Interpreting or Reporting? An Analysis of Journalistic Interventionism Across Western European Countries

ABSTRACT

The literature comparing journalistic roles around the world highlights different ways of understanding journalistic work across countries. One of the main differences in conceptualising concerns the journalist’s propensity for intervention: where in some contexts it is common practice for journalists to intervene with commentary and interpretation; while in others there is a tendency to adopt a more neutral reporting style. Through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance, this study investigates the performance of the interventionist role within its two analytical sub-dimensions (content-driven interventionism and style-driven interventionism), together with the specific indicators related to each of the two (interpretation, journalist point of view, call to action, qualifying adjectives, and use of the first person) across nine Western European countries. Contrary to expectations, our data show a higher level of interventionism—particularly content-driven—in Central and Northern European countries when compared to those belonging to the polarised pluralist model theorised by Hallin, D. C., and P. Mancini. (2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge University Press). Moreover, in almost all the countries considered, when journalists do intervene with their own voice, they predominantly do so through rhetorical devices of interpretation and by expressing their point of view.

KEYWORDS:

• Interventionism
• journalistic voice
• journalistic role performance
• journalism
• Western Europe
• media systems

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.journalisticperformance.org/the-project.

2 For more information on news outlets by media type and country look at supplementary materials.

3 According to JRP project strategies, we conducted a content analysis for Italy. The data on the other countries included in this study were analysed by other JRP national teams.

4 Based on Krippendorff’s alpha (Ka), the intercoder reliability per country was: Austria .88, Belgium .76, France .76, Germany .76, Ireland .74, Italy .85, Spain .80, Switzerland .78, United Kingdom .80.

5 For more details on the type of analysis conducted, please refer to the JRP project’s methodological note available at https://www.journalisticperformance.org/contentanalysis.