states that, “while accepting that the mass media can be and are politically and ideologically over-determined within many specific conjunctures, a political economy, as I understand it, rests upon ultimate determination by the economic.” (Skjerdal 1998)

Influenced by Bourdieuean sociology, with its more nuanced understanding of the sources and

nature of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1985, Lebaron 2003), other strands of communications scholarship

have continued to envision of media power as a resource while simultaneously breaking with the one-

dimensionality of the political economy tradition. J.B. Thompson begins to decouple (though by no means

the completely disassociate) economic from symbolic power, drawing analytical distinctions between

economic, political, coercive, and symbolic power (Thompson 1995, 13). Symbolic power, for Thompson,

“refers to the capacity to intervene in the course of events, to influence the actions of others and indeed

create events, by means of the production and transmission of symbolic forms.” (17). Note here the

similarities to James Carey’s definition of communication: “the symbolic process whereby reality is

produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.” (Carey 1989, 23). Like the political economists,

Thompson and Carey see symbolic power as the capacity to intervene in the course of events, rather than as

the measurable but discrete intervention itself; and like Bourdieu, both thinkers “break with the economism

that leads one to reduce the social field, a multi-dimensional space, solely to the economic field, to the

relations of economic production, which are constituted as coordinates of social position.” (Bourdieu 1985,

723). In similar fashion, Couldry and Curran draw on this understanding of power in their work on

alternative media, describing media power a particularly concentrated form of symbolic power-- one which

is capable of being challenged by other, alternative sources of communicative capital (Couldry and Curran

2003, 4).

Accepting and combining the best of these power-as-potential reinterpretations, in line with several

generations of scholarship in political science (Lukes 2005; Isaac 1985) we can at last define media power

as

• the multi-dimensional capacity (Bourdieu) to control the symbolic process whereby reality is

produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed (Carey); the capacity (not always exercised) to

intervene in the course of events, to influence the actions of others and indeed create events, by

means of the production and transmission of symbolic forms (Thompson)2

In sum: widely divergent traditions of communication theorizing-- limited effects, hegemony, uses

and gratifications, media events-- define media power as a force that is exercised by communications

institutions over individuals and society at large. An alternate tradition sees media power as lying in its

force potential rather than in its actual exercise. Most of this research, unfortunately, is irremediably

economistic and reductionist-- although a divergent strain, traceable to the symbolic sociology of Pierre

Bourdieu, marks the best current attempt to formulate a multi-dimensional understanding of media power

grounded in power as capacity. Nevertheless, in spite of all of this, we are still on the terrain of media

power. Media authority, for its part, remains a mystery; the undiscovered country of communications

studies. What, if anything, can we say now about media authority and its relationship to the understanding

of media power articulated above?

From Media Power to Media Authority

If debates over media power have, historically, dominated the field of communications research,

than what advantages might be gained by shifting our focus to questions of authority? Answering this

2 Ironically, after all of our relentless forward movement, we find have returned to the origins of an alternate communications research tradition-- to the work of Harold Innis, and his extensive discussion of “knowledge monopolies” (Innis 1950; 1951; Carey 1989).

question, of course, entails entering the minefield that is the “power vs. authority” debate in modern social

theory, a debate skirted during my brief definitional discussion above. Rather than recapitulate the history of

this debate—which extends at least as far back as the writings of Max Weber and continues up to the

present day3-- let me briefly clarify my own understanding of the distinction between these two muddled

concepts.

One of the clearest (and now largely forgotten) discussions of the relationship between authority and

power can be found in Wolff (1970), from which it will be useful to quote at length. Authority, Wolff

argues, “is the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed.” [emphasis added] It must be

distinguished from power, he continues, which is “the ability to compel compliance, either through the

threat or the use of force.” Wolff provides the illuminating example of the stolen wallet: no one would argue

that a thief has the authority to steal my wallet, even though he may have the power at his command to

compel me to do so. On the other hand, few would argue that the state, under the existing structures of

modern government, has the authority to compel me to pay taxes-- at least in a non-normative sense. Even if

the authority of the state, in the case of taxes, ultimately relies on its monopoly of the use or force (which is

itself debatable), it would be facile to claim that this authority can be reduced entirely to power in a manner

similar to that of a petty thief brandishing a gun.

