Between Rhetoric and Practice

Abstract

A large body of research in journalism studies has analyzed which social and political roles news professionals consider they must fulfill in society. These studies are based on the assumption that role conception influences news content. However, the gap between ideals and practice is inevitable, since the constraint to which journalists are exposed limits the possibility of living up to their normative standards. While recent studies have addressed the relationship between ideals and practice by studying whether journalists with different roles report differently, we know less about the gap between the two. By comparing the role conception of journalists with the news stories they produce, we address the (dis)connection between roles and content as a gap, analyzing which roles render a larger distance and also which journalists are more likely to put their ideals into practice. The findings show a significant gap between role conception and performance, particularly for the service, civic and watchdog roles. Greater perceived autonomy leads to a smaller gap, while economic and political influences as well as belonging to a beat increase the gap. Likewise, the gap varies significantly between journalists working at the quality and the popular press.

KEYWORDS:

• autonomy
• content analysis
• journalism
• journalists
• role conceptions
• role performance
• survey

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Corrigendum

FUNDING

Research for this article received funding from Fondecyt Grant No. 1110009.

Notes

1. La Nación is only considered for 2010, which is when the printed newspaper was halted by decision of the current government.

2. Twenty-one journalists were from El Mercurio, 14 were from La Nación, 15 from La Tercera, 19 from Las Utimas Noticias and 6 from La Cuarta.

3. These two items are based on the questions asked to a representative sample of Chilean journalists in a previous study of professional roles (Mellado 2012). Nevertheless, we think that a slightly different wording for “to be a passive observer” is a possible explanation for low reliability and correlation, as is the fact that in this study we only included newspaper journalists.

4. Such a goal is currently undertaken by the international project Journalistic Role Performance around the Globe (http://www.journalisticperformance.org, @Jourperformance).

Additional information

Funding

FUNDING Research for this article received funding from Fondecyt Grant No. 1110009.