SOURCE: Vera, Hernan. Review of On Television, by Pierre Bourdieu. Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 2 (March 1999): 196-97.

In the following review, Vera provides a brief overview of Bourdieu's On Television.

Pierre Bourdieu is the only major contemporary theorist who has proposed a general sociology of culture. The production process, the cultural text, and the audience—in the context of social institutions, culture, and social change—can be understood better as a whole process using the ideas on the economy of symbolic practices he has developed throughout his career. This small book [On Television] is a good example of the empirical use of his method as he turns it on the field of journalism.

The term field, part of Bourdieu's technical vocabulary, refers to “a structured social space, a field of forces, a force field” (p. 40). Like other fields, journalism “is based on a set of shared assumptions and beliefs, which...