Journalism as Social Practice in Crisis
2
news maintains and shapes social and cultural identity. Finally, we draw on news coverage about
two incidents of terrorism in Israel to illustrate how this mythwork takes place, drawing on a
comparative framework involving news produced both in Israel and in the U.S.
Newswork as “Mythwork”
News is the product of three overlapping cultural influences that combine to become
“mythwork”: the professional journalistic culture, the culture of the news industry, and the culture of
the society in which the profession and the organization are embedded. News is not the result of
objective judgments by expert journalists, but instead, the product of the professional journalistic
culture (Berkowitz, 2000). News is also the product of arrangements and strategies of doing work in
a news organization, i.e., it arises from the culture of the news industry (Erickson, Baranek & Chan,
1991; Fishman, 1982). Lastly, news is the product of the culture of the society in which the
profession and the organization are embedded (Hall, 1982). Most importantly, news is the outcome
of all these overlapping cultures that foster the telling of society’s occurrences and issues through a
consistent cultural lens. In all, news reflects not an objective reality, but a socially constructed one
(Adoni & Mane, 1984).
The culture of the profession dominates the news of everyday occurrences. Within this
culture, journalists work by a generally accepted set of norms and procedures designed to extract
their subjective biases when reporting “just the facts.” The journalism profession is thus founded
upon the professional ideology of objectivity (Hackett, 1984). The irony is that these work norms
lead to a consistently stylized form of news. Journalists learn to quickly polarize an issue and define
its parameters as they gather their information from "expert" sources, those people thought to
possess factual rather than self-interested information (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). However, that
factual knowledge tends to reside in people with certain kinds of societal credentials, something
lacking among those people on the outside margins of society (Erickson, Baranek & Chan, 1991;
Convention