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Journalistic Judgment in Comparative Perspective: A Weberian Analysis of France and the United States
Abstract
Building on literatures that emphasize (1) the standardizing effects of markets and technology, and (2) the historical patterns and social functions of the press, this article theorizes the simultaneous co-presence of cross-national similarities and differences in journalistic judgment. Drawing from Max Weber's early twentieth century writings on journalism, we argue that similar cross-national judgments reveal journalism's shared structural basis as a commercial enterprise, whereas differences highlight the distinctive social functions that journalists assume in particular national settings. We illustrate this framework via semi-structured interviews conducted between 2015 and 2020 with a strategic sample of French and American journalists evaluating their best work. In both country samples, journalists that express pride in attracting audiences by translating complex issues and dignifying story subjects highlight journalism's structural basis. Cross-national differences reflect nationally distinct understandings of journalism's social functions, with French journalists emphasizing their ability to shed light on large issues and their American counterparts highlighting efforts to pry information from power holders.
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Journalists’ professional roles entail an important research area, which enhances knowledge on journalism’s attempted impact on political and democratic life. Journalism scholars, however, tend not to study journalistic professional roles from its impact on news content but focus on journalists’ conception of their role concluding that the way journalists conceive of their role will eventually shape the stories they produce. Hence, the link between role conception and role performance (i.e., its impact on news) has caught more attention as a justification of research interest than as loci of empirical examination. This conceptual paper revisits this assumption, arguing for an indepth discussion of what the concept of professional role entails to understand its manifestation in news. As journalistic performance must be considered a collective outcome, this article addresses the concept of professional role from its relationship to structural characteristics of media work. Our approach suggests a media sociology conceptualization of professional roles that takes into consideration the gatekeeping context, and most importantly the organizational and societal levels, when analyzing professional roles of journalists.
The democratic role and authority of the news media rest on a basic premise of trust delegation, whereby citizens confide in the news media to provide sufficiently relevant and accurate information. In a time of dwindling trust levels, increasing polarization, and an abundance of new media, this article asks what characterizes citizens’ relations with the media when the relation of trust breaks down. To illuminate broader tendencies of mistrust and disengagement, the article analyzes how citizens who see current immigration patterns as a major threat evaluate established and alternative news media, navigate the news landscape, and create personal and selective news repertoires. From an abductive methodological approach, 24 in-depth qualitative interviews were analyzed in continuous dialogue with theories on trust, public connection, and the democratic role of citizens to conceptualize the alarmed citizen, who’s public connection is characterized by alertness, fear, and low institutional trust; the active shifting between alternative media and established news media, and the construction of personal news repertoires and supportive networks.
The separation between editorial and business activities of news organisations has long been a fundamental norm of journalism. Journalists have traditionally considered this separation as both an ethical principle and an organisational solution to preserve their professional autonomy and isolate their newsrooms from profit-driven pressures exerted by advertising, sales and marketing departments. However, many news organisations are increasingly integrating their editorial and commercial operations. Based on 41 interviews conducted at 12 newspapers and commercial broadcasters in six European countries, we analyse how editors and business managers describe the changing relationship between their departments. Drawing on previous research on journalistic norms and change, we focus on how interviewees use rhetorical discourses and normative statements to de-construct traditional norms, build new professionally accepted norms and legitimise new working practices. We find, first, that the traditional norm of separation no longer plays the central role that it used to. Both editors and managers are working to foster a cultural change that is seen as a prerequisite for organisational adaptation to an increasingly challenging environment. Second, we find that a new norm of integration, based on the values of collaboration, adaptation and business thinking, has emerged. Third, we show how the interplay between declining and emerging norms involves a difficult negotiation. Whereas those committed to the traditional norm see commercial considerations as a threat to professional autonomy, our interviewees see the emerging norm as a new way of ensuring professional autonomy by working with other parts of the organisation to jointly ensure commercial sustainability.
This article examines the differential formation of online news startups in Toulouse, France, and Seattle, United States. While Seattle is home to many startups, in Toulouse there have been just 4—and only 1 continues publishing. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, we argue that amount and types of capital held by journalists in the 2 cities varied as a result of differences in journalism's position in the field of power. These differences shaped the extent of startup formation in each city and structured journalists' capacities to convert their capital into the resources needed to form startups (e.g., funding, credentials, partnerships). These findings are positioned in relation to literatures on journalism innovation and comparative media.
