Why journalists covered Syria the way they did: On the role of economic,social and cultural capital

Abstract

While recent decades have seen the rise of a vast body of work on war reporting, there have been few sociological explanations of why journalists deal with challenging situations in particular ways. This article contributes to bridging the gap between practice-based studies of war reporting and general sociological studies of journalism as a profession, by providing a systematically sociological account of the factors that influenced how the Syrian conflict was covered by Dutch and Flemish reporters working for a wide range of media. In doing so, this article draws on 13 in-depth interviews with those reporters, which is informed by a content analysis of their work, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social and cultural capital on both an institutional and an individual level. In addition, it is argued that Bourdieusian analyses may be developed further by distinguishing between endogenous and exogenous forms of cultural capital.