Page 282 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Wolfgang Donsbach and Thomas Patterson

The surveys indicate that American journalists are, indeed, a relatively
distinctive group. They are the most aggressive fighters for a free press.
We collapsed our respondents’ opinions on six different issues concern-
ing freedom of the press into a single index. The six questions concerned
free access to any government documents; disagreement with legal con-
sequences in cases where a journalist breaks confidentiality promised to
anewssource;therighttoprotectsourcesinthecourtroom;difficultyfor
libel suits by public officials; disagreement with a private citizen’s right
to reply when he or she has been falsely criticized; and disagreement
with the government’s right to stop publications in cases of national
security. United States respondents supported these rights to a much
greater extent than their colleagues in the other countries, particularly
in Italy.
However, a stereotype that seems weak in the light of the empirical
data is the notion that U.S. journalists are usually attuned to commercial
considerations. We compiled four different questions on this issue into a
single index: the importance of leading competitors as guidance for news
decisions; the frequency with which news the respondent has prepared
is changed to increase audience interest; limitation of his or her work
by the necessity for capturing the audience’s attention; and whether it is
typical of the respondent’s work to seek audience attention rather than to
inform the audience. United States journalists were in the middle range
of this index of “competition and commercialization.”
But U.S. journalists were the most distinctive in the material they
used for their news stories. The survey included a question that asked
respondents to think about the most recent news story on which they
had worked and to indicate the sources that were used, such as eye-
witness observation, person-in-the-street interviews, wire service ma-
terial, archives, and so on. This question was not intended to measure
individual-level behavior; we made no assumption that a journalist’s
most recent story was typical of his or her work. The question was de-
signed instead to uncover patterns that typify news systems. Are jour-
nalists in one system more likely than those in another to rely, say, on
person-in-the-street interviews or wire service copy? The U.S. journalists
relied far more heavily on personal initiative (e.g., obtaining interviews
with newsmakers and people in the street) in covering stories than did
theirinternationalcolleagues,whoreliedmoreheavilyonother-initiated
material (e.g., wire service copy).
United States journalists are also rather distinctive in their sharp
separation of the work of the reporter, the editor, and the editorial

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