Japan: Media System

Yasuhiro Inoue

Hiroshima City University

Youichi Ito

Akita International University

Japan is unique in terms of its media structure. Most major newspaper companies in Japan hold their shares internally. Japan’s corporate law allows this internal stock holding in order to prevent external editorial influence and acquisition. Partly because of this, no large media conglomerates are owned primarily by non-media corporations, unlike the case in other industrialized countries (→ Concentration in Media Systems; Media Conglomerates). Another reason for the difficulty in taking over any Japanese media company is that there exist several media ‘keiretsu’ or groups that are closely intertwined in terms of both stock holdings and personal relationships.

The key actors in the keiretsu are the five national newspapers, each of which has close financial and personal ties to one of the five commercial television networks. Regional and local newspapers also own one of the regional and local television stations in their circulation areas. About 70 million copies are published each day by 108 newspaper companies in Japan, which is second to China (96 million, → China: Media System). In terms of per-capita circulation, Japan ranks the highest in the world (633 copies per thousand): more than twice that of the US (→ United States of America: Media System) and six times that of China.

General newspapers in Japan can be categorized into three kinds: national, regional (called ‘block’), and local. There are five nationals (the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and the Sankei Shimbun). Each has a circulation of more than 2 million and is regarded as a ‘quality paper.’ The Yomiuri publishes 10 million morning and 4 million evening papers. The second largest, the Asahi, publishes a total of 12 million copies a day. The Nihon Keizai (Nikkei), which publishes 4.5 million copies daily, has the largest circulation of any economics paper in the world. Most newspapers, including blocks and local newspapers, publish morning and evening editions, which is one of the particular characteristics of Japanese newspapers. Another characteristic is a heavy reliance on a home-delivery system. In total, 94 percent of all general newspapers are delivered to homes every day by exclusive distributors. Four national newspapers (all but Nikkei) and all three block newspapers publish sports newspapers, which are sports- and entertainment-oriented and fall into the category of tabloid press. Nikkei, in turn, publishes three trade papers. All the nationals have publishing divisions and issue weekly or monthly magazines as well as books. In addition, the Yomiuri and the Asahi own two of the top ten advertising agencies in Japan.

Television service is provided by a dual broadcasting system consisting of the public broadcasting corporation and commercial broadcasters. The public television service Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) is the second largest broadcasting corporation in the world after the → BBC (→ Public Broadcasting Systems). Supported by viewers’ fees, NHK broadcasts two channels nationwide through a network of 54 stations. It also conducts satellite broadcasting with two channels. Although NHK is not state-run, its annual budget and executive personnel proposals must be approved by the Diet, the Japanese parliament. The five commercial broadcasters based in Tokyo, who are all affiliated with major national newspapers, are Nihon TV (NTV, affiliated with the Yomiuri), TV Asahi (affiliated with the Asahi), Tokyo Broadcasting Systems (TBS, affiliated with the Mainichi), Fuji TV (affiliated with the Sankei), and TV Tokyo (affiliated with the Nikkei). These broadcasters are network stations (key stations) affiliated with regional and local stations. The key stations provide their affiliated stations not only with news, but also with programs that account for 80 to 90 percent of local broadcasting time.

In terms of online news media, Japan’s mainstream media are reluctant to be fully committed to Internet service. Major newspapers and NHK have started and keep developing their own news sites. But the information provided on their websites is very limited, both in terms of amount and in terms of depth, because they are not sure whether they can maintain their existing business scale by switching from paper subscription to web subscription.

Major national newspapers and television networks are relatively homogeneous in agendas, or news items (in straight news), but diverse in opinions (in editorials). The contents of major national newspapers and television networks tend to be similar because of the organizations’ deep commitment to impartiality and neutrality stipulated in their code of ethics. One of the reasons for so much conformity in the news agenda has to do with the ‘kisha’ (reporters) club system, which is unique to the Japanese news media industry. Kisha clubs are attached to nearly every government office and major organization all over Japan. Until the mid-1990s, foreign-media reporters were not allowed to join most major clubs, and Japanese magazine reporters and freelance journalists are still generally excluded.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Inoue, Y. (2004). Media literasi [Media literacy]. Tokyo: Nihon Hyoron Sha.
2. Ito, Y. (2006). Some trends in communication research and education in Japan. In K. W. Y. Leung, J. Kenny, & P. S. N. Lee (eds.), Global trends in communication education and research. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pp. 115–131.
3. Pharr, S. J. & Krauss, E. S. (eds.) (1996). Media and politics in Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Journalism

