Journalism as Social Practice in Crisis:
Restoring Identity Through Mythical Newswork
News of terrorism is shocking to read. It is sad, providing a grim reminder of the fragility of
daily life. It brings the news audience yet another glimpse of the chaotic nature of the world. In the
long run, news of terrorism plays a key role in building and maintaining social identities, both by
highlighting the identities of other nations that contrast with the audience’s world and by renewing a
familiarity with the audience’s own identities.
But news of terrorism does more than that for the readers and viewers of news: It retells the
master narratives of a society, those enduring views of a culture that reflect core values, prominent
social institutions, and the key social actors, which are then filled by an actual person or institution
when specific incidents arrive.
The central point of our paper is this: Journalists accomplish their work through a narrative
duality. During everyday news, journalists apply what we call a professional narrative that
represents a balance between their core journalistic values and the social pressures from their
working world. When society’s core values are under threat – such as with physical or political
violence – journalists switch to a master narrative that moves the public mind back toward the
dominant cultural order. To do so, news stories draw on mythical quests and challenges, placing the
story plot within familiar cultural narratives and drawing on actors who can fulfill those mythical
roles. Myth becomes an especially important force in newswork when an occurrence is relatively
unknown and culturally distant to the main media audience.
We begin this paper with a discussion of newswork as mythwork, followed by an elaboration
of the concept of news as myth. We then cast these elements within a broader discussion of how
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Convention