Page 284 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Wolfgang Donsbach and Thomas Patterson

United States journalists ranked the lowest (21 percent) in terms of the
importance to them of “champion[ing] particular values and ideas.”
TheirGerman(71percent)andItalian(74percent)colleaguesrankedthe
highest. It was the means of influence that separated the Americans from
the Europeans. Simplifying our data one might say that U.S. journalists
primarily want to affect politics and the public through information (al-
most 100 percent say that it is very or quite important for them to impart
informationtoothers)andnotthroughadvocatingtheirsubjectiveideas,
values, and beliefs in news writing.
To sum up, our look at U.S. journalists from a cross-national per-
spective shows them as a relatively peculiar breed within the profession.
Theyareaggressivedefendersofpressfreedom,sometimesattheexpense
of the rights of those covered in the news. They have by far the high-
est degree of division of labor between different journalistic tasks, and
they face the strongest editorial control for the sake of factual accuracy
and balance. Although they like political influence, they do not pursue
this goal by championing their subjective values and beliefs – as do their
German and Italian colleagues – but by digging out relevant information
through their own research.

CASE 3: POLITICAL ROLES AND NEWS SYSTEMS
Although our study focused on journalists, we were also interested in
identifying differences in news systems. The news organizations and
professionals within a country can be said to constitute a news system
(Seymour-Ure 1974). Such systems could be expected to vary in impor-
tant ways.
We sought, for example, to distinguish news systems by the empha-
sis placed on certain functions, such as the oversight of public officials.
Bernard Cohen (1963) was one of the first scholars to devise a typology
of journalists’ roles; he separated the “neutral” role from the “partici-
pant” role. Johnstone et al. (1976) applied this typology in one of the first
surveys ever of American journalists. A decade later, based on their sur-
vey of U.S. journalists, Weaver and Wilhoit (1986) proposed a three-role
typology: the “interpreter,”“disseminator,” and “adversary” roles. In a
Swedish study, Fjaestad and Holmlov (1977) identified the “watchdog”
and “educator” roles as the dominant orientations of Sweden’s journal-
ists. In a comparative study, K¨ ocher (1986) described British journalists
as “bloodhounds” and used the term “missionaries” to identify German

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