Sinking the Flagship: Why Communication Studies is Better Without One

Does U.S. communication research have a flagship journal? Not really, if by flagship we mean something like the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review. Those are unquestioned flagships, ratified (in a self-reinforcing loop) by citation metrics and by the disciplines’ tacit knowledge (Garand & Giles, 2003; Hargens, 1991; Oromaner, 2008). Ask a media studies scholar, and she might mention the Journal of Communication—but she could just as easily offer Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly or even Cinema Journal. She wouldn’t be wrong in any case. All four titles carry a major scholarly association's imprimatur. What is odd, of course, is that there are four scholarly associations all claiming the same territory. If media and communication has no flagship, it is because there no coherent discipline in the first place.Let’s stipulate that there is no media studies flagship. While our would-be discipline’s problems run deep, my view is that this is no longer one of them. Maybe it is OK, in other words, that we do not have an organ to anoint the “best” stuff. There was always something problematic about the flagship anyway: It is too easy for a narrow agenda to seize the power to consecrate. (Just ask a sociologist.) But the main reason that we are better off without a flagship, after all these years, is that its good and valuable functions can be taken up elsewhere.