In the following article, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb discuss the democratic opportunities of media literacy. Far from the simple analysis and interpretation media texts, Schirato and Webb advocate an approach based on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural literacy," which capitalizes on the subtle and intimate knowledge that comes from hands-on experience. The goal of media literacy in this context is to capitalize on the vulnerabilities of big media by skillfully producing texts which can convincingly point out inconsistencies and call for greater accountability. A call to a new media literacy that is as much concerned with practice as it is with theory, "Cultural Literacy and the Field of the Media" makes an important contribution to culture studies that resonates with the practical realities of media activism.

Cultural Literacy and the Field of the Media

Tony Schirato and Jen Webb

<1> This paper is concerned with the notion of cultural literacy, specifically with regard to the media, and focuses on two interrelated questions. First, what do we mean by the term cultural literacy, and how can this term be extended and applied to the field, texts and practices of the media? Second, what is it about the place and function of the media in the contemporary world that requires us (as citizens, educators or audiences) to be culturally and media literate?

<2> Every day we experience a flow of images and information -- through television, newspapers, radio, film, computers and digital technology -- which is far greater than was the case a generation ago. Moreover, the ubiquitous and seemingly uninterruptible nature of this flow means that very few cultural fields are relatively autonomous. That is to say, individual cultural fields are consistently in communication with, influenced by, and exposed to, the discourses, values, logics, meaning systems, economies, ideas and forms of capital associated with or emanating from other powerful fields (such as business, government, the legal field and, perhaps most pervasively, the media). Regardless of the field or fields to which we belong, we are required to negotiate, and be literate with regard to, different fields, media and modalities, and be able to read, relate and contextualize visual images and other media texts. In other words, we are required to possess wide (cultural) literacies.

<3> Cultural literacy is a concept that, with regard to its meanings and uses in this paper, has been extrapolated from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Although he rarely refers to the notion of literacy, Bourdieu's theorising of the epistemological possibilities available to agents is analogous to the term as it is used here and in previous work (Schirato 1997, 1998; Schirato & Yell 2000). For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent on, and can be explained in terms of, what he terms a "practical sense" or a "logic of practice" (Bourdieu 1990, 1998a; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). This, he explains further, can be characterized as an ability to comprehend and negotiate cultural fields, comparable to a sportsperson's "feel for the game." What this refers to is knowledge of the game that is played out by agents within cultural fields; that is, a knowledge of the various rules (written and unwritten), genres, discourses, forms of capital, values, contexts and imperatives which inform and determine their practice, and are, simultaneously, continuously being transformed by them.

<4> This knowledge provides agents with a field-specific literacy that allows them to make sense of what is happening around them, and to make strategic decisions as to how that field should be negotiated (in other words, what practices, genres or discourses are appropriate in certain circumstances). Moreover, Bourdieu insists (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) that, in certain circumstances (and particularly within cultural fields in which various forms of critical thinking are encouraged because they can facilitate the attainment of cultural capital), this practical sense can be extended to include what he refers to as a "reflexive" dimension or disposition. In other words, while every field disposes its agents to naturalize and universalize its own values, meanings, imperatives and perspectives, reflexive knowledge allows agents to respond to their knowledge of the particular set of circumstances (the conditions that produce and delimit what meanings and ideas are available to an agent) and factor it in to their ability to read and make sense of a situation. An obvious example of situations where this ability would be required would be so called inter- and cross-cultural contexts, where the "rules of the game" of communication are not shared by all the participants. We can extrapolate from Bourdieu's work then, and define cultural literacy as a familiarity with, and an ability to read and make use of, the various meaning systems (and the practices that inhabit them) that characterize the various cultural fields of a society or societies. Media literacy, by extension, would refer to the same capacities with respect to the meaning systems specific to, or associated with, the field of the media.