Kevin G. Barnhurst

University of Leeds

James Owens

University of Illinois at Chicago

Journalism is a constellation of practices that have acquired special status within the larger domain of communication through a long history that separated out news sharing from its origins in → interpersonal communication. Telling others about events in one’s social and physical surroundings is a common, everyday activity in human cultures, and news as a genre of the interactions has the primary characteristic of being new to the listener. A main difficulty for sharing intelligence is ascertaining truth, or, put the other way round, distinguishing intelligence from gossip (→ Truth and Media Content). Telling about events, supplying novelty, and discerning factual truth from the process are the main rudiments that came to define journalism as a cultural practice.

History

Journalism is a modern-era phenomenon (→ Journalism, History of) that began its separation from ordinary communication first with correspondence in the form of newsletters sent out in multiple copies to existing social networks (→ Media Content and Social Networks).

Newsletter authors also required some facility to produce more than one copy and to distribute the result, as well as sufficient social status to make their activity appear to have value for recipients. With the advent of the printing press some early newssheets imitated hand-made newsletters, but the primary model for all printing was the book as printer-editors incorporated the sharing of new intelligences into their line of business.

The main claim to distinction for journalism has come through a close alliance with political life. Politics impinged on printing from the beginning in the form of government controls, and printing itself quickly became a political act of either cooperation with or defiance of the powerful, or the state. Journalism developed at the nexus of negotiating boundaries to demarcate private life, civil society (or the market), and the state from each other, and in some perspectives that zone became a special or sacred space (→ Privacy; Public Sphere). It was a short step then for the emerging press to become enmeshed in politics, an alliance of two initially and perhaps continually unsavory activities, an irony often lost on practitioners and scholars. The nineteenth century turned newspapers into the central node of news as an economic activity.

Differentiation among Journalists

Although fiction writing occasionally imitates news, journalism differs fundamentally in practice.

Separating the occupation of journalist from author is one marker of a project under way by the early twentieth century to make journalism into a particular kind of profession (→ Professionalization of Journalism). Other markers include the emergence of acceptable practices, training programs, associations, and codes of ethics (→ Ethics in Journalism). In many parts of the world, journalism remained part of and firmly aligned with literary work, and even in nations where the professional project predominated, such as the United States, movements of long-form and literary journalism arose.

From its birth in the industrialized newsroom, journalism developed customary patterns for all aspects of work (→ News Routines). The best-known example is the ‘beat,’ combining location and process so that a reporter goes through a set of routines to gather information from predictable and reliable places. As an occupational category, journalism in the nineteenth century merged several tasks: principally those of the ‘editor,’ who managed some aspect of content from a central office, the ‘correspondent,’ who ventured out as a worldly traveler and (perhaps imperial) observer of affairs, and various forms of ‘news hound,’ who did piecework as local scavengers to fill the editorial hole by the inch, pursuing a particular topic or venue such as crime or the docks. As journalism emerged as a professional project, specialization produced new bundles of tasks.

The production of news content has become more portable across traditional print and broadcast media as the tasks journalists perform converge on digital technology (→ Cross-Media Production). The changes might point to multimedia journalism or instead to a de-skilling of practice as the tools shift from professionals’ into others’ hands. In many countries, citizens can now tell each other their own news by writing and distributing it electronically from home, a community center, library, or mobile device (→ Citizen Journalism). During political crises in Africa and the Arab uprisings of 2011, citizen journalists appear to have contributed to movements against established political power.

Scholarly Study and Prospects

Alignments between industry and the academy for the purposes of job training helped shape journalism research (→ Journalism Education). The first university journalism programs grew from the organized efforts of publishers and press associations to harness academic work to the project of making journalism respectable.

