Acknowledgment modalities, professional trajectory, and political position in the Argentine journalist field

Abstract

The article studies different acknowledgment modalities in which Argentine journalists validate media and colleagues as more important ones. A characterization of the journalist’s field is developed in terms of the professional trajectory and political positioning, considering correspondences between social space positions and the definition of hierarchical social places. A quantitative methodology was applied. Surveys made on journalists led to the confection of a taxonomy in which their social field could be illustrated. It is considered that the professional space is able to translate a series of asymmetrical references from established positions to the “newcomers”. This references are not politically neutral; they tend to favour conservative media. On the contrary, the acknowledgment of colleagues as consecrated involves a political segmentation, in which those superior positions in the social space are validated, but on the bases of a political differentiation between proximity to the Frente de Todos or to Juntos por el Cambio, Argentina’s two principal political forces. The analysis describes the superposition between media and journalists mentioned in the survey and the taxonomy. In this way, the mapping of the social space seeks to find correspondences between the actor’s representations –which symbolically consecrate both media and colleagues- and their places in the professional’s field structure.