<5> This seems a straightforward enough definition, seemingly in keeping with the standard definitions of media literacy found in textbooks such as W James Potter's Media Literacy. "Media Literacy," he writes,

is a perspective that we actually use when exposing ourselves to the media in order to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. We build our perspective from knowledge structures. To build our knowledge structures, we need tools and raw materials. The tools are skills. Active use means that we are aware of the message and are consciously interacting with them. (2001: 4)

<6> There are, however, two important differences that distinguish what we have extrapolated from Bourdieu's work from Potter's relatively conventional perspective/definition. Firstly, Potter's definition completely elides the crucial point that what constitutes knowledge and understanding is not an individual, personalized process, but rather is effectively predicated on, and largely determined by, our specific cultural trajectories and contexts. In other words, the definition starts from an implied consideration of the viewer as a separate physical and cognitive entity capable of receiving and decoding signs and signals (we sit in front of the television watching the news, "exposed" to images and words in a state of physical/biological isolation, so to speak, and therefore the process of meaning making is to a marked extent equally individuated). But as Bourdieu writes:

the self-evidence of the isolated, distinguished body is what prevents the fact being realized that this body which indisputably functions as the principle of individuation (in as much as it localizes in space and time, separates, isolates, etc.), ratified and reinforced by the legal definition of the individual as an abstract, interchangeable being, without qualities, is also -- as a real agent, that is to say, as a habitus, with its history, its incorporated properties -- a principle of "collectivization" … Having the (biological) property of being open to the world, and therefore exposed to the world, shaped by the material and cultural conditions of existence in which it is placed from the beginning, it is subject to a process of socialization of which individuation is itself the product, with the singularity of the "self" being fashioned in and by social relations. (2000: 133-4)

<7> The second main point of difference is to be found in the insight that individual cultural fields not only dispose agents to see things in a particular way, but they also virtually foreclose the possibility of seeing otherwise. So if we are watching television, the images and words that are presented to us are not simply available to be decoded providing we have access to the appropriate cues (semantic, semiotic) and contexts (historical, political, economic, personal). Rather, we see and respond to what "is there," and what is there is largely what we know, what we expect, and what we are familiar with.

<8> When we make use of the concept of cultural literacy that we have extrapolated from Bourdieu's work, then, we are referring to a process which takes into account, and can negotiate across, the notion that meaning making is field- and culturally-specific, and that this insight needs to be applied reflexively. In other words, the issue of where "I" come from, and as a corollary the resulting predisposition with regard to how "I" see and think, is a necessary part of being culturally literate.

<9> To what extent can this concept of cultural literacy to be applied, specifically, to the field of the media? Firstly, the media can be considered as a cultural field, and more specifically a part of the wider field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993, 1998b). This means that it has its own discourses, imperatives, values, logics, technologies and forms of cultural capital which produce and dispose the practices of agents within the field. It also has specific relationships with other fields in the wider field of cultural production (most obviously journalism, but also visual arts, advertising and others) and with the field of power (manifested, for instance, through government policies and regulations, and the vicissitudes of global capital). Thus we depart from Potter's notion of media literacy as a straightforward and relatively unmediated series of cognitive processes, and from the emphasis placed, by media theorists/critics such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, on the relationship between the media, meaning and technology. Instead, we suggest, the texts, images and meanings that are disseminated by the media are always tied up with, and influenced by, the dynamics of the field itself and, most importantly, its relationships with the wider field of power.

<10> It is particularly important, when considering the issue of media literacy, to appreciate that the question of technology needs to be contextualized in terms of wider cultural and political contexts. One of McLuhan's legacies, for instance, has been a disproportionate weight given (within media theory and cognate disciplines) to "the properties of and actions exerted upon ourselves by technologies and media and artefacts" (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 98); this being largely understood in terms of processes of enhancement or intensification, displacement and obsolescence, recurrence and retrieval, and the potential for the reversal of effects. In other words, for McLuhan the question of the relationship between media, meaning and technology is largely a technical and an empirical, rather than a cultural, theoretical or political, issue. Even more politically acute theorists such as Neil Postman fall into the trap of explaining the poverty or inadequacy of the media (for instance in terms of the dissemination of news, or more specifically in providing competent analysis of newsworthy and socially and politically relevant events) in terms of the limitations of (predominantly visual) technologies. Postman writes, for instance, that:

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper. Of course, there is a compensation: television offers pictures, and the pictures move … But the language of pictures differs radically from oral and written language, and the differences are crucial for understanding television news. To begin with, the grammar of pictures is weak in communicating past-ness and present-ness … Without the help of the written word, film and video cannot portray temporal dimensions with any precision. (Postman 1988: 72-3)

This misses the point that images -- moving or otherwise -- are always read in terms of different intertexts which help readers identify and make sense of them, and that the extent to which such intertexts are brought into play by agents varies according to the different forms of cultural literacy they possess. But a more important criticism comes from Jonathan Sterne, who writes, in a discussion of On Television (1998b), that:

