Rolls of Newspaper
Political journalism
from a comparative perspective
Lucie Čejková
luc.cejkova@mail.muni.cz
PMCb1006 Political and media systems
week 7

Outline
•media systems
•media + politics
•political journalism

Think of different factors that influence journalism.
•form pairs and come up with different factors (aim for specific examples)
•write them on the whiteboard
•
•5 minutes

Media system
= all media in a particular country, interrelated organizations, and actors, subject to a set of
laws and regulations, shared journalistic culture
→ but different media sectors: different business models, ownership, media type, audience served

Media system
•journalism rooted in the society → shape and form of the media system
•with variations according to cultures and subcultures, individual choices, technological and
political changes…
•
•national media systems are always, in some respect, unique
•to compare, it is essential to focus on key systemic factors

Media system
•socio-structural factors – historical differences (quality × popular press), distribution of the
news audience across social classes (print, TV, online), demographics (population size, age,
gender, ethnicity…), geographical differences, geo-political influence on international
distribution
•political factors – legal and regulatory arrangements, relations between political actors and
journalists (see Hallin & Mancini, 2004 – three models)
•economic factors – ownership (diversity, owner influence, market vulnerability), source of finance
(advertising, audience income, public funding), competition (quality, diversity)

Media + politics
Pluralism + independence = media freedom
•media independence and plurality as frequent indicators to measure the quality of democracy
(Landman, 2012; Jakubowicz, 2017)
•media independence = no political, corporate, or ownership influence or pressures
•media plurality
•internal: the plurality of voices, opinions, and sources (content)
•external: various types of media and their owners (media)

Media + politics
Examples of independence and plurality of media worldwide:
•Media Pluralism Monitor reports
•World Press Freedom index
•Fairness in news coverage analysis,
Digital News Report 2021

Media + politics
Some of the current challenges
•weakened influence of citizens in the society: society permeated by media and economic forces that
are trying to make the most of the opportunity to put pressure on the political system (Blühdorn,
2007; Jakubowicz, 2017)
•increasing media coverage of politics: politicians trying to adapt to the media logic → actions
shrunk to media–interesting topics that lose their ideological essence (Jakubowicz, 2017)
•commodification, digitalization, changing audience routines (Macek, 2015)
•prevalence of false information (Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019)

Media + politics
Some of the current challenges
•political polarization: according to Inglehart & Norris (2019) caused by the division of society
into socially liberal and socially conservative groups
•technological, economic, and political changes: fragmentation of media, allowing audiences to
consume only the content that matches their beliefs and thematic interests, which may increase
political and media polarization (Tewksbury & Rittenberg, 2012)

Media + politics
Some of the current challenges
•decline in trust in traditional political elites: especially in politically polarized countries →
often accompanied by decreasing trust in the professional media (Hanitzsch et al., 2017; Van Dalen,
2019)
•emergence of a large number of media outlets that hold specific positions of opinion and tend,
along with far-right populist politicians, to undermine trust in professional media: professional
media portrayed as “heralds of biased elites” (Rauch, 2015)

Media + politics
Independent and professional journalists
•professional autonomy of journalists = an important part of how journalism fulfills its democratic
function and how journalistic independence and professionalism are manifested (Deuze, 2005)
Journalistic autonomy: “the degree of self–governance within the profession, and the extent to
which the profession is independent of other societal institutions” (Örnebring, 2013, p. 39)

Media + politics
The level of journalistic autonomy can be determined by a range of factors, for example:
•the state of democracy
•presence of interest groups
•nature of the media system
•the inner workings of the media itself (including owner interference in content)
•concentration of media ownership
•characteristics of individual journalists

Media + politics
failing to maintain independence from those covered in journalism, inability to serve as
independent monitors of power → less professional journalism
“If the journalists don't do their best, the trust of the people or the respect is going down,
which is actually happening here. People are rejecting the media and I think that this is a real
problem for democracy.”
Ioana Avădani, Director, Centre for Independent Journalism, Romania

Political journalism
•new media, social networking sites → different relationship between politicians and journalists →
journalists needed to communicate the politicians’ messages × direct communication
•journalists more dependent on the politicians’ online messages, willing to take anything as a
quotation
= different power relations between politicians and journalists
“It is a distribution problem and obviously we can’t get back to the old times, when journalists
were the gatekeepers. And I don’t think that it was good, it was not very democratic, but what we
have now is bad for journalists but also for democracy.”
András Pethö, Editor, Direkt36, Hungary

Political journalism
Roles of journalists in political systems
•journalists’ identity and place in society (journalists' professional roles) seen as important for
democracy (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2018; 2017).
Hanitzsch and Vos (2017), two analytically distinct levels of roles:
Role orientations: normative (what journalists ought to do); cognitive (what they want to do)
Role performance: practiced (what they really do in practice); narrated (what they think they do)

Political journalism
Normative roles
“encompass generalized and aggregate expectations that journalists believe are deemed desirable in
society. Most normative roles of journalists are derived from a view that emphasizes journalism’s
potential contribution to the proper workings of democracy”
Cognitive roles
“comprise the institutional values, attitudes and beliefs individual journalists embrace as a
result of their occupational socialization. These roles tend to appear as evident, natural, and
self-explaining to the journalists”

Political journalism
Practiced roles
“practiced role performance captures the roles of journalists as they are executed in practice”
Narrated roles
“subjective perceptions of and reflections on the roles that journalists carry out in practice”

Political journalism
•various roles = good and bad political journalism (De Vreese et al., 2016)
•
•quality × news performance (different functions of media)
•news performance – strategy and game framing, interpretative journalism, negativity, political
balance (?), personalization, …
•in practice: usually different levels of quality and news performance

