真正性の政治とジャーナリズム

ポピュラーな正当化の可能性と矛盾の考察

抄録

    This article examines the notion of "authenticity" as one of the values for the legitimization of journalism in the hybrid media environment, blurring public and private boundaries while relativizing the professional journalistic norm. It finally suggests a revision of professional journalistic roles or norms.

    Authenticity has ritually legitimized authority through its originality and uniqueness. Some scholars also portray it as the existential ideal of deciding one’s life following one’s own internal voice as society gets modernized. However, of late, this ideal has deviated to more popular and commercial value, as mass production, including mass media, has deconstructed the division between original and copy. As seen in Reality TV and social media, paradoxically, people have come to consume self-performance that seems authentic and its collective sharing experience as authentic. Consequently, various media practices are competing for this constructed authenticity as symbolic power. This article refers to this situation as "politics of authenticity."

    In conclusion, this article discusses that today, journalism must incorporate authenticity into the democratic process of subjectification to restore its legitimacy in the neoliberal media environment. It concretely suggests that journalists must reveal a more personal self to audiences to facilitate the audience’s subjectification and dialogue. On the other hand, it also indicates that such a tactic often contradicts the democratic ideal of representing diverse voices because it is liable to represent, more widely, sympathetic as authentic. To respond to this problem, journalism studies need to empirically examine the processes of constructing authenticity by focusing on relationships among media actors or media environments in various practices.