Bourdieu's comments on television relate more to the habits and practices of the journalistic field and its relations to intellectuals and the state of public discourse in France than they do to anything resembling a theory of television as a technology … While writers like Neil Postman … for instance, have attributed … rapid-fire intellectual practice to the technological character of the television medium itself, Bourdieu takes a more sociological view, arguing essentially that the enabling and constraining conventions of the journalistic field, rather than the technology itself, shape the possibility of action on television. (Sterne 2003: 372-3)

What distinguishes Bourdieu from Postman, in this account, is that for Bourdieu "Technologies are socially shaped along with their meanings, functions, and domains and uses" (Sterne 2003: 373). Even though Bourdieu's own work (particularly On Television) takes up and develops the significance of economies of time and effect within the fields of journalism and the media, this is specifically contextualized in terms of the relationship between two different fields with their own (largely conflicting) sets of logics and values, and again in terms of the influence exerted by the economic field over these and other sections of the field of cultural production.

<11> The imperatives and logics that most directly dominate virtually all the mainstream media in the West are, as Pierre Bourdieu shows with reference to commercial television programming, the twin constraints of time and effect (Bourdieu 1998b). Time, for Bourdieu, is the most significant factor. He makes the point that the very limited time available to "do" a story means that issues are pared back, decontextualized, and explicated in terms of simple binaries (right/wrong, business/unions, men/women, citizens/foreigners). News programs provide the best example of this process. Stories connected to one another only in the sense that they happened at the same time (a famine in Africa, a celebrity divorce, the enactment of government policies) are thrown together in an order that is not so much arbitrary as interest-driven ("Are people tired of hearing about African famines?"), without explanations of contexts or antecedents. Moreover, because each event is dealt with in a minute or so, the explanation of the story has to be punchy and evoke human interest; for instance, a famine might be articulated in terms of the plight of one starving child or family, or a government policy might be reduced to the effects of the policy on a single shopkeeper. And of course once that single child is fed or the shopkeeper's problem solved, the issue effectively "disappears."

<12> These twin imperatives of time and effect make it virtually impossible for news programs to say anything that is not sensationalized or simplistic. In fact it really doesn't make sense for them to say anything much at all, which is why the news is invariably dominated by visuals. A thirty-second description of a massacre, famine, riot or war usually produces an immediate emotional effect -- which is what the news is meant to accomplish. Film of a person being beaten to death, of emaciated babies, of crowds destroying buildings, or of bombs zeroing in on bridges or enemy troops takes the viewer into the story, and can provoke an immediate, and strong, response (pity, anger, fear, revulsion, elation). But this action of taking the viewer "into the story" effectively dissolves the story, at least as far as any kind of complex understanding is concerned; viewers can only become involved if they automatically sympathize or empathize with, or alternatively fear or hate, the objects of the representation.

<13> The organization and deployment of various signs (visual and otherwise) within a strictly controlled economy of time and effect in order to produce a narrative without a narrative -- that is, the performance of an unmediated byte of the real -- is probably the defining characteristic of the contemporary field of the media. We can designate this characteristic as "the politics of affect"; quite simply, it involves the production and the reduction of events in terms of an immediate, unconsidered "emotional reaction." The quintessential example of this, of course, is the "war against terror," the term coined by US President George W Bush in the days following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Everything that happened subsequently, in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their effects -- the bombing and slaughter of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, the millions of refugees, the identification and treatment of prisoners as terrorists or "battlefield detainees" -- was reducible to, and thus legitimated by, this designation. Newspapers in Australia, for instance, added the term to their list of contents, along with sport, business, the weather and entertainment. The logic behind this practice was simple; since the "war against terror" was unambiguously and unquestioningly good (who, after all, could be against a war on terror; or, by extension, who could be in favor of terrorism?), then any acts committed in its name didn't require thinking about; they were merely to be applauded or supported.

