Journalism professor discusses ‘Media Control’


FIU journalism professor Robert E. Gutsche Jr.’s  new book, Media Control, examines the role of media in recent cases involving race and police shootings as well as government and corporate surveillance of citizens. Phil Tucker of  the School of Journalism and Mass Communication sat down with Gutsche to learn more about his perspective on journalism today.

media control image

What prompted you to write Media Control?

Revelations of the breadth and depth of NSA spying of U.S. citizens and world leaders the past few years have only confirmed the lengths power systems will go to maintain dominant messages of Western hegemony. Even more recent news that features white-on-black police violence presents a moment of necessary reflection on the true nature of the American spirit and purpose.

This book, then, comes at a time when not only should governments and their police agents undergo scrutiny, but so should media systems that support and make up these institutions. My hope is that Media Control can help situate current events in an ideological exploration of media power and control.

What are your concerns about media and how are they different from previous criticism?

First, I don’t distinguish between “good journalism” and “bad journalism” in order to analyze the way journalists report news. Lots of times, those who speak about the media do so with some type of expectation that journalists should meet an “objective” and “democratic” aim. Instead, I consider journalism to be a cultural practice as much as it is a social product. In this view, journalism operates as an ideological mechanism for spreading social thought and cultural explanations that benefit the powerful. So that’s one big difference.

Second, I believe there is a framework of White Supremacy that dominates Western thought and social practice in ways that have shaped media processes and meanings throughout history. I argue that journalism is an institution made of and for the powerful that is delineated along racial lines in the United States and abroad. This perspective, while not new, is rarely aligned with work in the field of Journalism Studies. It’s even rarer for such thoughts to be discussed in the teaching of journalism.

How does your experience as a journalist – and now as a journalism professor – influence your own journalism and teaching of journalism?

This is the interesting thing: While examining journalism as a cultural power source, I also must educate the next generation of journalists to the social norms of the field. I see it as my job, however, to balance the expectations of the field and the students to orient journalists to the profession by providing an “anti-journalism” position, if journalism is argued to be an institution and force of hegemony. I’ve had great experiences as a journalist, and it is these experiences that showed me just how aligned with dominant systems media are that has led to me challenging students’ initial conceptions of what they think they will do in the field.

What do you suggest as solutions to solving issues of race, policing and surveillance?

This is a question that I get all of the time. I don’t want to say that I don’t have solutions, but “solutions” are not at the center of this work. As I write in the book, my hope is that readers will challenge both my arguments and their own perceptions on the issues I cover there. The “solution,” then, might be in the realization of one’s agency to operate against dominant ideology and to provide resources for others who want to teach and think critically about issues of social justice and freedom.


DSC_0073 copyRobert E. Gutsche Jr. is an assistant professor in FIU’s the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and is an affiliated faculty member with FIU’s African and African Diaspora Studies Program.

Comments are closed.