Journalistic interventionism

Journalistic interventionism “reflects the extent to which journalists pursue a particular mission and promote certain values”. Journalists with a high interventionist attitude do not report neutrally and objectively but are engaged in the subjects they are reporting about. An interventionist reporting style aims at influencing public opinion. Moreover, “journalism cultures that follow an interventionist approach may act on behalf of the socially disadvantaged or as of a political party and other groups whose interest are at stake”.

Journalistic interventionism takes place in politics such as in election campaigns, and in peace journalism. Thomas Hanitzsch, associate professor of Communication Studies and Media Research at the University of Munich, proposes a continuum on which the degree of interventionism is measured. “The intervention pole of the continuum becomes manifest in role models like the ‘participant’, ‘advocate,’ and ‘missionary’” with journalists taking a more active role in their reporting. There are two factors that interrelate interventionism and journalistic culture: Distance to power holders and market orientation. Journalists with distance to power holders are expected to be more skeptical whereas journalists with close proximity to power holders tend to be more defensive of them and do not intervene as much as the skeptical journalist. Journalists in a market-oriented news culture, on the other hand, perceive citizens as consumers. In contrast, journalists in a public-interest culture are less market-oriented and regard their audience as citizens rather than consumers. They “produce news in regard to the democratic needs of society” and are less interventionist. The “critical change agent”, one of the four professional journalistic milieus that Hanitzsch suggests, tends to “emphasize the importance of advocating social change, influencing public opinion and setting the political agenda” and serves as an example of an interventionist reporting style. The degree of interventionism in journalistic reporting varies across different countries. In a study conducted by Hanitzsch et al. that interviewed 2100 professional journalists from 18 countries, it turned out that journalists from non-western contexts tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views. According to this study, 73% of the Egyptian journalists and 68% of the Turkish journalists regard themselves as “critical change agent” and thus as rather interventionist. In Germany, only 10% and in the USA 21% of the journalists regard themselves as “critical change agent”. Generally, “high interventionism is found in a journalistic culture that is labeled ‘pragmatic’”. In a pragmatic news culture, only political material with a high news value will be included into news programs whereas other political material will be excluded. Moreover, candidates´ statements are used as raw material out of which the journalist then constructs his or her own story.

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