Matthias Revers

University of Leeds · School of Media and Communication

Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing it, professional identity, and public service. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between the institutional logic of professional control (Lewi...

This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still but also variably open and resistant to change. Drawing upon extensive field research of political reporters and examination of discourses of journalist...

Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these tre...

Political backlash against liberal democracy and ubiquitous clashes between different versions of identity politics in recent years evoked a heightened awareness of political polarization. Rather than examining the mechanics of this process, social science predominantly conceives political polarization in a rather static manner and measures its pre...

This article theorizes how political divisions permeate social interaction, examining how the political becomes personal in everyday life. Drawing on affective polarization research, we underscore the importance of identification and feelings toward political in-groups and out-groups. Beyond conventional measurements of cross-group resentments, how...

TikTok has become a pivotal platform for political communication, particularly influencing younger demographics. This study examines how the German rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) used TikTok to disseminate its populist messages and engage users during the 2024 European elections. By analyzing videos posted by AfD politicians...

Es geht ein Gespenst um in den Feuilletons: Durch zunehmende "Cancel Culture" sich verengende Debatten- und Meinungskorridore, mögliche "Schweigespiralen" (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, 1980), durch die Forderung nach "Safe Spaces" (sicheren Orten) seien das kritische Denken und die Universität in Gefahr. Dagegen wettern andere, dieser Alarmismus sei l...

We invite you to participate in a collaborative research effort among scholars with conflicting viewpoints to jointly devise and conduct a quantitative survey on free speech on campus.A recent study (Revers & Traunmüller 2020) claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus, experiences of conformity press...

We invite you to participate in a collaborative research effort among scholars with conflicting viewpoints to jointly devise and conduct a quantitative survey on free speech on campus.A recent study (Revers & Traunmüller 2020) claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus, experiences of conformity press...

Zusammenfassung In unserer Antwort gehen wir auf einige Kritikpunkte an unserer Studie „Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus?“ ein, die uns wiederholt und in ähnlicher Form in Diskussionen begegnen. Diese betreffen unsere Fallauswahl, unser Verständnis und unsere Operationalisierung von Toleranz und Meinungsfreiheit sowie nicht zuletzt uns...

While universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends...

While universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers, and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trend...

Die Habilitationsschrift von Jürgen Habermas (geb. 1929) bleibt eines seiner einflussreichsten Werke, nicht nur in der Soziologie, sondern auch der Philoso-phie sowie den Politik-, Kommunikations-und Medienwissenschaften. Es ent-stand in der BRD der 1950er Jahren vor dem Hintergrund etlicher als Demo-kratiedefizite wahrgenommener Ereignisse. In die...

Max Weber definierte Kultur als »ein vom Standpunkt des Menschen aus mit Sinn und Bedeutung bedachter endlicher Ausschnitt aus der sinnlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens« (Weber 2002 [1904], 114). Der Begriff Kultur bezieht sich also auf das Sinn- und Bedeutungsgeflecht, mit dem der Mensch seine natürliche und soziale Umgebung interpretiert. Di...

Der Begriff des Habitus fand bereits in der antiken Philosophie Verwendung. In der Soziologie wurde er allerdings vor allem durch Norbert Elias (18971990) und Pierre Bourdieu (19302002) geprägt. Bei Elias umfasst der Habitus eine historisch spezifische Persönlichkeitsstruktur, die sich in Wechselwirkung mit strukturellen gesellschaftlichen Prozesse...

US-American sociology has largely failed to examine the transformation of mediated communication of the past 20 years. If sociology is to be conceived as a general social science concerned with analyzing and critically scrutinizing past, present, and future conditions of collective human existence, this failure, and the ignorance it engenders,...

This article reconstructs the evolution of societal and journalistic meta-discourse about the participation of ordinary citizens in the news production process. We do so through a genealogy of what we call “participatory epistemology,” defined here as a form of journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through 19 public int...

