Deconstructing Journalism Culture: Toward a Universal Theory

Abstract

Despite a large array of work broadly concerned with the cultures of news production, studies rarely attempt to tackle journalism culture and its dimensional structure at the conceptual level. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to propose a theoretical foundation on the basis of which systematic and comparative research of journalism cultures is feasible and meaningful. By using a deductive and etic approach, the concept of journalism culture is deconstructed in terms of its constituents and principal dimensions. Based on a review of the relevant literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of journalism culture that consists of 3 essential constituents (institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical ideologies), further divided into 7 principal dimensions: interventionism, power distance, market orientation, objectivism, empiricism, relativism, and idealism.