Power-Interactional Expertise: Negotiating Journalistic Autonomy during the Catalan Crisis at El País

During Catalonia’s independentist challenge in 2017, the prestigious center-left daily El País adopted an unexpectedly uncompromising stance widely seen as reflecting encroachment by the Spanish conservative field of power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with El País journalists, this article demonstrates how these pressures led not to conformism but to the widespread destabilization of journalistic habitus and newsroom cohesion. To account for this reaction, the study reconceptualizes autonomy as a distributed regime of professional expertise. It introduces the notion of power-interactional expertise: the ensemble of practices through which journalists collaboratively manage dependencies on political and economic power while aiming to publicly project autonomy. The breakdown of this regime, rather than censorship per se, accounts for the sense of professional habitus destabilization reported by El País journalists. By highlighting the tension between autonomy and dependency, the article reframes autonomy as an internal aspect of journalistic habitus and situates its transformation within the broader polycrisis affecting liberal democracies.