sight into the ways journalists make sense of what they do, and about
the role of journalism in society.

Journalism, like all social institutions, is socially constructed.
Questions about where journalism ends and entertainment begins are a
viable field of study that up to this point, has been largely ignored.
This project should begin to remedy this situation by examining what
many call journalism ethics issues from a constructivist point of view.
The way journalists make distinctions about acceptable behaviors, in-
tentions, and content says a lot about culture production and how so-
ciety creates and defines itself.

Throughout this study, cartographic metaphors--mapping images--
are used as a way of thinking about the relationships between different
institutions in American culture. Journalists map out the cultural space
of journalism by specifying where the boundaries are located. As
Gieryn ( 1995) notes, cartographic metaphors are useful when dis-
cussing the idea of a cultural space--territorial markers that people use
to make sense of the world around them. He says, "cartographic
metaphors offer a robust language for thinking about relations among
cultural phenomena," particularly the relations between adjacent phe-
nomena (p. 419). In the cultural space of mass media, news and enter-
tainment appear to be adjacent phenomena. Gieryn suggests thatwe
consider using cartographic terms such as "contours, landmarks, scale,
orientation, coordinates, points of interest, and legend" (p. 419). These
terms compel us to examine how this cultural space was slowly carved
out of the cultural landscape rather than privilege journalism-as-it-is as
the only logical outcome.

Some of the boundaries of journalism may be moving and flexible or
perhaps blurry and indistinct. In other places they may be uncontested
and easy to see. In any case, it is the players on either side of the al-
leged boundary (or in the middle of it) who are the primary stakehold-
ers in constitutive rhetoric that attempts to delineate borders. That is
why the primary site of this study is in the rhetoric of journalists: They
have the most to gain or lose by such rhetoric about the boundaries of
journalism.

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