Sociology of Journalism

Course Catalog Description

Course designed for students of journalism and sociology (and any other focus) to heighten awareness of news as a social product and cultural reinforcement. News is used as an extensive case study to explore the power of processes, systems, and institutions. Due to the nature of the final project, this course is best taken with or after a methods course.

Course Overview

News is a continually refreshing case study to explore how people wrestle for meaning and truth through the imprimatur and social authority of the public communication commonly called news. This course uses academic rigor through theory and method to explore all mediums of today’s news for their latent and underlying meanings as well as to explore the contexts and influences of the product’s creation.

Course Learning Outcomes

The final project for this course is open for students to select a concept to explore through a theory and a method to create a product of their choice in coordination with the instructor, e.g., a research paper (as a last resort), an ethnography, an auto-ethnography, an interview, an experiment, a meta-analysis, a theory proposal, a text analysis, a discourse analysis, a visual analysis, a survey, a case study, a comparison, a philosophy of journalism, etc.

    • Social authority of news

    • News as conveyance of meaning

    • News as conveyance of culture

    • Is there a difference between facts and truth?

    • Reification

    • Framing theory

    • Is seeing believing?

    • Does news mirror society and reality?

    • Hierarchy of influence

    • Social knowledge

    • Spheres of consensus, controversy, and deviance