<14> The way in which, say, the CNN network processed and represented the events and aftermath of September 11 constitutes a quintessential example of the media as a kind of machine for producing the politics of affect. Some analysts have referred to CNN's coverage as being akin to the genre of a soap opera, but this isn't quite right. At the same time it is not that far from the truth. The soap opera is, in a sense, the hysteric genre par excellence, in the shows' constant and fascinated focus on desire. Although soaps are meant to run at "real life time," what actually distinguishes them from real life are the extraordinary richness of symptoms of this desire, and its associated crises. A family gathering in a soapie, for instance, is not played out to the rhythms of ordinary life, in which crises or symptoms of crises (in the form of affairs, betrayals, lies, antagonisms, lust, revenge, rebellion) are seldom overtly present. Rather, these crises are crammed into half-hour or hour episodes; they are expected; and they are never the subject of closure. The resolution of one crisis (the wife's affair is forgiven, the couple go back to a normal, loving relationship) is always the prelude to another crisis (the husband has contacted a hit-man to arrange his wife's murder; the jilted man plots to bring down the marriage; the wife will revisit her desire for the other man).

<15> CNN's coverage of September 11 did not exactly fit into this generic pattern; or rather, it did not employ the genre exclusively in its reports, narratives, images and representations. Its coverage in fact used a variety of popular culture and media genres, depending on the event or issue being covered. The first few days after September 11, for instance, were characterized by versions of reality television (point the camera at the Twin Towers or other important buildings and see what happens), drama ("How will the President take control and lead America?"), documentary ("when were the Towers built, and for what function?" "who is bin-Laden and what are his origins?"), action adventure (the struggle on one of the doomed flights), rescue shows (the search for survivors; the heroism of the firefighters), current affairs ("What are the political ramifications of September 11?"), the Western (picking up on Bush's "wanted, dead or alive" call), the epic (Bush's "Let's mount a crusade!") and even sport (the New York Yankees and Mets "playing for America"; America hitting terrorists "like a linebacker crunching a quarterback"). But what the employment of these different genres enacted (initially at saturation level, and continuously for some months after the events) was the genre of the soap opera in terms of its affiliations with the order of hysteria. Symptoms were found (stories, statistics, photographs) of the crisis, but this only led to more symptoms, which were replaced by new symptoms.

<16> The ultimate object of desire and line of closure was, initially, the capture or elimination of bin-Laden; but this soon gave way to the destruction of the Taliban and the capture of Mullah Omar; which in turn was replaced by the elimination of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and then threats against North Korea, and then the 2004 intervention in Haiti, and so on. The Marxist/Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek writes that what is central to hysteria is that "the hysteric doubts -- that is, her position is that of an eternal and constitutive (self-) questioning: What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other? … (1999: 247-48). This self-questioning must be resolved or muted if the hysteric is to function at all, and so, Zizek writes elsewhere, "the fact that we 'don't know what we really want' -- what to desire -- converts into a desire not to know, a desire for ignorance" (Zizek 1991: 144). For President Bush there was a serious desire for ignorance because that took away the need for or the possibility of self-examination; he wondered in public, very briefly, why so many people hated America, and then brushed the thought aside. But the media have a different imperative: the commoditization of their field, and hence, for the coverage and continued promotion of the September 11 crisis, it needed to find new outlets, symptoms, heroes and villains. This is why one genre quickly gave way to another, as when the boredom of "reality TV" (because nothing was happening) was replaced by stories and images of firefighters, victims and terrorists. CNN was both fascinated by the events of September 11, and terrified that nothing else would happen, which would have been bad for (media) business.

<17> Bourdieu's arguments about the domination of the media by the economic field explain why certain content is brought to the (temporary) attention of the public, and why it is treated in a decontextualized and ahistorical manner. This takeover of the social field by the institutions, values and logics of capitalism and the market, and, concomitantly, the increased privatization of the media, have brought about a situation where the media not only stands in for the public sphere, but has colonized and influences -- or dominates -- virtually every aspect of the social, cultural and political fields in the contemporary West. The explanation that is put forward for this development is based, predictably, on a form of technological determinism; the advent of computers, satellite broadcasting, digitalization and "real time" communications has meant that few areas and activities around the world, let alone within the nation, are not accessible to the media. But there are social and political contexts that have driven both the production of that technology, and the concomitant colonising of the social by the media. The media's colonization of society (not only in areas such as sport and entertainment, but also in the arts, politics and economics) has enabled it to grow exponentially, which has in turn further facilitated the intrusion of the market and the field of power into every sphere of human activity. The media provides a huge standing reserve of desires and performances, a kind of mass market of ideas and subjectivities from which viewers can theoretically "pick and choose."