Comparative research across the world has shown that nation-level variables are strong predictors of professional roles in journalism. There is, however, still insufficient comparative research about three key issues: cross-national comparison of journalistic role performance, exploration of how – or whether – organizational variables account for variation in role performance across countries, and the performance of specific journalistic roles that prevail in regions with post-authoritarian political trajectories. This article tackles these three issues by comparatively measuring journalistic performance in five Latin American countries. Based on a content analysis of 9841 news items from 18 newspapers, this article reports findings from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, by analyzing the presence of the ‘interventionist’, ‘watchdog’, ‘loyal’, ‘service’, ‘infotainment’, and ‘civic’ roles. Results show that the region is far from homogeneous and that while ‘country’ is a strong predictor for most of the roles, other variables such as ‘media type’, ‘political orientation’, and ‘news topic’ are also significant predictors to varying levels.
Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to finish, the creation of ambitious multimedia projects, and the ethical dilemmas posed by social media in the newsroom. Here, the reality of creating news in a 24/7 instant information environment clashes with the storied history of print journalism, and the tensions present a dramatic portrait of news in the online world.
This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers.
This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. Yet even in an era of global hypercommercialism, Benson also finds enduring French-American differences related to the distinctive societal positions, professional logics, and internal structures of their journalistic fields. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective, and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers, and concerned citizens.
Journalists’ professional roles entail an important research area, which enhances knowledge on journalism’s attempted impact on political and democratic life. Journalism scholars, however, tend not to study journalistic professional roles from its impact on news content but focus on journalists’ conception of their role concluding that the way journalists conceive of their role will eventually shape the stories they produce. Hence, the link between role conception and role performance (i.e., its impact on news) has caught more attention as a justification of research interest than as loci of empirical examination. This conceptual paper revisits this assumption, arguing for an indepth discussion of what the concept of professional role entails to understand its manifestation in news. As journalistic performance must be considered a collective outcome, this article addresses the concept of professional role from its relationship to structural characteristics of media work. Our approach suggests a media sociology conceptualization of professional roles that takes into consideration the gatekeeping context, and most importantly the organizational and societal levels, when analyzing professional roles of journalists.
Global journalism is a practice that differs from traditional foreign correspondence. Instead of only covering distant events, it actively interconnects the local with the global. However, while some researchers claim that its practice has been incorporated into everyday news production as a natural response to the increasing interconnectedness of our globalized society, others see few empirical signs of its presence, and instead consider it to be a utopian vision for less " national provincialism " among the world's media. These contrasting views on the evidence for global journalism in the news call for more empirical research. The purpose of this study is thus to examine the prevalence of global journalism in mainstream news media. The article provides, first, an operationalization of global journalism and, second, a quantification of its presence or absence in the news output of three national newspapers, The Times, Le Monde and De Standaard, by means of a quantitative content analysis covering the period January 2013–June 2013 (N=850). According to our main results, a quarter of all articles include at least one building block of global journalism, and a fifth of all articles are centered on a global event and/or present a global outlook on the reported matter. Le Monde is the most " global " newspaper, as it exhibits the most examples of global journalism. However, the other two newspapers to a greater extent embed global outlooks in their domestic news sections, which might be viewed as an emerging way of producing globalized news discourse in a social reality with ever more blurred distinctions between domestic and global reality.
