The Media, Journalism and Democracy by Margaret Scammell & Holli Semetko

Author:Margaret Scammell & Holli Semetko [Scammell, Margaret & Semetko, Holli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9781351747103
Google: FFJHDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38810524
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Graph 1. Political position and notion of objectivity.

Graph 2. Impartiality and "Hard Facts" notion of objectivity.

Graph 3. Relationship between notion and importance of objectivity.

Graph 4. Age and importance of objectivity.

Graph 5. Impartiality and importance of objectivity.

Graph 6. Relationship between dissonance and evaluation of news organization's objectivity.

percent among the conservative). Overall and as a confirmation of what we found for the different age groups, we can conclude that the notions of objectivity seem to be quite unaffected by other variables in U.S. and British journalism while they vary substantially in continental-European countries.

However, another variable affects a journalist's notion of objectivity similarly in all four countries: his or her attitude towards the role of the news media. We asked our respondents to what degree they would prefer a more impartial news system where each individual news organization presents a balanced version of all significant viewpoints, or an advocacy system where each news organization promotes its own particular point of view.6 In all countries, the majority of journalists favored the impartial news system. However, there were differences in the degree to which they supported this view of the role of the mass media.7

For the purpose of the context in this paper we distinguished between respondents who were strong supporters of the impartiality system (scale point 1) and those who tended more or less to the advocacy news system (scale points 2 through 7) and compared their answers on their notion of objectivity.

Graph 2 shows the respective relationships for the "Hard Facts" model of objectivity. We find an unanimous and clear correlation in all four countries for the "Hard Facts" model: Journalists who are less inclined with the impartiality role model are more in favor of an objectivity model that goes beyond statements and strives to find 'true reality'. Between-group differences are in the range of 11 to 12 percentage points for all countries. From this, we can infer that "going to the hard facts of a political dispute" is usually combined with advocating a particular point of view, not necessarily with presenting the (negative and positive) hard facts of all contending sides in a political conflict.

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