The remark above about “non-normative argumentation” represents a further conceptual puzzle

succinctly dispensed with by Wolff. To argue that authority represents a right to command and a right to be

obeyed implies either a normative or an empirical claim:

To claim authority is to claim the right to be obeyed. To have authority is then—what? It may mean to have that right, or it may mean to have one’s claim acknowledged and accepted by those at whom it is directed. The term ‘authority’ is ambiguous, having both a descriptive and a normative sense. Even the descriptive sense refers to norms and obligations, of course, but it does so by describing what men believe they ought to do rather than by asserting they ought to do it. (21)

3 See, for instance, Randall Collins, “A Comparative Approach to Political Sociology,” in State and Society, ed. R, Bendix (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), pg. 42-57; Jere Cohen, Lawrence Hazelrigg, and Whitney Pope, “De-Parsonizing Weber: A Critique of Parsons' Interpretation of Weber's Sociology,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 299-41; and the lengthy footnote 31 in Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press), pg.61

In general, Wolff concludes, the distinction between political science and political philosophy can be

boiled down to this difference in emphasis. Political scientists have described the actually existing

mechanics of authority, while political philosophers have argued, in normative terms, about the legitimate

bases upon which that authority should rest. A similar distinction can be made in the sphere of

communications research: amongst the few media scholars who have bothered to consider authority, their

arguments are most often drawn at the normative level.4 Indeed, to discuss media authority at all usually

implies that one will make an argument about what an authoritative media source should be like, rather than

a description of how this source maintains its authority.

Why, then, has communication research focused so resolutely on questions of power, ignoring or

over-normativizing questions of authority? Part of the answer, I argue, lies in the neo-Marxist origins of

“critical” media scholarship, which, along with so-called “administrative” research, has largely dominated

the field since the 1970’s. Marxism, of course, has long been concerned with issues of power. By

recognizing at a basic level that the possession of capital represented, and indeed masked, the possession of

power, Marx inaugurated a challenge to the liberal social paradigm that today finds its heirs in the “political

economy” wing of communications studies. The shadow of Gramsci, who expanded Marx’s understanding

of power to include varieties of ideological control that would address economically inexplicable patterns of

social consensus, lies behind much of the most interesting sociological work on now banal (though certainly

not at the time!) concepts like media framing, agenda-setting, and priming. And Foucault, who

simultaneously inverted and exploded the Marxist notion of power (but who also always framed his work in

dialog with Marx), can be seen as the somewhat eccentric spiritual father of two generations of media /

cultural studies.

If varieties of Marxism and neo-Marxism have lent themselves well to radical thinking about media

power, are there alternate critical theoretical currents that might be better situated to sharply interrogate, on

4 The scholarship undergirding the “public journalism movement” can be faulted for blurring this distinction. More recent work, like Schudson’s article on democracy and expertise (2006), operates on an entirely normative level.

both a normative and empirical level, issues of media authority? One possibility might be found in the

recent emergence of what can loosely be defined as “anarchist social thought.” A comparison here between

late 19th century answers to the question “what is authority?”—one provided by Bakunin, the other by

Engels—might provide us with an initial illumination of the problem.

Bakunin divides authority into two parts: against the first, the authority of the natural law (“the

inevitable power … which manifests itself in the necessary linking and succession of phenomena in the

physical and social worlds”) he acknowledges that rebellion would be impossible. “We cannot disobey

natural laws,” Bakunin writes, “because they constitute the basis and the fundamental conditions of our

existence; they envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements, thoughts, and acts.” Yet in this

obedience, he writes, there is no humiliation, for an “external master, a legislator outside of him whom he

commands”, has not imposed the natural law upon us The authority of the external legislator represents, for

Bakunin, a second type of authority, one that, however learned or seemingly in conformity with the natural

law, is inevitably despotic. Even if systems of external regulation were to reach the heights of pure science

—even if the philosophers were to become kings, in Plato’s formulation—unquestioning obedience to the

authority of such a legislator would still be “monstrous,” for three reasons. First, because even seemingly

“perfect” science can err. Second, because any authority invested with absolute power would inevitably

become corrupt. And finally and most importantly, because:

“A society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending - such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes … It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.”