The first half of the 1910s were a crucial turning period for Max Weber’s thought. Whereas he had initially considered the question of the emergence of modern capitalism in relation to religious ethics, he started to link the study of contemporary capitalism with that of a variety of other domains—law, music, and the press. With regard to the latter he sought to set up a broad survey in the context of the creation of the German Sociological Society. This paper narrates the story of the formulation of the survey plan and the failure of the project, before setting out to unravel the relation which Weber seems to have wanted to ascertain, between the ‘information economy’ and the economy itself.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, national newspapers in France, both general and political, have regularly praised ‘investigative journalism’ and its role in unveiling ‘scandals’. To gain an understanding of how this new model of professional excellence arose, even though it concerns only a small number of journalists, we need to show the extent to which it is first of all largely symptomatic of a series of changes that have occurred outside the field of journalism, especially in the political and legal worlds, and in the relationships these spaces maintain with one another. In particular it is important to show that the media space has become highly strategic, notwithstanding its relative lack of autonomy. What is covered by the media is largely the outcome of power relations within different social spaces that are then translated in accordance with media processes. Thus ‘investigative journalism’ is often based less on journalists’ own investigations than on state-sponsored studies: reports, inquests, etc. The present article endeavours to show how and why these ‘scandals’ have been exposed only where such external changes have also found an echo in the field of general and political media nationally, in particular among a group of politicized journalists who constitute a new specialist field within the profession. The rise of ‘investigative journalism’ and its successful profile in the discourse of the profession both result from and reveal transformations affecting the whole space of journalism.
List of tables List of figures Preface Part I. The News Media and Civic Malaise: 1. The news media and democracy 2. Evaluating media performance 3. Understanding political communications Part II. Trends in Political Communication: 4. The decline of newspapers? 5. The rise (and fall?) of the television age 6. The emerging internet era 7. The evolution of campaign communications 8. The rise of the post-modern campaign? Part III. The Impact on Democracy: 9. Negative news, negative public? 10. Knows little? Information and choice 11. Cares less? Cynical media, cynical public? 12. Stays home? Political mobilization 13. American exceptionalism? 14. A virtuous circle? Technical appendix Notes Select bibliography Author index Subject index.
This book provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Focusing on France and America, it analyses how the people of these two different cultures mobilise national 'repertoires of evaluation' to make judgements about politics, economics, morals and aesthetics. The analysis draws on eight case studies by eleven French and American researchers who have worked together over a number of years to develop systematic comparisons between these countries. The topics are wide-ranging, comparing how individuals use the cultural tools at their disposal to answer questions such as: are races equal? What constitutes sexual harassment? What is the value of contemporary art? Should journalists be neutral? How can the defense of the environment be reconciled with economic imperatives? Moving beyond simplistic essentialist models of national character, this comparative approach offers important insights that will interest not only sociologists but also political scientists and anthropologists.
Despite growing attention to notions of (dis)trust in both journalism studies and conflict studies, the role of suspicion and distrust in the dynamics of conflict coverage has not yet been investigated. This paper explores the various aspects of suspicion in the perceptions of journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with journalists and an interdisciplinary approach to the conceptualization of suspicion and (dis)trust. An inductive-qualitative analysis of journalists’ narratives identified three main aspects: suspicion of information sources, suspicion of peer journalists, and awareness of being under suspicion. The study demonstrates that through all stages of news production, journalists operate within a perpetual context of suspicion despite being required to generate trust. This dilemma culminates in hostile environments, where journalists must trust their sources in order to ensure their physical security yet are professionally required to epistemically suspect the information delivered by these same sources. Taken together, the manifestations of suspicion identified in this study provide an analytical framework for understanding (dis)trust within journalism and for further studying the processes through which these manifestations can contribute to public trust in both the media and conflict parties.
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists (N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news they see on the platform, potentially causing them to dismiss information that many of their colleagues identify as newsworthy. Our results also indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment – for journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications, such as pack journalism, but we also see positives, as Twitter may conduit a wider array of voices into the mainstream news agenda. Twitter plays a key role in journalistic practices including, as we demonstrate here, influencing journalists’ news judgment. Twitter’s growing centrality in the news process warrants greater scrutiny from journalists and scholars.
The author offers a comprehensive portrait of online news performance in Western countries in changing media environments. Drawing on a content analysis of 48 news outlets from different types of media organization in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and USA, Edda Humprecht investigates the complex interplay of systemic and organizational dynamics and their impact on online news content, showing that the performance of online news media strongly varies among different media outlets. Less profit oriented outlets and those with a focus on information generally perform well offering hard news, diversity, critical distance, or analytical depth. This suggests that the divide between high and low-performing outlets is tied to the news outlet's capacity and willingness to strike a balance between their profit orientation and their normative role as information providers. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that different dimensions of news performance are more pronounced in certain countries. This book provides new theoretical perspectives and methods for political and media scholars, and insights for journalists, policymakers, and concerned citizens.