<18> The reality, of course, is somewhat different; as Judith Butler (1993) points out, the performances of subjectivity that are made available in the media, and the provision of the role models and exemplars that do a great deal of the work of commoditizing those performances, are always already the result of specific regimes of seeing. One of these is the domination of subjectivity by the "logic of fashion." The concomitant circulation of a diversity of ideas, images and discourses leaves the door open for transformation and negotiation not only of normative and naturalized categories of subjectivity, but more generally of the meaning and function of the social and the public sphere.

<19> This is why the issue of cultural and media literacies is particularly important. We pointed out earlier that what we call cultural literacy allows agents to make sense of what is happening around them, and to make strategic decisions as to how a field or fields should be negotiated. For all the reasons which we have outlined above, the media has become the most important cultural field for the playing out of meanings and explanations of what is happening to and around us, and for debates about social issue. In a sense it more or less constitutes, as far as public sphere activity is concerned, the only game in town.

<20> The various elements of what Bourdieu calls the field of power have recognized this; witness the extraordinarily efficacious media "productions" of Gulf War 1 and 2, and the so-called "War Against Terror" by the US government and the military. The American media's handling of the events and aftermath of September 11, for instance, involved not so much reporting, but rather actually helping to produce, the sudden upswing in patriotism in America. The strong "America will not be intimidated" rhetoric emanating from the media meant that President Bush would have been seriously out of step with the public mood if he hadn't done something -- anything; such as bomb Afghanistan as soon as possible. In a sense what the media did to influence American foreign policy -- albeit relatively unwittingly -- after September 11 comes close to duplicating William Randolph Hearst's infamous telegram to his bemused reporter in Cuba in the early twentieth century: "Stay where you are -- I'll supply the war."

<21> Once the war had been supplied, of course, it had to be fought. The problem was that the strategy of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age (and consequently keeping American casualties to a minimum) involved considerable collateral damage amongst Afghani civilians. Although the US, Western and to a certain extent the world media were remarkably quiet when it came to Afghani villagers being accidentally blown to pieces, protests from Northern Alliance forces and some members of the new Afghani government (quickly withdrawn after US pressure was applied) about the needless slaughter of civilians brought the conduct of the war into question. This, coupled with the general lawlessness of the Northern Alliance, America's apparent lack of interest in Tony Blair's civilising mission in Afghanistan, and later the very serious doubts cast on the reasons for the invasion of Iraq, meant that Western enthusiasm for America's war on terrorism "wherever they found it" waned considerably. More importantly, the extension of the war within the US, which gave greater powers to the military and secret services, and withdrew the right of public trial for foreigners held on suspicion of involvement in terrorism, suggested the beginning of a strong assault on America's supposed commitment to the ideal of freedom of speech. Newspaper columnists, cartoonist, comedians and even a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl (expelled from school for wearing an anti-war t-shirt) became the victims of censorship. The US media, which did so much to ignite the war in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq, ended up becoming, to some extent, one of the casualties of the war.

<22> What this suggests is that it not only audiences, analysts and educators need to become more media literate; the same might be said about media professionals themselves. This is particularly true of those practitioners, often located in public broadcasting, who are committed to the media carrying out a serious public sphere role. Why are media professionals in need of greater media literacy? Consider the ways in which politicians and corporate executives, drilled by media professionals, have become particularly adept in dealing with and deflecting those sections of the media that take their "public sphere responsibilities" seriously. There are numerous examples of this that come to mind. General cases include the way in which President Bush and Secretary of State Rumsfeld have, since 2001, managed to keep the media committed to the notion of a global "War against Terrorism" campaign despite the fact that their own policies and discourses (for instance, with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or their designation of states such as Cuba and North Korea as "terrorist sympathizers") were unilateralist, divisive and likely to exacerbate the conditions which bred widespread anti-American sentiments.

<23> More specific examples of the way the media struggles to breakdown or challenge what Bourdieu refers to as the doxa emanating from the field of power are to be found in any number of interviews or press conferences involving Rumsfeld or Bush, but in some ways it is more useful and productive to refer to examples of, say, politicians being interviewed about domestic matters. We will refer to two of these that occurred in the Australian media -- the first on a public television current affairs show, and the second on public radio. In the first case the interviewer was questioning the Minister for Foreign Affairs about international legal challenges that were being threatened with regard to a state government's policy of mandatory detention for those convicted of three offences -- a policy which was clearly directed at, and impacted upon, the local indigenous population. When pressed by the interviewer as to whether this was another example of covertly racist policies being promulgated to take advantage of right-wing populist sentiment, the Minister replied such a notion was ridiculous: Australia was a democracy, he said, and "democracies don't implement racist policies." This effectively ended any further line of questioning on the issue.

