The Art of Journalism in an Uncertain Context: A Study of Iranian Journalistic Practices

The focus of this study is on the practices of Iranian journalists and the ways in which they struggle to achieve the journalistic objectives that they set for themselves in the Iranian context. This research has three objectives. First, I examine the factors that restrict journalists’ practices. Second, I investigate how journalists navigate these constraints and manage their work. The third aim is to establish an explanation of why Iranian journalists behave in the way that they do in journalism practice. Building on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, and through the arrangement of the concepts of field, habitus, and capital, this research offers an explanation of the variations in journalists’ behaviour and choices of actions, which range from the individual level to the macro-level. The empirical material includes in-depth interviews with 26 journalists working in established media outlets in Iran, and these are analysed through a combination of thematic analysis and grounded theory. This study suggests that three interrelated underlying factors explain the Iranian journalists’ practices: the journalism field, journalists’ habitus, and journalists’ capital. There is a relationship between each of these factors and the journalists’ chances of success in their struggle to make certain strategies operative, to bypass the constraints, and to achieve their journalistic ends. The journalism field consists of the range of interlinked macro-level influences that stem from the political field, and the meso-level influences that stem from news organizations, which shape the journalists’ practices and their chances of success. The findings reveal that the journalists’ practices are also connected to their journalistic habitus, that is, their practical mastery, which is acquired through time and their experience of playing the journalistic game in the particular context of Iran. The journalists’ practical mastery of the game gives them higher chances of success. This study also shows that the journalists’ practices are associated with various forms of resources that they possess, including cultural capital, and internal and external social and symbolic capitals, which give them more strength and higher chances of success in their struggle. These findings propose a model for explaining journalistic practices in Iran, and other relatively restrictive settings in general, and sheds light on the influences of the factors that have been overlooked until now.