In this first comprehensive national study of Australian journalists, the author surveyed 1,068 news people in all mainstream news media. Australian journalists are similar to their U.S. colleagues in distributions of age, sex, and socio-economic background, but have less formal education. Like U.S. journalists, Australians have mixed professional and ethical values and are committed both to investigative and to news-disseminating roles of the media.
Previous measures of economic conservatism can be considered dated in the wake of the collapse of communist systems and the embrace of free market policies by social democrat political parties, arguably reflecting rejection of many left-Liberal positions. Testing of a traditionally worded 20-item scale of economic values on an Australian sample of 260 indicates poor reliability (alpha = .53), apparently because many items do not reflect contemporary ideological differences. Higher reliability (alpha = .65) is found in a two-factor eight-item scale involving attitudes to political action and social welfare. The short scale correlates significantly with other measures of conservatism (Pearson r with declared political leaning = .26, r with social conservatism .48).
Personality, a little-explored variable in studies of journalists, may prove useful in understanding news people's values and motivations. A short test of two personality dimensions was applied to a random sample of 173 Australian journalists, who were found to be more extroverted than the general population, but not significantly different on the dimension of neuroticism. Job stress was related both to neuroticism and to extroversion, while extroversion was related to the valuing of information disseminating roles of media and of direct feedback from the public. Early success in journalism was related positively to extroversion and negatively to neuroticism. Further approaches to the study of personality in journalism are suggested.
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