Setting the Agenda, Influencing Public Opinion, and Advocating for Social Change

Abstract

This study seeks to contribute to the systematic explanation of journalists’ professional role orientations. Focusing on three aspects of journalistic interventionism—the importance of setting the political agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change—multilevel analyses found substantive variation in interventionism at the individual level of the journalist, the level of the media organizations, and the societal level. Based on interviews with 2100 journalists from 21 countries, findings affirm theories regarding a hierarchy of influences in news work. We found journalists to be more willing to intervene in society when they work in public media organizations and in countries with restricted political freedom. An important conclusion of our analysis is that journalists’ professional role orientations are also rooted within perceptions of cultural and social values. Journalists were more likely to embrace an interventionist role when they were more strongly motivated by the value types of power, achievement, and tradition.

KEYWORDS:

• comparative research
• journalistic interventionism
• multilevel analysis
• news influences
• professional roles
• survey

FUNDING

This study was funded by several institutions, including the German Research Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, Rothschild-Caesarea School of Communication at Tel Aviv University, and the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland.

Notes

1. The data-set used for this analysis can be downloaded from http://www.worldsofjournalism.org/docs/WJS_2007-2011_public.sav.

2. Schwartz (2007, 175) organized the 10 value types into a circular structure, representing what he calls a “motivational continuum.” Values which are close to each other in the circle are similar in their underlying motivations, while those situated further away from each other represent antagonism.

3. The quality press (e.g., “serious” newspapers such as broadsheets and news magazines) usually addresses its audience primarily as citizens, while popular outlets (such as tabloids) target an audience of consumers.

4. In every country, there exists a tacit consensus among journalists and media scholars regarding the media that are considered to substantially shape the national political agenda. Hence, we selected those quality outlets which are commonly believed to have the greatest impact in this regard. For popular print media we selected the outlets with the highest circulation numbers. The selection of radio and television stations was based on the ratings of their newscasts.

5. Turkey was the only case where journalists completed questionnaires on their own while a researcher was present.

6. See http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2012/methodology. The political freedom data were transformed to meet the conditions for regression analyses as the distribution of values deviated extremely from normal distribution.