Journalism beyond democracy: A new look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life

Abstract

Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.