Matthias Revers
Biographic Data
| ID | 333272 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthias Revers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthias |
| FAMILY NAME | Revers |
| SIGNATURE | REVERS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goethe University Frankfurt |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6266-4967 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Beyond anti-elitism and out-group attacks
TikTok is a pivotal platform for political communication, especially among younger users. This study examines how the German rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) used TikTok to disseminate populist messages and engage users during the 2024 European elections. By analyzing videos posted by AfD politicians in the three months leading up to the elections, we identified the main populist messages and assessed their impact on user en…
Micropolarization
This article theorizes how political divisions permeate social interaction, transforming the political into the personal in everyday life. Drawing on affective polarization research, we highlight the central role of identification and emotions in shaping political in-groups and out-groups. Moving beyond conventional measures of cross-group resentment, we conceptualize polarization as the lived experience of political antagonism. We argue that pol…
Performative Polarization
Political backlash against liberal democracy and ubiquitous clashes between different versions of identity politics in recent years evoked a heightened awareness of political polarization. Rather than examining the mechanics of this process, social science predominantly conceives political polarization in a rather static manner and measures its prevalence and causes within and between societies. This article views political polarization as taking…
Meinungsfreiheit an der Universität
In unserer Antwort gehen wir auf einige Kritikpunkte an unserer Studie „Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus?“ ein, die uns wiederholt und in ähnlicher Form in Diskussionen begegnen. Diese betreffen unsere Fallauswahl, unser Verständnis und unsere Operationalisierung von Toleranz und Meinungsfreiheit sowie nicht zuletzt unsere „Positionalität“. Wie wir darlegen, beruht diese Kritik vornehmlich auf einer verzerrten Rezeption unserer Befun…
Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case
Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends on university campuses are a clear indicator of the dire future for freedom of speech. Others vi…
The Sociology of Journalism
Sociological inquiries into journalism have considered journalism as the product of cultural, economic, political, and technological forces in different times and spaces. As part of (and like) the field of media sociology, the sociology of journalism is an interdisciplinary subfield. It has several objectives of inquiry: examining situational and larger cultural differences of journalisms; analyzing systemic complexities in which journalism arise…
How Not to Establish a Subfield
From Counter-Power to Counter-Pepe
This article reconstructs the evolution of societal and journalistic meta-discourse about the participation of ordinary citizens in the news production process. We do so through a genealogy of what we call “participatory epistemology”, defined here as a form of journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through public interaction. It is our argument that the notion of “citizen participation in news process” has not simply …
Staking Out the Boundaries of Professionalism
This chapter maps US and German journalists’ definitions of occupational virtues and ideals, public responsibility and boundary drawing between “good” and “bad” journalism. These pronouncements arose in research interviews, ethnographic observation of reporting practice and in public venues (metajournalism). US reporters stood out by engaging in much more self-examination in metadiscourse and drawing boundaries more assertively towards each other…
Digital Media and the Diversification of Professionalism
This chapter focuses on resilience and change of professionalism with respect to digital media. For US reporters, the hybridity of traditional and online journalism did not only have practical implications but changed their professional self-understanding as well. Even though German reporters used the same media (except blogs), they had relatively little impact on their work and professional identity. Especially Twitter featured US reporters as s…
Competitive Collegiality
This chapter examines collective dynamics of German and US journalism. Even though competition and solidarity are realities of both groups of reporters, the analysis identifies the US case above all as a competitive press culture and the German case as an associational press culture. While US reporters thrive on competition, German reporters evaluate it as inherently negative. While US reporters contest associational structures, German reporters …
Conclusion
The conclusion draws together key findings of the book, discusses its larger implications and breaks down differences between the two occupational cultures of journalism along six dimensions: subjectivity, interventionism, competition, relation to politics, digital media and its larger role in democracy. The analysis finds vigorously upheld but relatively porous and malleable professional boundaries of US journalism which stand opposite the unagi…
Introduction
This chapter starts with an analysis of debates in leading US and German media outlets about the Snowden revelations of the difference between journalism and advocacy. It shows that these examples of journalistic metadiscourse are filtered through specific lenses of each occupational culture. This chapter then presents the theoretical framework of the analysis, which is mainly based on cultural sociology and field theory. A quick discussion of th…
The Sacred Discourse of Journalistic Professionalism
This chapter focuses on sacred discourse encapsulated in mythologies and articulated in moments of occupational consecration. The discourse analysis of journalism award statements and obituaries of journalists is followed by an examination of interview data of reporters of the two press corps engaging in occupational mythologizing. This chapter demonstrates a greater emphasis on the concrete social impact of journalism in the USA, corresponding t…
Contextualizing US and German Journalism
This chapter situates journalism in its institutional and cultural context in Germany and the United States. On the institutional level, it compares the two media systems, focusing particularly on market and non-market influences and professional organizational infrastructures of journalism. On the cultural level, it examines the history of journalism and connects it to national repertoires of evaluation. The chapter suggests a pervasiveness of m…
