Journalism Theory as Theory of Sociological Reflection

Abstract

Journalism theory seems to face a theory-constructive crisis today. The paradigm conflict with theory of information environments and the tendency to be absorbed into mass communication theory have placed Journalism theory as 'working theory.' That is precisely the reason why I propose reconstructing journalism theory a social theory which considers journalism a ideal principle of society. The weakness of journalism theory is that it has failed to grasp the relation between mass media and audience. To improve this weakness, it is necessary to rearrange journalism theory for audience behavior. In this regard, 'uses and gratifications' approach serves as a reference. It suggests two points at issue as follows, (1)Audience behavior is subjective and active significant action. (2)Audience behavior is essentially self-reflective, that is to say, andience reflect through mass media. In short, audience behavior is a social process of reflection of communicative subject. G.H. Mead clarified that the social process of reflection was a layered process based on the levels of communicative subject forming layered interactions. Mead's theory shows us as follows, (1)A subject of jounalism is reflective one, and he makes a chain of communicative subject from individual to 'self-conscious society.' To understand this, it is necessary to introduce sociological perspective for analyzing the audience-people.(2)Jounalism theory has to study 'meaning' in the Mead's sense, i.e.reflective knowledge grasped subject-correlatively. (3)As a inside consequence of this point, the duty of journalism theory is criticizing discom-munication as non-reflective Proeess. (4)An ideal of journalism is construction of'universe of discourse.' The pursuit of ideal condition of society should be also the duty of journalism theory. In this paper, it is attempted to reconstruct journalism theory from the standpoint of audience and setting communication concept as reflective process in its crucial zone and it is the first step toward reconstruction of journalism theory as'theory of sociological reflection'. And this project would lead a journalism theory to a critical theory to which resists suppressing power on social reflection of audience, i.e.communicative subject.