THE FADING PUBLIC VOICE

Abstract

The increasing commercialization of media markets in Denmark and abroad have led to concerns about journalism's role in democracy. In discussions about the influence of budget cuts and increased competition on the way journalists work, the difference between political journalists and other journalists is often disregarded. This paper argues that commercialization has a polarizing effect. It strengthens the political beat at the expense of other beats, as political news is cost-effective and a way for outlets to brand themselves. Representative surveys among parliamentary reporters and other Danish journalists confirm that commercial pressures affect political journalists less than other journalists, even those working in other prestigious beats. This has negative implications from the viewpoint of participatory democracy; while other journalists emphasize a role as promoters of a citizen perspective, parliamentary journalists see it as their main role to demand accountability rather than responsiveness of politicians.

Keywords:

• beat reporters
• commercialization
• democracy journalism survey
• political journalism
• role conceptions

Notes

1. TV2 is still state-owned and subjected to public service obligations.

2. See http://www.mediefonen.dk/leksikon-tv2news.htm (accessed 30 July 2011).

3. For the population of journalists outside the political beat the number of cases on which the data for Table 1 are based is lower than the total number of respondents (1548). This is due to the fact that freelance journalists were not asked about their autonomy and commercial pressures, since some of these questions relate directly to the news organization which the journalists work for.

4. To test for spurious relations we ran ordinary least-square regression where background variables like gender, journalistic experience and journalistic education were included. Including these background variables did not affect the comparison between political reporters and other journalists. Therefore only the mean scores of the two groups are presented in Table 2.

5. Differences in commercial pressure between the political beat and other journalists are not due to the type of outlets they work for. When controlling for type of outlet we find similar results.