Embedded Political Reporting
The specificity of the research setting—reporters embedded in political institutions—is utilized in this chapter to examine the maintenance of professional autonomy. Source relations constitute a continuous social drama for US journalists and involve meticulous signaling of professional boundaries ( boundary performance ) and perpetual adjustments of closeness and distance ( boundary management ), performatively and otherwise. German reporters tr…
The role of events in ICT adoption
ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy of culture unfolds in technological change processes. Cultural sociology has shown how influential ev…
Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany
This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still bu
The Media Syndrome
Book review of The Media Syndrome, by David L. Altheide. New York: Routledge, 2016. 234 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781629581477
The Field of American Media Sociology
This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the …
Cultural Sociology, History of
The augmented newsbeat
This article deals with the intertwining of digital and nondigital spaces of news reporting. It focuses specifically on how Twitter affects spatial and temporal orderings of news ecosystems. At the New York state government, actors within the space permeate informational barriers through Twitter while enabling others to follow and engage in events from remote locations. The always-on mentality of tweeters not only blurs boundaries between work li…
The Twitterization of News Making
Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing it, professional identity, and public service. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between the institutional logic of professional control (Lewis, 2012)) and an ethic of transparency. Drawing from extensive research on a political press corps, …
Journalistic professionalism as performance and boundary work
In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists’ efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt to influence media representations every day, provides a strategic research site (Merton, 1987) for…
Sociologists in the Press
The Twitterization of News Making
Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing it, professional identity, and public service. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between the institutional logic of professional control (Lewis, 2012)) and an ethic of transparency. Drawing from extensive research on a political press corps, …
Journalistic professionalism as performance and boundary work
In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists’ efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt to influence media representations every day, provides a strategic research site (Merton, 1987) for…
From Counter-Power to Counter-Pepe
This article reconstructs the evolution of societal and journalistic meta-discourse about the participation of ordinary citizens in the news production process. We do so through a genealogy of what we call “participatory epistemology”, defined here as a form of journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through public interaction. It is our argument that the notion of “citizen participation in news process” has not simply …
Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany
This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still bu
The augmented newsbeat
This article deals with the intertwining of digital and nondigital spaces of news reporting. It focuses specifically on how Twitter affects spatial and temporal orderings of news ecosystems. At the New York state government, actors within the space permeate informational barriers through Twitter while enabling others to follow and engage in events from remote locations. The always-on mentality of tweeters not only blurs boundaries between work li…
The Field of American Media Sociology
This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the …
Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case
Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends on university campuses are a clear indicator of the dire future for freedom of speech. Others vi…
Sociologists in the Press
Performative Polarization
Political backlash against liberal democracy and ubiquitous clashes between different versions of identity politics in recent years evoked a heightened awareness of political polarization. Rather than examining the mechanics of this process, social science predominantly conceives political polarization in a rather static manner and measures its prevalence and causes within and between societies. This article views political polarization as taking…
Sociologists in the Press
Journalistic professionalism as performance and boundary work
In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists’ efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt to influence media representations every day, provides a strategic research site (Merton, 1987) for…
The augmented newsbeat
This article deals with the intertwining of digital and nondigital spaces of news reporting. It focuses specifically on how Twitter affects spatial and temporal orderings of news ecosystems. At the New York state government, actors within the space permeate informational barriers through Twitter while enabling others to follow and engage in events from remote locations. The always-on mentality of tweeters not only blurs boundaries between work li…
The Twitterization of News Making
Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing it, professional identity, and public service. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between the institutional logic of professional control (Lewis, 2012)) and an ethic of transparency. Drawing from extensive research on a political press corps, …
Cultural Sociology, History of
The Field of American Media Sociology
This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the …
Staking Out the Boundaries of Professionalism
This chapter maps US and German journalists’ definitions of occupational virtues and ideals, public responsibility and boundary drawing between “good” and “bad” journalism. These pronouncements arose in research interviews, ethnographic observation of reporting practice and in public venues (metajournalism). US reporters stood out by engaging in much more self-examination in metadiscourse and drawing boundaries more assertively towards each other…
Digital Media and the Diversification of Professionalism
This chapter focuses on resilience and change of professionalism with respect to digital media. For US reporters, the hybridity of traditional and online journalism did not only have practical implications but changed their professional self-understanding as well. Even though German reporters used the same media (except blogs), they had relatively little impact on their work and professional identity. Especially Twitter featured US reporters as s…
