ABSTRACT. Knight notes that journalists inhabit a culture of ideas which shape the way they report, select, edit and prioritise news. Meyer maintains that precision journalism employs social science survey methods to gather statistics which could be used as the basis of news stories. Hastings remarks that, in the past, only news "flashes" had been transmitted by wire. Meyer writes that the new precision journalism is scientific journalism. Bourdieu contends that journalists owe their importance in society to their de facto monopoly on large-scale informational instruments of production and diffusion of information.