“The liberty of man,” concludes Bakunin “consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has

himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any

extrinsic will whatsoever, divine or human, collective or individual.”

Importantly, it is at this moment that Bakunin moves on to the question of expertise. Denying that he

acknowledges no authority whatsoever, Bakunin retorts that:

In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

Expert authority grounded in a division of labor, Bakunin acknowledges, does indeed exist. But it is

entirely provisional, always subject to verification, and can only be acknowledged through free consent. “I

bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason … The greatest

intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole [of knowledge] … Therefore there is no

fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary

authority and subordination.”

In this remarkable essay, Bakunin does a number of things. First, he directly poses the question,

“what is authority,” grounding it in the non-material sphere and discussing scientific and legislative

knowledge (“the knowledge of humanity”) in its ideal form. He addresses issues of expertise, the division of

labor, and its relationship human freedom. Remarkably, for a man dedicated to the destruction of most of

the 19th century social order, his perspective is deeply indebted to the Enlightenment. And although his

essay is almost entirely normative, he points in the direction of a more empirical analysis of the basis for

legitimate authority.

It was not a coincidence, then, that the anarchists of the International Workingman’s Association

(IWA) were called “anti-authoritarians” by their Marxist opponents, or that anti-authoritarian remains the

preferred nomenclature for many of the less sectarian anarchists working in today’s social movements.

Contrary to the common stereotypes, much recent anarchist political thought is as engaged in trying to

formulate the basis of legitimate authority—the right by which command is exercised in society—as it is

with the permanent critique of that command. While received wisdom holds that anarchism is against power

tout court (anarchy means, of course, “against rulers”), it is more accurate to say that anarchism admits the

inevitability of power in some form while simultaneously seeing to render that power as local, democratic,

and rational as possible—in short, to ground authority in human freedom. Political theorist Peter Manicas

argues that the cluster of ideas commonly referred to as “anarchy” would better be described as anocracy;

that is, the absence of illegitimate domination rather than the absence of all authority or government.

Although Manaicas occasionally describes the anarchist ideal as a “human association in which

authoritative and legal coercive power is altogether eliminated” he elsewhere admits that authority would

exist in this society; it would nevertheless remain an authority consented to freely and locally rather than

imposed from above (Manicas 1982, 146).

More recently, David Graeber has noted that anarchism is “a constant questioning, an effort to

identify every compulsory or hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves,

and if they cannot-- which usually turns out to be the case-- an effort to limit their power and thus widen the

scope of human liberty.” While Graeber uses the term power here, I would argue that it would be more

accurate for him to speak of authority-- note his emphasis on “compulsion” and his challenge to power to

“justify itself.” More practically, Graber has also written that the anarchist wing of what came to be known

as the “anti-globalization movement” is “not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of

organization … is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like

states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus

democracy.”

Given this philosophical backdrop, how should we define media authority? As a starting point, we

can apply Wolff’s distinctions between power and authority more specifically to questions of media power

and media authority. Media power, we noted above, was the multi-dimensional capacity to control the

symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Media authority, by

Wolff’s definition, would be

• the right to control the symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and

transformed (Carey); the right to intervene in the course of events, to influence the actions of others

and indeed create events, by means of the production and transmission of symbolic forms

(Thompson)

Our redefinition of media power, detailed above, has provided us with the necessary conceptual tools

through which to posit a coherent definition of media authority. The terrain of the ground we are operating

on has shifted, albeit slightly. In concluding this paper, I would like to trace the details of this “absent

tradition” of media study—the study of authority—and detail a new intellectual approach through which

questions of both power and right can return to the center of the communications research tradition.