By the late 1940s, social science became the dominant paradigm for academic inquiry into journalism, organized generally around the concept of ‘mass communication.’ Humanities approaches fell behind, and studies employing quantitative methodology published in the journal of news media research, Journalism Quarterly, rose from 10 to 48 percent between 1937 and 1957. Earlier paradigms treated journalism as a powerful force in defining social problems, propagating government ideas, and fomenting public support, but the functionalist thinking among scholars at mid-century saw journalism as limited in its effects (→ Media Effects).

By the 1960s intellectual currents such as → semiotics influenced thinking about journalism. Social scientists studied journalists’ autonomy from surrounding forces. By the 1970s fault lines emerged in the dominant social scientific paradigm after research found that greater effects could occur among distinct social groups than among general audiences, and that journalism had influence in setting priorities among political elites (→ Agenda-Setting Effects). In Britain → cultural studies scholars analyzed journalism texts, and social critics described how capitalist ownership and shared values among media professionals helped support class domination. US sociologists examined news and conducted fieldwork among journalists.

In the early 1980s the communication discipline underwent a period of ferment, and journalism study moved along new vectors. Particularly in relation to political life, → framing effects developed as a research approach (→ Framing of the News). Under the emerging conditions of postmodernism, attention to news was declining among youth, and journalism as a professional project entered a conscious period of crisis (→ Postmodernism and Communication). Industrial changes liberalized state-controlled media in some countries; cable, talk radio, and other alternatives to traditional news outlets proliferated in countries with commercial systems; and new populist media arose as tabloid journalism spread globally. Scholars of journalism engaged in political and economic critiques that examined the relationship of media organizations to centers of social control.

The ‘new journalism studies’ incorporated concepts of narrative, myth, ideology, and hegemony and engaged in professional critique, political and economic analysis, and sociological observation. The paradigm took institutional form in anthologies, new journals, and in the creation and rapid growth of a Journalism Studies Division in the → International Communication Association (ICA).

References and Suggested Readings

1. Allan, S. (ed.) (2010). The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge. Anderson, P. J., Williams, M., & Ogola, G. (2013). The future of quality news journalism. A cross-continental analysis. London: Routledge.
2. Aouragh, M. & Alexander, A. (2011). The Egyptian experience: Sense and nonsense of the internet revolution, International Journal of Communication, 5, 1344 –1358.
3. Barnhurst, K. G. (2011). The problem of modern time in American journalism. KronoScope, 11(1–2), 98–123.
4. Barnhurst, K. G. & Nerone, J. (2001). The form of news: A history. New York: Guilford.
5. Chouliaraki, L. (2013). Re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation: The cosmopolitan trajectories of convergent journalism. Journalism Studies, 14(2), 267–283.
6. Deuze, M. (2010). Journalism and convergence culture. In S. Allan (ed.), The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 267–276.
7. Donsbach, W. (2010). Journalists and their professional identities. In S. Allan (ed), The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 38–48.
8. Etling, B., Kelly, J., Faris, R., & Palfrey, J. (2010). Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: Politics and dissent online. New Media and Society, 12(8), 1225–1243.
9. Franklin, B. & Mensing, D. (eds.) (2011). Journalism education, training and employment. London: Routledge.
10. Lewis, Seth C. (2012). The tension between professional control and open participation: Journalism and its boundaries. Information, Communication & Society, 15(6), 836–866.
11. Vujnovic, M., Singer, J. B., Paulussen, S., Heinonen, A., Reich, Z., Quandt, T., Hermida, A., & Domingo, D. (2010). Exploring the political-economic factors of participatory journalism: Views of online journalists in 10 countries. Journalism Practice, 4, 285–296.
12. Zelizer, B. (2004). Taking journalism seriously. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Journalism Education

Lee B. Becker

University of Georgia

Journalism education historically has been instruction for work in the news departments of media organizations, both print and electronic. Journalistic instruction can take place before journalists enter the workforce, during early employment, and at later career stages. It can involve practical training in the skills of the journalist and broader education about the context of that work (→ Professionalization of Journalism). The training can cover skills in reporting (information gathering and evaluation), writing (language use and storytelling techniques, including photography, videography, and graphics), and editing (including story presentation and integration into the news format). Education about the context of journalism can include topics such as the social setting and impact of news, journalism history and law, and news ethics.

