Perceptions of Media Roles in Serbia and Croatia: Does News Orientation Have an Impact?

ABSTRACT

This study examined the perceptions of media roles among journalism students in Serbia and Croatia (N = 401). The results showed that the most important were citizen-oriented and watchdog roles and that they were positively predicted by hard news orientation, whereas consumer and loyal roles were least important. Consumer role was positively predicted by the soft news orientation, whereas the best predictor for the perceptions of the loyal media role was political orientation (right of the center). This is the first study that comparatively analyzed students’ views in two countries of the former Yugoslavia using national samples.

KEYWORDS:

• Croatia
• hard news
• media roles
• soft news
• Serbia
• survey

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The original Mellado et al. (2013) study recognized only one function of citizen-oriented role. However, previous studies indicated that in their orientation towards the public, journalists distinguish between neutral and participatory functions (e.g., Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986). The importance of neutrality role was also highlighted in Pjesivac et al. (2016) study of audiences’ views in Eastern Europe, which stressed that the audiences in Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia extremely valued detached relationship of the media, as they reported the events in short, concise, accurate, and clear manner without telling the audiences what to think. Finally, the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with Varimax Rotation, conducted for this study, showed that 23 items loaded on 5 factors exceeding Eigenvalues greater than 1, which presents another indication that citizen role might split into 2 roles. Thus, this study opted for measuring separately citizen neutral role and citizen-interventionist role, in which the citizen-neutral role sees journalists as neutral disseminators of unbiased information/news important to the audience (e.g., Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976), whereas citizen interventionist role sees journalists more as populist mobilizers and advocates for citizens, who have the position to move the audiences, advocate for a certain position over another, as well as promote certain issues over others (e.g., Weaver and Wilhoit 1986).