Competitive Collegiality
This chapter examines collective dynamics of German and US journalism. Even though competition and solidarity are realities of both groups of reporters, the analysis identifies the US case above all as a competitive press culture and the German case as an associational press culture. While US reporters thrive on competition, German reporters evaluate it as inherently negative. While US reporters contest associational structures, German reporters …
Conclusion
The conclusion draws together key findings of the book, discusses its larger implications and breaks down differences between the two occupational cultures of journalism along six dimensions: subjectivity, interventionism, competition, relation to politics, digital media and its larger role in democracy. The analysis finds vigorously upheld but relatively porous and malleable professional boundaries of US journalism which stand opposite the unagi…
Introduction
This chapter starts with an analysis of debates in leading US and German media outlets about the Snowden revelations of the difference between journalism and advocacy. It shows that these examples of journalistic metadiscourse are filtered through specific lenses of each occupational culture. This chapter then presents the theoretical framework of the analysis, which is mainly based on cultural sociology and field theory. A quick discussion of th…
The Sacred Discourse of Journalistic Professionalism
This chapter focuses on sacred discourse encapsulated in mythologies and articulated in moments of occupational consecration. The discourse analysis of journalism award statements and obituaries of journalists is followed by an examination of interview data of reporters of the two press corps engaging in occupational mythologizing. This chapter demonstrates a greater emphasis on the concrete social impact of journalism in the USA, corresponding t…
Contextualizing US and German Journalism
This chapter situates journalism in its institutional and cultural context in Germany and the United States. On the institutional level, it compares the two media systems, focusing particularly on market and non-market influences and professional organizational infrastructures of journalism. On the cultural level, it examines the history of journalism and connects it to national repertoires of evaluation. The chapter suggests a pervasiveness of m…
Embedded Political Reporting
The specificity of the research setting—reporters embedded in political institutions—is utilized in this chapter to examine the maintenance of professional autonomy. Source relations constitute a continuous social drama for US journalists and involve meticulous signaling of professional boundaries ( boundary performance ) and perpetual adjustments of closeness and distance ( boundary management ), performatively and otherwise. German reporters tr…
The role of events in ICT adoption
ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy of culture unfolds in technological change processes. Cultural sociology has shown how influential ev…
Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany
This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still bu
The Media Syndrome
Book review of The Media Syndrome, by David L. Altheide. New York: Routledge, 2016. 234 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781629581477
The Sociology of Journalism
Sociological inquiries into journalism have considered journalism as the product of cultural, economic, political, and technological forces in different times and spaces. As part of (and like) the field of media sociology, the sociology of journalism is an interdisciplinary subfield. It has several objectives of inquiry: examining situational and larger cultural differences of journalisms; analyzing systemic complexities in which journalism arise…
How Not to Establish a Subfield
From Counter-Power to Counter-Pepe
This article reconstructs the evolution of societal and journalistic meta-discourse about the participation of ordinary citizens in the news production process. We do so through a genealogy of what we call “participatory epistemology”, defined here as a form of journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through public interaction. It is our argument that the notion of “citizen participation in news process” has not simply …
Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case
Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends on university campuses are a clear indicator of the dire future for freedom of speech. Others vi…
Meinungsfreiheit an der Universität
In unserer Antwort gehen wir auf einige Kritikpunkte an unserer Studie „Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus?“ ein, die uns wiederholt und in ähnlicher Form in Diskussionen begegnen. Diese betreffen unsere Fallauswahl, unser Verständnis und unsere Operationalisierung von Toleranz und Meinungsfreiheit sowie nicht zuletzt unsere „Positionalität“. Wie wir darlegen, beruht diese Kritik vornehmlich auf einer verzerrten Rezeption unserer Befun…
Micropolarization
This article theorizes how political divisions permeate social interaction, transforming the political into the personal in everyday life. Drawing on affective polarization research, we highlight the central role of identification and emotions in shaping political in-groups and out-groups. Moving beyond conventional measures of cross-group resentment, we conceptualize polarization as the lived experience of political antagonism. We argue that pol…
Performative Polarization
Political backlash against liberal democracy and ubiquitous clashes between different versions of identity politics in recent years evoked a heightened awareness of political polarization. Rather than examining the mechanics of this process, social science predominantly conceives political polarization in a rather static manner and measures its prevalence and causes within and between societies. This article views political polarization as taking…
Beyond anti-elitism and out-group attacks
TikTok is a pivotal platform for political communication, especially among younger users. This study examines how the German rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) used TikTok to disseminate populist messages and engage users during the 2024 European elections. By analyzing videos posted by AfD politicians in the three months leading up to the elections, we identified the main populist messages and assessed their impact on user en…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Media Studies and Communication (17 works) · Media studies (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Journalism (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · German (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)