Education for entry-level journalism has followed three main traditions. The earliest journalists learned their skills on the job, usually beside a journeyman. That tradition has persisted until now, most notably in the United Kingdom. A tradition usually associated with the US centers on university instruction before entering the workforce. A tradition associated with continental Europe houses journalism instruction in training institutions other than the university and separate from the industry. Variants of these traditions exist in nearly every country even today.

Proponents view journalism education as important because it gives journalists skills and values that affect what they do, e.g., expertise to be better gatherers and interpreters of information, and writing and video-shooting skills to fashion better reports, which audiences will more likely attend to and understand. The outcome should be a better-informed citizenry. Although the evidence for that assumption is largely anecdotal, news media companies support it in their habits. Larger organizations employ specialized journalists to cover medicine, transportation, legal affairs, defense, and the like, because they believe that specialized knowledge, acquired through training or on the job, makes for better reporters and editors, to the benefit of citizens.

The organizations that employ the graduates believe that journalism training supplies more productive members of the workforce. A journalist who knows which sources to approach, how to conduct an interview, how to write in news style (→ News), and how to work under deadlines will likely produce the news product quickly and cost-effectively. A journalist trained in libel and other legal constraints on news will likely help the employing organization avoid legal problems. From education, the employer gets a type of certification of a journalist’s basic skills.

Journalism education can be used as a means of political control. In eastern European countries under communism, for example, journalists generally could not hold the top news leadership positions unless they had trained at one of a few university journalism programs. The training guaranteed that journalists followed the techniques and values of the state information system. The values of the host society always influence journalism, and journalism education is necessarily one means to exert social control over journalism practice.

Post-employment training for working journalists has become common in many countries. In some countries, union contracts guarantee training opportunities for journalists. As part of media assistance, donor countries around the world commonly include training for working journalists. The employer, an educational institution, or an independent organization may offer mid-career training. The programs, running from a few hours to several months of intensive study, may take place at work or at another institution. Specialized journalism training organizations offer some programs, and universities offer others, as extensions of existing journalism curricula. Programs may focus on specific skills, such as software use or government databases, or on general knowledge, such as health research methods. Web resources increasingly supplement the programs, and some training takes place exclusively online. Working journalists may know about and regard the programs highly, but little systematic information exists about the effectiveness of the training. Promoters say that participants have more motivation and advance in their careers. Sharing experiences may improve individual performance and journalism in general. Research does suggest that long programs give journalists a respite, a time to gain new enthusiasm for work and for subsequent stages of their careers.

The competencies of journalists, acquired through education before and after employment, may affect the news construction process, but research has not yet documented to what extent. More important, research has not examined how variants in journalism education affect news work. Do university- and industry-based programs produce reporters with different value systems? Do journalists educated in the humanities produce a different version of news than those educated in the social science tradition?

References and Suggested Readings

1. Becker, L. B., Vlad, T., & Kalpen, K. (2012). 2011 Annual survey of journalism and mass communication enrollments. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 67(4), 333–361.
2. Donsbach, W. (2013). Journalism as the new knowledge profession and consequences for journalism education. Journalism, 15(6), 661–677.
3. Josephi, B. (ed.) (2010). Journalism education in countries with limited media freedom. New York: Peter Lang.

Journalism, History of

John Nerone

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

The history of → journalism, inclusively defined, encompasses the history of news and news media, including, among other things, the history of print, broadcast, and computer technology; of news work, news routines, and news workers; and of news organizations, including newspapers and other media outlets as well as wire services and feature syndicates. Defined more narrowly, the history of journalism refers to the emergence of a set of values and explanations that discipline, regulate, and justify news practices. Journalisms are socially constructed, and appear in different guises at different times in different national cultures in reference to different media.

Journalism as Historical Construct

Commentators began to apply the term ‘journalism’ to some of the content of newspapers in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the century, journalism came to refer to a specific kind of reportage in the modern west. The word ‘journalist’ appears first describing the opinionated, politicized newspaper writers of post-revolutionary France. The word then appeared in English news reports but continued to refer to French essayists. It was subsequently applied to English and US essayists, but continued to refer to opinion writing until the second half of the century. Then it began to be applied to news-gathering practices, which were becoming increasingly routinized (→ Newspaper, History of; News Routines).

