This qualitative study of influences on a purposive sample of Afghan journalists was carried out in the year after the US military mission was declared over. After more than a hundred million dollars of Western government funding had been invested in development of liberal democratic journalism, the study found the paradox of news media ‘capture’. We conceptualize this phenomenon further into political, bureaucratic, foreign-donor, and violent-actor capture. The study concludes that in countries with heavy foreign intervention, where imported journalism values are layered upon previous and continued institutional arrangements and where violence and instability continue unabated, news media work is prone to ‘capture’ by a variety of actors outside media organizations. We suggest that future research could refine a typology with six distinct forms of capture – economic, political, cultural, legal, bureaucratic, and societal.
Gatekeeping theory and the hierarchy of influences model were used as a framework to analyze democratic norm development in Iraq. The study developed three watchdog gatekeeping models that could be adapted for other conflict or postdictatorship environments or modified for longtime democracies. The study used hierarchical regression to analyze forces that influenced attitudes of 588 Iraqi journalists in their gatekeeping role. Individual-level forces, followed by ideologicallevel forces, contributed the most toward watchdog gatekeeping attitudes toward access to government meetings, and news media routine forces contributed the most toward influencing attitudes toward access to government records.
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