This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still but also variably open and resistant to change. Drawing upon extensive field research of political reporters and examination of discourses of journalistic professionalism as well institutional analysis, this book finds that occupational norms and values of journalism in the US are vigorously upheld but in fact relatively porous and malleable. In Germany, by contrast, professional boundaries are rather strong and resilient but treated matter-of-factly. Revers argues that this is both a consequence of institutional arrangements of media systems and historically evolved cultural principles of journalism in both countries which mutually constitute each other.
In this article we review research published since the publication of Comparing Media Systems which seeks to operationalize concepts discussed in that work and to test the framework proposed there or to put forward alternatives or revisions. We focus on works that deal with the original 18 countries covered in Comparing Media Systems, and consider the progress made in developing quantitative measures across these cases for key variables, research testing the grouping of cases in Comparing Media Systems, research extending the comparative analysis of Western media systems to new media, and research on convergence toward the Liberal Model. In the final section, we focus on limitations of the research produced during the 10 years following the publication of Comparing Media Systems, particularly the heavy emphasis on quantitative operationalization, and some of the difficulties in using quantitative analysis to investigate complex, dynamic systems.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
Cross-national comparative studies of journalists generally focus on the demographic characteristics and/or the values and role-perception of journalists. Systematic studies of journalistic skills have been rare, however. This article reports the findings from a comparative study of journalists from Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Based on an email survey of 2238 news professionals, journalistic skills can be grouped into three distinctive dimensions: reporting, editing, and networking skills. The data also show a number of similarities, but also important differences regarding the importance journalists give to different professional skills in different European countries.
Bringing together the perspectives of more than 40 internationally acclaimed authors, The Handbook of Global Media Research explores competing methodologies in the dynamic field of transnational media and communications, providing valuable insight into research practice in a globalized media landscape. Provides a framework for the critical debate of comparative media research. Posits transnational media research as reflective of advanced globalization processes, and explores its roles and responsibilities. Articulates the key themes and competing methodological approaches in a dynamic and developing field. Showcases the perspectives and ideas of 30 leading internationally acclaimed scholars. Offers a platform for the discussion of crucial issues from a variety of theoretical, methodical and practical viewpoints.
In this timely book, leading researchers consider how media inform democracy in six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Taking as their starting point the idea that citizens need to be briefed adequately with a full and intelligent coverage of public affairs so that they can make responsible, informed choices rather than act out of ignorance and misinformation, contributors use a comparative approach to examine the way in which the shifting media landscape is affecting and informing the democratic process across the globe. In particular, they ask:
Like many news media organisations, European public service broadcasters are adapting their corporate strategies to the specific demands of the evolving communicative environment. Digitisation and convergence have usually been presented as an opportunity to reinvent public service broadcasting into public service media, by producing and delivering (news) content across traditional radio, television and new online platforms. While investment in digital facilities has set the basis for a more integrated operation amongst the different news media outlets, finding a workable template to implement professional cross-media practices has been more complex than expected. With the aim of exploring key challenges of convergence affecting public service broadcasting newsrooms, this article presents a multiple-case study that investigates the current convergence processes of five European mid-sized public broadcasting corporations—the United Kingdom’s BBC Scotland, Spain’s CCMA and EITB, Norway’s NRK and Flemish-Belgian VRT. Combining an array of qualitative methods, the study focuses on specific convergence parameters, including newsrooms’ physical structure and management, cross-media production routines and workflows, degree of multi-skilling in journalists, professional identities, and attitudes towards convergence. Findings show that public broadcasters tend to follow a similar pattern in basic aspects, like grouping radio, television and online newsrooms together in the same physical space, even if this model has different outcomes in terms of cooperation across media and journalists’ involvement.