Early newspapers responded to religious and economic concerns. Most governments, anxious to keep public affairs out of the hands of ordinary people, created systems of censorship and tried to suppress political news (→ Censorship; Censorship, History of). But practicalities made this difficult. Recurring periods of intra-elite conflict produced breakdowns in censorship systems.

As censorship systems failed, the various nations of western Europe and North America developed what Jürgen Habermas (1989) has described as a bourgeois → public sphere. In this formulation, such a public sphere appeared as a space between civil society and the state and worked both as a buffer zone, preventing state interference in private life, and as a steering mechanism, allowing citizens to deliberate in an uncoerced manner to form → public opinion. The newspaper became a key part of a system for representing public opinion. Shortly into the nineteenth century, a frankly partisan model of newspaper politics prevailed in western Europe and North America. It was this style of newspapering that occasioned the first use of the word ‘journalism.’

International Patterns

Journalism seems to have a shared history in the modern west. In most national histories, there was first a transition from opinion to factual observation, followed by a split between correspondence and reporting, followed by the emergence of a professional journalism centered on objective expert reportage (→ Objectivity in Reporting). And, in most countries, this history was complicated by the emergence of pictorial journalism (→ Photojournalism), followed by broadcasting. What distinguishes these national histories, however, is the different experiences with censorship and other forms of media regulation, as well as the differing states of political development. In the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the west exported its models of journalism to other regions of the world.

The shift from opinion to fact followed the emergence of a mass daily press. This shift centered on Britain and North America. By the 1820s, the United States had a partisan press system with a high popular readership. In the 1830s, cheap daily newspapers, or ‘penny papers,’ began to circulate in urban centers; the content of all newspapers shifted toward event-oriented news. In Britain the growth of a popular press was delayed by stamp taxes on newspapers, which were finally repealed in 1851. Printing presses adopted first steam power, then rotary cylinder plates, followed by stereotyping, and finally linotype typesetting. The telegraph enhanced the commoditization of news and the growth of wire services and press agencies.

As newspapers became more commoditized, they began to hire reporters (Baldasty 1991). Unlike correspondents, who had a personal voice, reporters were meant to faithfully record facts: to transcribe speeches, to present minutes of meetings, to compile shipping lists and current prices, to relate police court proceedings. Reporters were the information workers of industrializing newspapers. Industrializing newspapers adopted a set of norms that distinguished between their high-value or sacred mission and their more profane work of earning success in a competitive marketplace. The sacred mission was to create an informed self-governing public. The profane work of the news seemed to produce a misinformed public whose tastes and intellect had been affected by → sensationalism. And the competitive marketplace seemed to favor greedy and increasingly monopolistic industrialists with a political agenda of their own.

Modern Constructions

The modern notion of journalism mediates between the sacred and profane and merges the work of the correspondent and the reporter. In Anglo-American history, the key term in this journalism has been objectivity. Objective journalists are always aware of their own subjectivity, but police it, separating their own values from impersonal reports. Michael Schudson (1978) has described this form of objectivity as arising from a dialectic of naïve empiricism and radical subjectivism. A similar dialectic is evident in the rise of pictorial journalism, which took raw material from photography and sketch artistry to make engravings that promised fidelity to an objective reality.

A tribe of indicators can trace the rise of professional journalism in the west. Canons of journalism ethics (→ Ethics in Journalism), professional associations and schools of journalism (→ Journalism Education), the byline, the inverted pyramid form and summary lead (which, counterintuitively, tells stories from end to beginning), and the habit of balancing and sourcing all became familiar around the same time. The excesses of World War I intensified the drive for → professionalization of journalism.

By the 1920s an alternative model of professionalism had appeared, first in the Soviet Union, then in other anti-capitalist states. Soviet and Chinese journalism adopted some notions of bourgeois professionalism, wedded them to vanguardism, and institutionalized the resulting construct in state monopoly institutions. Elsewhere, alternative forms of journalism appeared (→ Advocacy Journalism; Alternative Journalism; Minority Journalism). Usually, alternative journalisms were tied to a group within the larger society, whether based on some aspect of identity (gender, race, ethnicity, class) or on the advocacy of a particular position. Globally, the twentieth century saw the rise of broadcast journalism. In some countries, broadcast media were privately owned; in others, there were monopolistic national broadcast authorities. In either case, broadcasting seemed to intensify the process of professionalization.

