Most comparative research on media systems and journalistic cultures has focused on advanced democracies only. In a new study, researchers analyzed journalistic role performance doing a content analysis for a total of 34 514 print news articles. The study included 19 countries located in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia.
Researchers analyzed the presence of six journalistic roles: interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, civic, service, and infotainment. They found patterns of multilayered hybridization. This hybridity of cultures did not resemble “either existing ideal media system typologies or conventional assumptions about political or regional clusters”, the authors state.
The disseminator role was the only one showing uniform quality globally, regardless of region or political status. The study concludes that the political system is an important factor in shaping journalism and that roles are affected by changing local sociopolitical conditions. For future research, there is a need to better explain differences and similarities of journalistic cultures across the globe, the authors state.
The authors of the article are:
- Claudia Mellado of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso
- Lea Hellmueller of the University of Houston
- Mireya Márquez-Ramírez of Universidad Iberoamericana
- Maria Luisa Humanes of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
- Colin Sparks of Hong Kong Baptist University
- Agnieszka Stepinska of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan
- Svetlana Pasti of the University of Tampere
- Anna-Maria Schielicke of Technischen Universität Dresden
- Edson Tandoc of Nanyang Technological University
- and Haiyan Wang of SunYat-Sen
The article “The Hybridization of Journalistic Cultures” was published in the Journal of Communication and is available online (free abstract).
Picture: Blooming Clarity by Connie Krejci, licence CC BY 2.0