By providing some perspectives and visions, textbooks frame a discipline the way to conceptualize reality. Thus, people participating in a discipline pursuit similar objectives, and have similar standards, methods and assumptions. Those assumptions pre-decide what issue is important, what solution is acceptable, and what is deviant behavior of a discipline.
Different from traditional journalism research mainly focussing on analysis of news coverage, the article analyzes journalism textbooks. Textbooks define the ideal and normative journalism profession. They cultivate the journalists the knowledge of the profession by the routinization. Valuable is to analyze those knowledge which legitimacy have been taken for granted, because it will be helpful for further understanding the essence of the truth in journalism from different aspects.
Based on paradigm perspectives and symbolic convergence theory, the article analyze what rhetorical vision is constructed by journalism textbooks and what is shared by journalist as their perspective of reality. The analysis finds that, textbooks define the set of rules and methods for pursuing the perfect concept: reality . Textbooks promise that reality can be presented in news coverage, if the set of rules and methods are followed by journalist. However, the reality presented in news coverage are language generated by journalist. Most of the time those languages are not thing to do with reality.
Legalized and approved, The knowledge presented in textbooks are identified and agreed by the society. The article do not attempt to understand every aspect of the journalist culture by ignore other knowledge and experience beyond the textbook.
However, it can not be denied that textbooks represent ideal journalist knowledge. By analyzing textbooks, we are able to know what is must known and is must disciplined for journalists and to know what journalists are expected by the society.