Prospective

Forms of news considered distinctive to the Anglo-American tradition continued to spread in the late twentieth century. Investigative journalism spread to Latin America, for instance (Waisbord 2000). The retreat of state-supported broadcast authorities in Europe brought the introduction of more commercial television news programming. The collapse of the Soviet bloc sparked a wave of commercial media ventures and partisan journalism.

Meanwhile, within the west, the end of the twentieth century saw the erosion of what Dan Hallin (1994) has called the “high modernism of journalism.” The rise of the 24-hour television news service, of new, so-called personal, media like talk radio and the blogosphere, of the tabloid form (→ Tabloidization) and a hybrid journalism, especially in the Scandinavian countries, and of a new form of partisan media power associated with broadcast entrepreneurs like Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch eroded journalism's institutional authority.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Baldasty, G. J. (1991). The commercialization of news in the nineteenth century. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
2. Barnhurst, K. G. & Nerone, J. (2001). The form of news: A history. New York: Guilford.
3. Chalaby, J. (2001). The invention of journalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
4. Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Hallin, D. (1994). We keep America on top of the world: Television journalism and the public sphere. London: Routledge.
6. Hallin, D. & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7. Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of the American newspaper. New York: Basic Books.
8. Waisbord, S. (2000). Watchdog journalism in South America. New York: Columbia University Press.

Journalism: Legal Situation

Sandra Davidson

University of Missouri-Columbia

Knowledge is power, said Englishman Francis Bacon (1561–1626). But sometimes journalists have knowledge while government has power. This can lead to clashes and even imprisonment or death for journalists (→ Violence against Journalists). Dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn languished in the Gulag Archipelago before the Soviet Union fell. Azerbaijani newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev was released in May 2011 after four years imprisonment for criminal libel. Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong, sentenced on charges of spying for Taiwan, was freed in February 2008 after 1,000 days in a Chinese prison.

In September 2013 alone, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported these among many other cases: Uzbek authorities’ arrest for “hooliganism” of Sergei Naumov, a freelance journalist who reports on human rights abuses; Nairobi’s restrictions on visitors to jailed journalist Reeyot Alemu. The journalist jailed longest is Uzbek editor Muhammad Bekjanov, imprisoned since 1999 and sentenced in 2012 to another five years. In December 2012, the Committee reported the highest number of jailings worldwide: 232. Turkey led with 49 jailed journalists. These nations rounded out the top ten: Iran, China, Eritrea, Syria, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders also closely follows arrests. For example, it condemned the arrest of eight journalists, with one beaten by police, during post-election protests in March 2012 in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It denounced a court’s September 2013 decision in Murmansk to place Russian freelance photographer Denis Sinyakov in two months of preventive detention after authorities intercepted the Greenpeace vessel he was aboard in Russian waters.

In the United States, journalists who refuse to reveal sources risk jail time. The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) that the First Amendment does not protect journalists ordered to reveal confidential sources to grand juries (→ Source Protection). The record US imprisonment is 226 days, spent by videographer Josh Wolf, who refused to testify before a federal grand jury or hand over his raw videotape of a G8 Summit protest that resulted in injury to a police officer in San Francisco, California, in July 2005. As part of an agreement for his release, he gave up the videotape. There is no US federal shield law, but 40 of 50 states and the District of Columbia had shield laws in 2013.

Threat of jail for refusal to reveal sources can occur in any country lacking shield protection. In 2005, two Australian journalists from the Herald Sun faced that threat. This helped prompt calls for shield laws in Australia which is now passed. The first test of such a law occurred in Western Australia in August 2013, when a court refused to order journalist Steve Pennels to reveal his sources to billionaire Gina Rinehart. In October 2006, Japan’s Supreme Court protected a reporter from the Japan Broadcasting Company, ruling that a reporter’s protection of confidential sources is a form of protecting one’s occupation. The media law passed in Iceland in 2011 offers shield protection. In Sweden, journalist’s privilege is a constitutional right under the Freedom of the Press Act, which was adopted in 1766 and is part of the Swedish Constitution. Strengthened in 1949, the Act protects → news sources, making illegal the investigation of identities of anonymous sources. Its shield law authorizes criminal prosecution of journalists if a confidential source’s identity is revealed without the source’s authorization. It forbids public officials to inquire about journalistic sources. If public officials violate the law, they face fines or up to one year in jail. Belgium also has a strong law protecting journalists’ sources. WikiLeaks routes its submissions through Belgium and Sweden because of their strong protection of sources.