<24> The second example to which we refer occurred when two companies involved in the pay television industry announced that they had come to an agreement to share programs and services. Consumer groups strongly opposed the move, suggesting that it was anti-competitive, and would allow the companies to operate as a duopoly. A public radio journalist interviewed a media analyst from a large corporation as to what the effects of this cooperation might be. The analyst stated that it was a "win-win" situation, and dismissed the idea that there might be public interest issues at stake. The journalist was initially taken aback, but then simply responded by saying that this was good news, and thanked the analyst for his time.

<25> These two examples demonstrate how the logics and economies of the media can be turned against its practitioners. In the first example the television interviewer was caught out by what Bourdieu refers to as the media's dependence on a "time and effect" logic; the Minister's sweeping generalization could have been countered by specific examples to the contrary, but this would have required that the interview both digress to the history of Australian attitudes towards its indigenous population and migrants, and take on a level of detail about specific policies within a wider historical frame. In the second example the radio interviewer was clearly unfamiliar with the immediate issues, but she was also unaware that the media analyst she was interviewing was not speaking from a position of disinterestedness, but was simply reproducing the doxa, emanating from multinational corporations (one of which was his employee), that what is good for big business is also good for the public.

<26> There are at least three examples of illiteracy in this pair of examples. Firstly, when the Minister successfully deflected the line of questioning by resorting to doxa ("democracies aren't racist"), the interviewer was either unfamiliar with the historical contexts that would have given the lie to this claim, or unable to bring that knowledge into the interview in a way that was commensurate with the imperatives of "time and effect" under which he (and the field in general) operates. The radio interview exemplifies two related, but essentially separate, issues. Journalists and media practitioners are increasingly being asked to operate, at relatively short notice, across a variety of fields; consequently they are forced to rely on "experts" to give them their stories and to explicate or contextualize what is happening and why. The problem here is twofold: because the journalists are often illiterate with regard to the field under discussion, and are forced to rely upon the expertise at hand (spokespersons, analysts, academics), they can also be led by them; and as a corollary, they are likely to be illiterate with regard to identifying who, within a field, both has the appropriate expertise and is likely to comment from a relatively disinterested position. In a sense the media is placed in an untenable position. It is required to comment on, analyze and ask questions about everything (that is, a variety of fields and practices), while knowing little or nothing (about the fields and practices in question).

<27> What the above examples point to is both the significance of, and the difficulties involved in, addressing the question of media literacy. As Bourdieu points out, the twin constraints of time and effect make it easy for representatives of the field of power to deflect or avoid the kind of critical questioning and analysis, and demands for public disclosure, that are essential to public sphere activity. Bourdieu himself addressed this problem (he wished to intervene in the public debate in France about issues such as the war in Algeria, globalization, and migration) both through writing a polemical book on television and journalism (1998b), and through two lectures he gave about television which were delivered on television, and were designed to get around the problems of trivialization, sensationalism and the lack of time he associates with the media. Bourdieu gave his lectures via the audiovisual service of the College de France, and was not restricted with regard to time, topic or technical requirements. In his own words: "I have a control of the instruments of production" (Bourdieu 1998b: 13).

<28> The book taken from the lectures was a bestseller in France, as was The Weight of the World (Bourdieu, et al 1999). These texts provoked widespread debates, particularly in the media, about issues such as the market's domination of the public sphere, racism, social inequality, globalization and the erosion of the welfare state. Of course Bourdieu was able to make these kinds of interventions precisely because of the considerable cultural capital he carries, particularly in France; but he was (media) literate enough to understand that although the media is dominated by commercial interests, and although its commitment to its own ethical imperatives and values (to serve the public interest, to act as a responsible public sphere) is an empty one, the existence of these values provides an opportunity -- albeit a limited one -- for intellectuals to intervene in the media-inflected public sphere. And if we are to have a functioning public sphere it will inevitably be because those individuals and groups who wish to contribute to public sphere debates are at least as "media literate" as are the representatives of the field of power.

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