Doctoral Dissertation
The Materiality of Media Discourse
On Capitalism and Journalistic Modes of Writing
Peter Berglez Media and Communication
Örebro Studies in Media and Communication 4
örebro 2006 issn 1651-4785
isbn 91-7668-483-0
Peter Berglez is a researcher and teacher in
Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University.
The study investigates the relationship between the capitalist hegemonic order and the mass media, with the latter restricted to two European elite newspapers (Swedish DN and Slovenian Delo) and three bodies of international media coverage: Nato’s military intervention in former Yugoslavia, 1999, the political demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague, 2000, and 9/11, 2001.
The relationship between capitalism and media discourse is ana-lysed in terms of journalistic modes. The central aim is to analyse how particular journalistic modes of writing are dialectically integrated with structures such as individualism, material exploitation, economic differentiation and reifi cation.
In the concluding part, the study emphasises the democratic impor-tance of creating new journalistic modes endowed with a transnational journalistic epistemology that decisively include the reality of global capitalism in everyday (local) news reporting when covering and ex-plaining social, political, cultural etc. issues.