International law on journalist’s privilege is media-friendly. Two international courts have accepted claims that the confidentiality of journalistic sources is part of a right to freedom of expression. The European Court of Human Rights declared in 1996 that journalists have a right not to disclose their sources unless an overriding, countervailing interest outweighs the confidentiality of news sources. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia held in 2002 that war correspondents cannot be compelled to testify about their sources, except under extraordinary circumstances. Still, going to jail remains an occupational hazard for journalists in many countries.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Committee to Protect Journalists (2012). 2012 prison census; 232 journalists jailed worldwide. At http://cpj.org/imprisoned/2012.php, accessed August 2, 2014.
2. Committee to Protect Journalists (2013). 2013 prison census; 211 journalists jailed worldwide. At http://cpj.org/imprisoned/2013.php, accessed August 2, 2014.
3. Committee to Protect Journalists (2012). Special Reports: Number of jailed journalists sets global record. At http://www.cpj.org/reports/2012/12/imprisoned-journalists-world-record.php, accessed August 2, 2014.
4. Davidson, S. & Herrera, D. (2012). Needed: More Than a Paper Shield. William & Mary Bill of Rights Law Journal, 20(May), 1277–1394.
5. Reporters Without Borders (2012). Press Barometers. At http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-barometer-journalists-imprisoned.html?annee=2012, accessed August 2, 2014.

Journalists, Credibility of

Yariv Tsfati

University of Haifa

Credibility is a central professional value for journalists. Scholars and journalists disagree about what constitutes credibility, but agree that it relates primarily to the truthfulness, believablity and accuracy of the facts journalists report. However, scholars argue that credibility goes beyond believability (Metzger et al. 2003), and demonstrate that it encompasses fairness, lack of bias, accuracy, completeness, and trustworthiness (Meyer 1988; → Bias in the News; Quality of the News). Additional definitions of credibility connote broader expectations of audiences from journalism which depend on norms of professionalism and vary across contexts (→ Professionalization of Journalism). In the US, for example, crediblity spans over a wide variety of professional values, whereas in Europe professional culture puts somewhat less emphasis on objectivity and → neutrality.

Surveys of journalists worldwide have documented the importance of credibility as a norm. Journalists’ codes of ethics make credibility a central tenet and view it as the rationale for many journalistic dictates. The centrality of credibility for journalists could also be inferred from journalists’ rhetoric following professional scandals that potentially jeopardize audience trust (→ Ethics in Journalism).

Much empirical work has been dedicated to deciphering the reasons behind a dramatic decline in audience perceptions of media credibility in the US starting in the 1970s. Recently it has been suggested (Ladd, 2012) that the main causes include economic pressures on media (that lower the level of journalistic professionalism), political polarization (that increases elite criticism on media) and media → tabloidization (→ Commercialization: Impact on Media Content). Research on the consequences of audience perceptions of media credibility demonstrate that those who rate journalists low on credibility tend to diversify their news diets and attend to more alternative news. Perceived news credibility was also found to moderate an array of → media effects (Ladd, 2012).

References and Suggested Readings

1. Ladd, J. M. (2012). Why Americans hate the media and how it matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Metzger, M. J., Flangin, A. J., Eyal, K., Lemus, D. R., & McCann, R. M. (2003). Credibility for the 21st century: Integrating perspectives on source, message and media credibility in the information age. Communication Yearbook, 27, 293–335.
3. Meyer, P. (1988). Defining and measuring credibility of newspapers: Developing an index. Journalism Quarterly, 65, 567–588.

Journalists’ Role Perception

Wolfgang Donsbach

Dresden University of Technology

‘Journalists’ role perceptions’ can be defined as generalized expectations of society towards their profession, and as actions and beliefs that the professionals see as normatively acceptable – that will influence their behavior on the job. The concept is important for describing how journalists in different cultures and media systems understand their work and its social function. Journalists’ role perceptions have been studied primarily for news workers covering politics and current affairs.

