This article engages with the constructionist conceptualizations of the relationship between media and power and media and reality. At the backdrop ofthe "illegal immigrant stories" it challenges some widely accepted assumptions of that relationship that are part of the journalistic self-identity and professional mythology. In the journalistic stories on the "Other" the central role of the media is the reproduction of normality (and not reality) and journalism is therefore more the "poetics of the community" as the "chronology of the reality". This means, that the stories on illegal immigrants, for example, are to a greater extent the representations of our vision of "our way of life" than the representations of the immigrant issue itself. The author argues how the professional canon of objectivity marginalises the argumentation in journalism and fosters other discursive forms of evaluation and moralization. The ideological structure of the "journalistic field" should be therefore, according to the author, considered as an articulation of not only the political or/and economic interests involved, but as the articulation of at least two additional dimensions involved in the journalistic production: the professional journalistic self-image and mythology of neutrality and objectivity and the popular ideology/mythology which is constructed and reproduced by journalism understood as a form of cultural practice.
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