Which Journalists for Which Democracy?

Abstract

Although the impacts of journalistic phenomena on democracy are often contested, democracy as a concept rarely gets concretized in these debates. Some studies suggest that different models of democracy have different implications for public discourse and media performance—however, journalistic roles as an important category of journalism research have not been sufficiently differentiated so far. This study addresses that gap by transferring the liberal-representative, the deliberative, and the participatory models of democracy onto journalistic roles, thereby showing how journalists should understand themselves and their work in order to play a functional role within each model, and then suggesting a way of measuring these roles in their different contexts. This deductive approach made use of data from a survey of Austrian journalists from 2014/15 (N = 818). The results indicate that these journalists most strongly support a liberal-representative role, which corresponds to the state of Austrian democracy. However, potentials for alternative understandings of democracy were also found in nontrivial amounts. The journalistic news beat as well as media ownership influence the extent to which journalists identify with democratic roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Austria
• democracy
• survey
• journalistic roles
• worlds of journalism study
• deliberation
• political representation
• political participation

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ORF = “Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.”

2. > 1.5 % / 0.5—1.5 %.

3. The Research Institute for the Public Sphere (fög 2015) subsumes Politics (Domestic, Foreign and Regional), Economy, Culture and News (Analysis/Opinion) under core beats; our operationalization follows this classification with the difference that Regional Politics was not a category of the survey and that Law and Crime, Education and Science and Belief and Religion were additionally included under core beats. It further subsumes Sports and Human Interest under other beats; the operationalization further differentiates the latter in Society, Entertainment, Computer and Technics, Free Time, Food and Dining and Lifestyle and adds Health, Local Issues and Regional Issues to other beats.

4. χ²(2) = 5.932; p = .052.

5. F(2, 415,181) = 2,143, p. 118.

6. F(2, 778,913) = 4,105, p < .05—post-hoc analysis (Scheffé) revealed a significant difference (p < .05) in performance of the “Democratically Detached” with the “Representation- and Discourse-Oriented” (−2.436, 95%-CI[−4.77, −0,10]) as well as “Information-Based Motivators” (−2.295, 95%-CI[−4.48, −0,11]), but not between the two latter groups.

7. F(2, 3,182) = .578, p = .561.

8. Most journalists in leading positions and/or management roles (N = 208) did not assign themselves to a specific beat. Those who did so (N = 55) were treated as belonging to a beat, because their voluntary allocation was interpreted as high identification with the respective beat.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Project I 1341-G16.