Authority and Communications Research: An Absent Tradition

Media authority has been the orphan child of communication studies. Nevertheless, traces of its

presence can be found in a number of distinct research traditions. I detail three of these traditions here—

hegemony; cultural histories of professional objectivity; and studies of journalistic authority—before

elaborating my own perspective of how this absent tradition might be reinvigorated.

Gitlin has called hegemony a “halfway house” between authority and power. The reasons for this are

obvious; hegemony operates, in Machiavelli’s language, through both force and fraud. Stuart Hall goes

further: “in the liberal capitalist state, consent is normally in the lead, operating behind the ‘armor of

conversion.’” () If we take the second of Wolff’s research topics, then—the study of authority is the study of

how willing compliance to domination is secured—it should be obvious that the hegemony concept is meant

to address this very question. Persuasion from above is united with consent from below. (Gitlin 1980, 10)

In Gitlin’s study, however—and in all media studies that utilize the hegemony concept—the media’s

role is to “create” hegemonic power in the service of powerful classes and class fractions. Media is the

producer, hegemony is its output, and the effect is on society. There is no discussion of how the authority of

the media itself is created. Given a more process-oriented understanding of power, this later question is

nearly incoherent; the only way to phrase it would be to ask something along the lines of “by what right

does the media influence society in a manner (usually) contrary to society’s interests.” Given our more

capacity oriented understanding of media power, however, better questions suddenly snap into place. We

can now ask: by what right do media institutions possess levels of concentrated symbolic capital which

allow them to productively intervene in the maintenance of reality through the production of symbolic

forms? Or rephrased in a more sociological vein, by what methods is the willing acceptance of unequal

concentrations of symbolic capital generated? It is these questions that the hegemony concept, as it

traditionally conceived, does not address.

A second line of thought, falling uneasily in the border between sociology, history, and

communication studies, does consider how the authority of media institutions is generated. I have elsewhere

grouped the various authors in this tradition together under the somewhat uneasy label of “cultural histories

of professional objectivity” (Anderson and Schudson 2008). This tradition owes much to work in the

sociology of the professions, and seeks to uncover the manner in which various professional practices

generated a specific form of cultural authority (Starr 1984) on behalf of various occupational groups.

Through archival research and historical analysis, this research takes up E.C. Hughes’ question, “what are

the circumstances in which people in an occupation [usually journalism] attempt to turn it into a profession

and themselves into professional people?” (Hughes 1963) most often by chronicling the rise of the

professional practice of journalistic objectivity. Schudson, probably the leading figure in this tradition, has

argued that the “objectivity norm” in American journalism ultimately provides some sort of benefit to the

group that articulates it, either by stimulating social cohesion (in a Durkheimian sense) or social control (in

a Weberian one) (Schudson 2001). Ethics and norms exist for ritualistic reasons, helping to provide internal

solidarity and cohesion to a particular group; they also can also represent a way of defining a group in

relation to other groups (152). Schudson has also noted, in a later work, that journalistic objectivity serves

the additional function of acting as a “group claim to possess a unique kind of professional knowledge,

articulated via work” (Anderson and Schudson 2008) a claim which in turn helps generate cultural

authority.

These cultural professional histories (which also include Dicken-Garcia 1989; Summers 1994;

Banning 1999; Kaplan 2002; Tucher 2004) are probably the most consistent examples of scholarly work

that seeks to probe the foundations of the authority of media institutions themselves. It would be an

exaggeration, however, to claim that these histories represent anything like a dominant trend within

communications research. They are, by and large, historical and archival, they usually confine their

attention to one specific concentration of symbolic capital (journalism), and they have overemphasized the

role played by the objectivity norm in the maintenance of journalistic authority (as comparative research

demonstrates.) Nevertheless, they can serve as a sturdy foundation on which to ground additional research

on forms and concentrations of media authority.

