The twentieth anniversary of the launch of two of journalism studies’ defining journals, Journalism Studies and Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, recently gave different authors cause to reflect on how the field has developed over time, as a sub-field of the wider universe of communication and media studies. This paper takes a review of a selection of these state-of-the field commentaries as the starting point for our own argument, which is theoretically and methodologically informed by post-Marxist discourse theory. It offers a critique of the disciplinary imaginary of journalism studies from an agonistic perspective that acknowledges the richness of how the field has developed over time, but questions what we see as the emergence of a more professionalized (and more disciplined) scholarly identity. Our argument focuses on three limitations of a field that is sufficiently heterogenous to defy easy categorization. First, an enduring failure to adequately conceptualize the political (or to be more precise ontopolitical) condition of journalism, even in a political context where claims about the politics of journalism are commonplace. Second, the lack of conceptual autonomy in the field, where researchers too often seem to simply adopt and naturalize buzzworthy concepts from media discourse or actors outside academia. And, third, the field’s tendency towards the normalization of mezzo-level analytical perspectives which decenter the question of journalism’s place in the wider social totality.