On ‘the politics’ of representation: a Laclauian contribution to journalism and democracy

Journalism studies would benefit from a more robust understanding of symbolic representation as a constitutive political act. While the field largely rejects the possibility of an objective and accurate representation of ‘the people’, it is yet to significantly engage with the constitutive role of representation in the formation of collective identities central to all politics. The result is that in both journalism and journalism scholarship, popular political movements are largely understood for how they contravene hegemonic understandings of rational individualism and reasoned debate, rather than as an alignment of political demands.