Page 286 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Wolfgang Donsbach and Thomas Patterson

Advocate
Italy print • Germany print
• and and broadcast
broadcast

U.K. Sweden
print broadcast •
•
• • Sweden print
U.K. broadcast U.S. print and
•
broadcast
Neutral

Passive Active
Figure 11.2 Role Positions of Journalists in Five Countries. Note: The
active-passive scale is based on five survey items indicating to what degree
the journalists hold a critical, adversarial position or a supportive,
mediating position toward political leaders. The advocate-neutral scale
consists of five items indicating to what degree the journalists prefer an
advocacy or a detached type of reporting. Positions are based on deviances
for each country’s journalists from the grand mean for all five countries.

fourcombinations,andtheyencompassnearlyalloftheroleconceptions
and metaphors found commonly in the scholarly and popular literature
on the news media:

Passive-Neutral: neutral reporter, mirror, common carrier, dissem-
inator, broker, messenger
Passive-Advocate: hack reporter, partisan press
Active-Neutral: critic, adversary, watchdog, Fourth Estate, progres-
sive reporter
Active-Advocate: ideologue, missionary, interpreter

Although this typing capacity is another indicator of the utility of our
two-dimensional framework, a more critical test is whether it has the ca-
pacity to describe a variety of news systems. Figure 11.2 shows where the
journalists from the five countries are positioned in the two-dimensional
space. They are positioned by their mean scores on the passive-active and
neutral-advocate indices. It will be noted that British print and broad-
cast journalists are located at different points, an indication that their
journalistic cultures differ substantially. And in fact, the partisan-tinged

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