Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists (original) (raw)
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Surveying 1,700 journalistsfrom seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains -political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural infuences are perceived as more powerful limits to journalists'work than political and economic influences.
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This article makes a case for a socially situated and theoretically sophisticated approach to the sociological study of journalists. This is urgently needed for us to understand the increasingly complex news production environment and the rapidly evolving nature of journalistic practice. Two theoretical approaches to studying the sociology of journalists are outlined and discussed. The first is a development of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory; the second -the 'news world' approach -emerges from the social worlds approach commonly associated with Howard S. Becker. Each approach on its own shows considerable promise for the analysis of the increasingly complex news media environment. The article concludes that the journalistic field and the news world approaches could be combined to create a new framework for the sociological study of journalism that would provide a way forward for the important empirical research on journalists that is now needed.
This article compares the perceived importance of influences on news work across 18 societies. Evidence is based on journalists' survey responses to a six-dimensional scale, covering political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences as well as influences from reference groups. The results confirm the expectation that political and economic factors are clearly the most important denominators of cross-national differences in the journalists' perceptions of influences. Furthermore, perceived political influences are clearly related to objective indicators of political freedom and ownership structures across the investigated countries. Economic influences seem to have a stronger impact in private and state-owned media than in public newsrooms, but they are not related to a country's economic freedom. With respect to organizational, professional, and procedural influences as well as the impact of reference groups, the differences between the countries turned out to be much smaller.
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Between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the last century, the press was explored by a group of German and American scholars, who had somehow occasionally shared the journalistic practices, the concern about teaching journalism in academic settings, the study of newspapers and its relation to society, as well as sociology as a fi eld of journalism investigation and teaching. The extensive reviews on the diff erent theories of journalism display a huge gap on this historical content which comprises the so-called "social theories of the press" (H. Hardt, 1970), except for isolated references to the study of journalism and society conducted by M.
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In this article, we use Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences (HOI) model as a framework to investigate the ways in which Egyptian journalists perceive the influences exerted on them in the context of the post-Arab Spring transition. Our findings show that perceptions of limitations to journalism practice can extend to all levels in the HOI model and that journalistic autonomy is particularly impeded due to factors at the social system level. This leads to an adaptation of the HOI model as we find that the perceived closure of the public sphere and a complicated network of clientelism at the social system level has impacted journalism practice negatively in Egypt and has a wider influence on the rest of the four levels in the model. In other words, routines, individuals, organizations, and social institutions all seem to mediate the social system’s influence on journalistic behavior.
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The media and, more specifically, journalists are high on the public agenda these last few years. Global news services like the BBC and CNN and technological developments like the World Wide Web (WWW) facilitate a growing number of citizens world-wide participating in the public debate on the role of the media in society. This kind of public concern corresponds with academic interest-sparking a notable increase in survey studies among journalists, as well as resulting in several new theoretical perspectives on journalism and ...
Deconstructing Journalism Culture: Toward a Universal Theory
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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.