This paper explores how the study of objects of journalism, retraced through the material traces left in metajournalistic discourses, might constitute a robust basis to investigate change and permanence in contemporary journalism. We delineate a research program focusing on materiality that requires foremost that objects should not be taken for granted and, therefore, that each object’s social history be minutely retraced. Stemming from two specific objects (the blog and the hyperlink), the paper argues that beyond their idiosyncrasies, both follow a similar rationale that could be extrapolated to other objects and lead to a materially focused social history of journalism in a digital age. The paper first clarifies how we approached the notion of “objects of journalism” and which objects we chose to study. Then, we show how different theoretical frameworks led us to adopt a similar research stance and a shared hypothetico-inductive path: determining how objects are parts of a series and analyzing metajournalistic discourses to retrace each object’s history on an empirically grounded basis. The resulting attention to filiations and context ultimately produces a contextualized socio-history of objects.
The Ideal of Objectivity The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press Telling Stories: Journalism as a Vocation After 1880 Stories and Information: Two Journalisms in the 1890s Objectivity Becomes Ideology: Journalism After World War I Objectivity, News Management, and the Critical Culture
This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culture scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people's after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
What are the values guiding the French practice of journalism? What is the place of objectivity among these values? These questions were asked of 13 war correspondents working for eight of the leading French newspapers.
While objectivity is rejected as either an unattainable standard or an undesirable norm, it appears that a definition of objectivity is lacking and that this notion is often mistaken for neutrality. Three different conceptions of objectivity-as-neutrality emerge from the interviewees’ discourses: as a separation between facts and commentaries, as cautiousness in labeling and as a balance between the parties.
Can or should one of these conceptions serve as a guideline in the daily practice of journalism? The interviewees seem to be divided on this question and several propose moral values such as honesty or modesty as alternatives. The reference to moral values in turn proves problematic insofar as the focus on the journalists’ attitudes or intentions fails to address responsibility for highly consequential actions. In the end, when discussing specific dilemmas that they themselves have faced, most of the journalists quote accuracy and fairness as criteria for the evaluation of journalistic performance. ‘ Etre juste’ — meaning both to be accurate ( justesse) and to be fair ( justice) — is what is expected of a professional journalist.
Coverage of the 2005 riots in France underlined the multimedia and transnational nature of contemporary news. The controversies that spun out of the coverage even as it was being produced extended larger debate about emerging journalism practices and products. This case study, centered on the meta-discourse of the riots and the relationships among the diverse media covering the riots, underlines the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's influential field theory to studies of new media and suggests a critical update to Bourdieu's conception of the field. Bourdieu placed the norms and values of the participants of a field at the center of his analysis, but his theory, as it has been applied to journalism, rests on a stark division between journalists and their audiences. The news story of the French riots was very much a new-media product in that it was created by professionals and non-professionals. In Bourdieu's vocabulary, the amateurs at the middle of the riots and in nations around the world contributing news product constituted new "agents" whose influence on the field has yet to be fully considered. The rise of the audience-participant poses compelling new challenges to field study. This article points out some of the areas scholars across disciplines and methodological approaches might take up for research.
This study of the explanatory report attempts to make a meaningful contribution to the history of the American newspaper by synthesizing existing historical knowledge of the form, documenting the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, and analyzing the explanatory reports that have won the Pulitzer Prize in this category. This study also offers insights from that history to suggest how newspapers in America might improve their products in the service of democracy. A fundamental strategy, as demonstrated in the exemplary reports identified by the Pulitzer juries, is the greater use of storytelling in explanatory journalism. Such a change might help increase readership and better serve the mandate of the American press to strengthen democracy through fostering discourse in the public sphere.
The Mass News Media in Systemic, Historical and Comparative Perspective
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Exporting the First Amendment
- Margaret Blanchard
- Blanchard Margaret
News Substance: The Relative Importance of Soft and De-Contextualized News
- Thorbjørnsrud Brekken Tove
- Kjersti
- Brekken Tove
Opportunities and Limitations of Newsroom Convergence
- Ainara Larrondo
- Domingo
- David
- Ivar Erdal
- John
- Masip
- Pere
- Hilde Van Den Bulck
The Explanatory Logic: Factors that Shape Political News
- Frank Esser
- Vreese
- Claes
- David Hopmann
- Nicolas
Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective
- Pamela Shoemaker
- Stephen D Reese
Global Journalism Between Dream and Reality
- Van Leuven
- Sarah
- Peter Berglez
Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations
- Max Weber