Understanding the Global Journalist: a hierarchy-of-influences approach

Abstract

Globalization of media organizations has brought accompanying debates about the proper education and professional standards for the journalists who work for them. These journalistic and press performance issues have attracted a correspondingly global community of scholars to conduct often transnational, comparative studies. In this article, I consider the issues raised in examining these "global journalists" from a sociology-of-media and a cross-national comparative perspective. I propose a "hierarchy of influences" levels-of-analysis model to help clarify and address such questions, including the problematic nature of "professionalism". From micro to macro, these levels address what factors shape media and news content, and include the individual journalist, news routines, organizational, extra-media, and ideological, with each carrying a different view of the professionalism issue. While many studies, comparative and otherwise, have been conducted at the individual level, often using surveys to examine the views and characteristics of individual professionals, this model requires that we take into account the larger structure within which these journalists function. More important than national differences may be the emergence of a transnational global professionalism, the shape of which will greatly affect how well the world's press meets the normative standards we would wish for it.