Barbie Zelizer has probably done the most to bring questions of authority to the forefront of

communications scholarship. Like the professional historians discussed above, Zelizer’s work primarily

centers on the authority of journalism as an institution and cultural practice. Asking how “half-jumbled

wisps of conversation become full blown news stories … told with a knowing and certain voice” Zelizer

points toward the establishment of journalistic authority, defined as “a source of codified knowledge,

guiding individuals to appropriate standards of action.” This knowledge coheres through binding ritual acts,

later given symbolic form. Authority, for Zelizer, emerges out of ritual, symbol, and narrative, “a construct

of community, functioning as the stuff that keeps community together.” (4) Zelizer sees journalism as a

community, grounded, in the end, through symbolic sharing and through the stories journalists tell each

other. In her case study of media coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination, Zelizer looks at how one

group of previously disparaged journalists (TV reporters) inserted themselves into the journalistic

profession via both their coverage of the killing and, even more importantly, the stories they later told each

other about the killing.. Recalling Giddens, Durkheim, and Halbwachs, Zelizer examines “how [TV]

journalists used narrative practice as a means of collectively representing shared codes of knowledge which

they then feed back into the community to set themselves up as cultural authorities.” (10)

My own empirical work on journalistic authority has tried to build on the best of each of the

research strands described above. In response to classic sociological boundary problems endemic to the

ethnographic analysis of the newsroom, I have advocated a reemphasis on boundary spanning networks and

have proposed a methodological fusion of news production ethnography, social network analysis, field

theory, and actor-network theory (ANT) as a means to transcend the historicism of the cultural theorists of

objectivity and the overemphasis in Zelizer’s work on authority via rhetoric. I have tried to establish the

importance of journalistic knowledge—an odd kind of knowledge, no doubt, one that thrives by

emphasizing its own commonality, its “expertise of non-expertise,” and the journalists’ odd, hybridized

boundary position. This work remains in its early stages; nevertheless, I hope it, too, will eventually play a

role in forging a genuine research tradition out of the current fragments of one that litter the

communications field.

Establishing this tradition is, I believe, tremendously important given the technological world we

inhabit today. Despite all the forces seeking to reground uneven distributions of communicative power

(through the elimination of “net neutrality,” by permitting unequal access to digital communications

networks for the world’s poor and disadvantaged, and by the continued concentration of digital “pipes” in

the hands of fewer and fewer corporate monopolies) it remains the case that the dominant movement in the

21st century is towards a flattening of communicative power. I leave the advocacy and scholarship required

for this trend to continue in the hands of others. Nevertheless, even if these trends towards power dispersal

continue, it will not guarantee the dispersal of all authority as such—and it surely will raise the question,

ever more sharply, of how communicative authority is justified in a power flat world. Why, given the

theoretically equal access of all to the production of reality-shaping symbolic forms, should some be

permitted greater concentrations of communicative power than others? How is this concentration

established sociologically? How can it be justified philosophically? These are the questions I hope this new

tradition of media studies will begin to explore, and hey are questions for which the anarchist tradition,

discussed above, has particular resonance.

It should go without saying that I am not arguing that all scholars and pundits concerned with

questions of media authority are closet anarchists, nor am I arguing that future research on authority should

substitute the catechism of Bakunin for the Gospel of Marx. I am arguing, however, that future media

scholarship should be sensitive to the resonances anarchist paradigm, especially insofar as this paradigm

brings questions of legitimate media authority to the fore. Such an orientation would be as relevant to

current technological developments as it would be intellectually sound. The current crisis in media

authority, it can safely be assumed, owes much of its origin to the impact of the internet, and the internet

remains-- even after all the disappointments and retrenchments of the short 21st century—a profoundly anti-

authoritarian machine. We live in a world where the freedom to communicate, create, deliberate, and share

are available like never before—available to some more than others, true, but (theoretically and

increasingly) available to all. What we now do with this freedom has become the pressing question of our

age.

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