MAPPING JOURNALISM CULTURES ACROSS NATIONS

Abstract

Abstract This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views. Keywords: comparative researchepistemologiesethical ideologiesinstitutional rolesjournalism culturejournalistssurvey Notes 1. 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 School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. 2. In every country, there exists a tacit consensus among journalists and media scholars regarding the media that shape the national political agenda. 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 figures, while the selection of radio and TV stations was based on the ratings of their newscasts. 3. This was especially true for local media. Here, we sampled media outlets produced in various parts of the countries: in urban centers and rural areas or, as in the case of Switzerland and Indonesia, in the regions inhabited by the major cultural populations. 4. This was the case in Austria, Egypt and Uganda. Austria had no significant local TV station, so the number of national channels was increased. In the absence of local newspapers and private radio stations in Egypt, we decided to raise the number of national newspapers and state-owned radio channels, respectively. In Uganda, we increased the number of local radio stations to compensate for the lack of local TV stations; hence, the resulting sample also reflected the prominence of radio in the country. 5. Calculated by one-way independent ANOVA. 6. The program was developed by Adi Raveh and David Talby; it is freely available from http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~davidt/vcoplot/index.html. 7. Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient Rho: Australia: 0.719***, Austria 0.641***, Brazil 0.385***, Bulgaria 0.523***, Chile 0.341***, China 0.478***, Egypt 0.181 (ns), Germany 0.589***, Indonesia 0.305**, Israel 0.377***, Mexico 0.671***, Romania 0.488***, Russia 0.423***, Spain 0.687***, Switzerland 0.589***, Turkey 0.214*, Uganda 0.271**, United States 0.617*** (*p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001; ns, not significant). 8. See http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=16.