Political journalism
Journalists + politicians
“democracy dependent on a well-informed citizenship, and it is up to journalism to provide the
people with accurate and reliable information based on which to make informed political decisions”
(McNair, 2008, p. 238)
→ professional relationship between political journalists and politicians = integral part of the
democratic societies

Political journalism
politicians trying to attract journalists to cover them, journalists need politicians as one of the
most important sources of information
×
journalists’ and politicians’ close relationships, let alone emotional → considered unprofessional
(Hájek et al., 2015).
→ constantly negotiated and renegotiated boundaries
→ the role of emotions and individual values

Political journalism
Context
•journalists under increasing pressure to maintain good relations with politicians due to
increasing online presence of politicians (Van Dalen, 2019)
•journalists perceived as being increasingly dependent on politicians’ statements online (Broersma
and Graham, 2016).
•journalist-politician relationship: verbal attacks on journalists, political hostility towards
media (Krämer, 2018; Figenschou and Ihlebæk, 2019), accusations of fake news spreading across the
political spectrum (Aalberg et al., 2017)

Group activity
•form groups of up to 3 people
•choose one country
•briefly characterize its media system with a specific focus on the relationships between media and
politicians
•find its position in one of the independence and/or pluralism rankings
•shortly present to the class (one of you, two, all three – up to your choice)
•
•15 minutes to prepare + up to 3 minutes speech after

Adserà, A., Boix, C., & Payne, M. 2003. Are You Being Served? Political Accountability and Quality
of Government. Journal of Law, Economics and Organisation 19 (2): 445–490. doi:10.1093/jleo/ewg017
Beattie, P. 2019. Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible
Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-02801-5
Benson, R. 2008. Journalism: normative theories. The international encyclopaedia of
communication, 6, 2591-2597.
Blühdorn, I. 2007. The third transformation of democracy: On the efficient management of
late–modern complexity. In I. Blühdorn & U. Jun (Eds.), Economic efficiency – Democratic
empowerment, 299–331. Lanham: Lexington Press.
Carey, J. 1999. In Defense of Public Journalism. In T. Glasser (Ed.), The Idea of Public Journalism
49–66. New York: Guilford Press.
Carpini, M. X. D., & Keeter, S. 1996. What Americans know about politics and why it matters. Yale
University Press.
Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom. Media Pluralism Monitor.
https://cmpf.eui.eu/mpm2021-executive-summary/
Egelhofer, J. L., & Lecheler, S. 2019. Fake news as a two–dimensional phenomenon: A framework and
research agenda. Annals of the International Communication Association 43(2): 97–116. doi:
10.1080/23808985.2019.1602782
Fenton, N. (Ed.) 2009. New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. London:
Routledge.
Hanitzsch, T., & Vos, T.P. 2017. Journalistic Roles and the Struggle over institutional identity:
the Discursive Constitution of journalism. Communication theory 27. 115-135. Doi:
https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12112
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. 2019. Cultural backlash. Trump, Brexit and the rise of authoritarian
populism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jakubowicz, K. 2017. Média a demokracie v 21. století: hledání nových modelů. Brno: Masaryk
University.
Landman, T. 2012. Assessing the Quality of Democracy: The International IDEA Framework. Eur Polit
Sci 11: 456–468.
Macek, J. (2015). Média v pohybu. Brno: MUNI Press.
McNair, B. 2008. Journalism and democracy. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The handbook
of journalism studies, 237–249. New York: Routledge.
Rauch, J. (2015). Exploring the Alternative–Mainstream Dialectic: What “Alternati-ve Media” Means
to a Hybrid Audience. Communication, Culture & Critique 8(1), 124-143. doi: 10.1111/cccr.12068
Reporters Without Borders. World Press Freedom index. https://rsf.org/en/ranking
Reuters Institute. 2021. Digital News Report.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2021
Tewksbury, D., & Rittenberg, J. 2012. News on the Internet: Information and citizenship in the 21st
century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Toka, G. 2008. Citizen Information, Election Outcomes and Good Governance. Electoral Studies 27(1):
31–44. doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2007.11.006
Van Dalen, A. 2019. Rethinking journalist–politician relations in the age of populism: How outsider
politicians delegitimize mainstream journalists. Journalism. Advance Online Publication. doi:
10.1177/1464884919887822
Deuze, M. 2005. What is Journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered.
Journalism 6(4): 442–464. doi: 10.1177/1464884905056815
Hanitzsch, T. 2017. Professional Identity and Roles of Journalists. Communication. Oxford Research
Encyclopedias.
https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228
613-e-95
Hanitzsch, T., & Vos, T.P. 2017. Journalistic Roles and the Struggle over institutional identity:
the Discursive Constitution of journalism. Communication theory 27. 115-135. Doi:
https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12112
Hanitzsch, T., & Vos, T. P. 2018. Journalism Beyond Democracy: A new look into journalistic roles
in political and everyday life. Journalism 19(2): 146–164. doi: 10.1177/1464884916673386
Örnebring, H. 2013. Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better? Professional journalists on citizen
journalism in six European countries. The International Communication Gazette 75(1): 35–53. doi:
10.1177/1748048512461761
Reich, Z., & Hanitzsch, T. 2013. Determinants of Journalists Professional Autonomy: Individual and
National Level Factors Matter More Than Organizational Ones. Mass communication and Society. 16(1).
133-156. DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2012.669002
Singer, J. B. 2006. The socially responsible existentialist. A normative emphasis for journalists
in a new media environment. Journalism Studies 7(1): 2–18. doi: 10.1080/14616700500450277
Some sources from the many:))

Rolls of Newspaper
Thank you & see you next week!
Lucie Čejková
luc.cejkova@mail.muni.cz
PMCb1006 Political and media systems
week 7