News Media Landscape in a Fragile State: Professional Ethics Perceptions in a Post-Ba'athist Iraq

Abstract

During the years of Ba'athist dictator Saddam Hussein, media personnel were under tight control and tortured or executed when they strayed from the government line. In the decade following the fall of the Ba'athist regime, thousands of Iraqi journalists were trained in liberal democratic professional norms, and hundreds of news outlets opened even as some of the old patronage practices and violence continued. This study utilized Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchy of influences model to examine factors influencing a proxy indicator for professional ethics, the value of conflict of interest avoidance among a purposive sample of Iraqi journalists (N = 588). We found that the news media routines and ideological levels, though not strong, had the greatest influences on this conflict of interest avoidance perception criterion indicator, the proxy for professional ethics. The findings suggest a tension between liberal democratic journalism training at the routines level and ideological aspects, in some cases, such as ethnic identity and political ideology. Strong influences on perceptions of conflict of interest avoidance were the type of media platform/Western journalism training, Arab ethnicity over Kurdish ethnicity, ideology of “democrat” over Kurdish nationalist or Islamist. No influence was apparent for Internet use frequency or state versus nonstate media.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Mariwan R. Hama and Ziad al-Ajili for their assistance with this research and the journal reviewers for their helpful input.

Notes

¹We note that one reviewer suggested that this variable could have been alternatively used on the individual level as a form of education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeannine E. Relly

Jeannine E. Relly (Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2008) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at The University of Arizona. Her research focuses on press-state relations, democratic institutions, and freedom of expression and access to information in countries in conflict and political transition.

Margaret Zanger

Margaret Zanger (M.S.L., Yale Law School, 1989; M.A., The University of Arizona, 1985) is a professor of practice in the School of Journalism at The University of Arizona. Her research focuses on international journalism and the Middle East with an emphasis on Iraq, the Kurds, and crises reporting.

Shahira Fahmy

Shahira Fahmy (Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2003) is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at The University of Arizona. Her research is situated in the areas of global reporting and visual journalism with a specific focus on the Middle East and issues that intersect these domains in the context of wars and conflicts in the region.