Despite a large array of work broadly concerned with the cultures of news production, studies rarely attempt to tackle journalism culture and its dimensional structure at the conceptual level. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to propose a theoretical foundation on the basis of which systematic and comparative research of journalism cultures is feasible and meaningful. By using a deductive and etic approach, the concept of journalism culture is deconstructed in terms of its constituents and principal dimensions. Based on a review of the relevant literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of journalism culture that consists of 3 essential constituents (institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical ideologies), further divided into 7 principal dimensions: interventionism, power distance, market orientation, objectivism, empiricism, relativism, and idealism.
The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news outlets, and media organizations struggle over discursive authority in conversations about journalism's identity and locus in society. Journalistic roles are articulated and enacted on 2 distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive roles) and role performance (practiced and narrated roles). The process model of journalistic roles proposes a circular structure, where normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles are connected through processes of internalization, enactment, reflection, normalization, and negotiation.
Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.
Despite signs of declining press trust in many western countries, we know little about trends in press trust across the world. Based on comparative survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS), this study looks into national levels of trust in the press and identifies factors that drive differences across societies and individuals as well as over time. Findings indicate that the widely noted decline in media trust is not a universal trend; it is true for only about half of the studied countries, with the United States experiencing the largest and most dramatic drop in trust in the press. Political trust has emerged as key factor for our understanding of trust in the press. We found robust evidence for what we called the trust nexus-the idea that trust in the news media is strongly linked to the way publics look at political institutions. The link between press trust and political trust was considerably stronger in politically polarized societies. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the relation between press trust and political trust is becoming stronger over time. We reason that the strong connection between media and political trust may be driven by a growing public sentiment against elite groups.
This article sets out to map the journalistic field as a space of struggle between distinct professional milieus. These milieus crystallize around journalists who share similar views on journalism’s function in society. By means of cluster analysis, four global professional milieus were extracted from the survey responses of 1800 journalists in 18 countries: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent and the opportunist facilitator. The detached watchdog milieu clearly dominates the journalistic field in most western countries, while the milieu of the opportunist facilitator reigns supreme in several developing, transitional and authoritarian contexts. In accordance with the theoretical propositions, relatively little professional autonomy was found in contexts with rather strong corporate and commercial influences. However, a more universal approach would need to go beyond corporate and commercial factors in order to account for the realities of the journalistic field in non-western countries.
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