This study analyzes journalistic discourse about journalism’s gatekeeping role in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The intent is to understand how the notions of newsworthiness, news selection, and news judgment came to be expressed in normative terms in the journalistic field. The study finds discursive strategies that explained news judgment in terms of a special skill that journalists possessed, that downplayed judgment while shifting focus to the external qualities of events, and that explained news judgment in terms of the social and economic values of the information provided. The findings demonstrate how journalistic capital is formed in the context of professionalization efforts.
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