Sociological inquiries into journalism have considered journalism as the product of cultural, economic, political, and technological forces in different times and spaces. As part of (and like) the field of media sociology, the sociology of journalism is an interdisciplinary subfield. It has several objectives of inquiry: examining situational and l...

Book review of The Media Syndrome, by David L. Altheide. New York: Routledge, 2016. 234 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781629581477.

ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy o...

This chapter situates journalism in its institutional and cultural context in Germany and the United States. On the institutional level, it compares the two media systems, focusing particularly on market and non-market influences and professional organizational infrastructures of journalism. On the cultural level, it examines the history of journal...

This chapter maps US and German journalists’ definitions of occupational virtues and ideals, public responsibility and boundary drawing between “good” and “bad” journalism. These pronouncements arose in research interviews, ethnographic observation of reporting practice and in public venues (metajournalism). US reporters stood out by engaging in mu...

This chapter starts with an analysis of debates in leading US and German media outlets about the Snowden revelations of the difference between journalism and advocacy. It shows that these examples of journalistic metadiscourse are filtered through specific lenses of each occupational culture. This chapter then presents the theoretical framework of...

The specificity of the research setting—reporters embedded in political institutions—is utilized in this chapter to examine the maintenance of professional autonomy. Source relations constitute a continuous social drama for US journalists and involve meticulous signaling of professional boundaries (boundary performance) and perpetual adjustments of...

The conclusion draws together key findings of the book, discusses its larger implications and breaks down differences between the two occupational cultures of journalism along six dimensions: subjectivity, interventionism, competition, relation to politics, digital media and its larger role in democracy. The analysis finds vigorously upheld but rel...

This chapter examines collective dynamics of German and US journalism. Even though competition and solidarity are realities of both groups of reporters, the analysis identifies the US case above all as a competitive press culture and the German case as an associational press culture. While US reporters thrive on competition, German reporters evalua...

This chapter focuses on sacred discourse encapsulated in mythologies and articulated in moments of occupational consecration. The discourse analysis of journalism award statements and obituaries of journalists is followed by an examination of interview data of reporters of the two press corps engaging in occupational mythologizing. This chapter dem...

This chapter focuses on resilience and change of professionalism with respect to digital media. For US reporters, the hybridity of traditional and online journalism did not only have practical implications but changed their professional self-understanding as well. Even though German reporters used the same media (except blogs), they had relatively...

Book review of Silvio Waisbord (ed.) Media sociology: A reappraisal. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. 298 pp. ISBN 9780745670553.

This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever-growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is ref lected by a resurg...

Variations of adopting digital media, particularly tensions and negotiations in adoption processes, mark points of departure of technological change. This comparative study of social media adoption in journalism reveals two concurrent tendencies: 1) diversification of professionalism, accompanied by an increasingly hybridizing media environment and...

Der dramatische Abschiebefall der kosovarischen Familie Zogaj war in den Jahren 2007 bis 2010 Anlass für Solidaritätsbekundungen und öffentliche Debatten über „gute Integration“ und Asylrecht in Österreich. Dieser Beitrag vermisst den medialen Diskurs von 2007 bis 2010 in den Tageszeitungen Der Standard und Kronen Zeitung auf inhalts- und narration...

Cultural sociology reaches back to classical thinkers in sociology. In the wake of the ‘cultural turn,’ cultural sociology constitutes itself drawing on various theoretical resources from the social sciences and humanities: critical theory, cultural anthropology, phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism among others. After its institutio...

This article deals with the intertwining of digital and nondigital spaces of news reporting. It focuses specifically on how Twitter affects spatial and temporal orderings of news ecosystems. At the New York state government, actors within the space permeate informational barriers through Twitter while enabling others to follow and engage in events...

In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists' efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt...

A “list” of social science texts that move us and continually captivate our minds and emotions.

Stimulated by debates on public sociology in the recent years I studied contributions of sociologists in daily newspapers in Austria. Although sociologists are rather present in the Austrian press, I argue this remains without noticeable effects on public opinion formation; the topics sociologists write and talk about are rather arbitrary and they...