The most widely used ideal types for role perceptions were identified by Morris Janowitz (1975), who distinguished between the ‘gatekeeper’ and the ‘advocate.’ These types differ in their picture of the audience (self-dependent vs dependent), and their criteria for news selection (according to news factors vs according to instrumentality). Normative typologies serve a heuristic purpose in research. For instance, Patterson (1995) distinguished between the roles of ‘signaler,’ ‘common carrier,’ ‘watchdog,’ and ‘public representative.’ Finally, role perceptions have emerged from surveys of journalists and subsequent data analyses – like the distinctions ‘information dissemination,’ ‘interpretative–investigative,’ and ‘adversary.’ Some normative proposals for journalistic role models like the ‘politically constructive’ expectations towards journalists in developing countries (→ Development Journalism) or the proposal of the new, more politically active role in form of ‘public journalism’ (→ Citizen Journalism) triggered debates in academia and the profession.

For democratic countries, the existing theoretical role models can be collapsed into three dimensions, all of them interrelated. On the ‘participant–observational’ dimension, journalists can choose between actively seeking to influence the political process and trying to function as impartial conduits for political reporting. On the ‘advocacy–neutral’ dimension the alternatives are expressing subjective values and beliefs or maintaining strict neutrality and fairness to all sides. On the ‘commercial–educational dimension,’ journalists can strive either to reach the widest audience by serving its tastes and patterns of media exposure or to make news decisions based on what is good for democracy and public discourse. Journalists in all countries acquire elements of all three dimensions from the available.

A country’s history is the most decisive factor for differences in journalism between countries. For instance, economic and social changes in the US population in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the commercial motivation of publishers to reach the widest possible audience, together drove US newspapers to adopt a less partisan position and to develop basic professional standards such as the norm of objectivity (→ Objectivity in Reporting). Aside from these intercultural differences, the role perception of journalists within a given media system can also differ according to their individual training, socialization, institutional demands, or personal job motivations.

The changes brought to social communication through the → Internet have again raised discussions about journalists’ role perceptions. Several authors argue that the function of public communication is no longer restricted to professional journalists working for large media institutions, because today anybody can be a journalist, for example through blogging or in the → social media. Authors differ, though, in their view of what makes an activity “journalistic.” Besides personal competencies and resources it might well be that the role perception, motivation, and ethical foundation of those who cover public issues make the difference – in whatever technical and institutional framework it happens (Donsbach, 2009; → Online Journalism; Web 2.0 and the News).

Communication researchers have applied a variety of methods and empirical indicators to assess journalists’ role perceptions, surveys being the most frequently used methods, in addition to content analyses and participant observations. Comparative investigations are particularly valuable because they allow benchmarking with other professional cultures and can help interpret and evaluate the role perceptions measured in one country or in one professional sector. A questionnaire first used for US journalists in the 1980s was later applied in 20 other countries (Weaver 1997). In the early 1990s a survey conducted almost simultaneously in five countries measured the role perceptions and professional norms of journalists involved in daily news decisions (Donsbach & Patterson 2004), and between 2007 and 2011 the ‘Worlds of Journalism’ project was in the field.

Empirical evidence shows that western news systems are more alike than different, although their differences are important and consequential for journalists’ performance. Besides differences on the aggregate between countries, role perceptions can differ considerably among individual journalists and media organizations (Hanitzsch & Donsbach 2012). Role perceptions within the countries can also change, sometimes through key events as the → Watergate scandal in the USA. Several studies have brought evidence that the general role model of journalism changed in the 1960s from the ideology of paternalism to the ideology of criticism.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Donsbach, W. (2009). Journalists and their professional identities. In S. Allen (ed.), The Routledge Companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 38–48.
2. Hanitzsch, T. & Donsbach, W. (2012). Comparing journalism cultures. In F. Esser & T. Hanitzsch (eds.), The handbook of comparative communication research. London: Routledge, pp. 262–275.
3. Janowitz, M. (1975). Professional models in journalism: The gatekeeper and the advocate. Journalism Quarterly, 52, 618–626.
4. Patterson, T. E. (1995). The American democracy, 7th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.
5. Weaver, D. H. (ed.) (1997). The global journalist: News people around the world. Cresskill, NJ: Philip Seib.