The Gap Between Reported Journalistic Behaviors and Role Performance in the news: A cross-national comparison in Europe, Latin America, and Asia

In recent years, public dissatisfaction with and skepticism about the performance of professional news media and journalists has alarmingly increased. The public debate about journalism credibility in general and ‘lying media’ accusations in particular mainly address the question of whether journalists live up to their ideals; that is, whether journalistic values and normative standards regarding their work find their adequate implementation in the final news product that is made known to the public.

To address such questions, previous studies in journalism have analyzed the gap between role conceptions and perceived role enactment, or discrepancies between individual journalistic conceptions and the performance of professional roles for individual countries. These studies showed that the gap between ideals and practices seem inevitable due to the various external constraints that limit the possibility for journalists to fully meet their preferred professional roles in everyday practice.

Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies analyzing how the gap between ideals and performance manifests itself at the level of the news organization, and across countries with different political, economic and media system contexts. At the same time, little is know about the discrepancies between reported journalistic behavior and actual practice, in comparison to the roles journalists find important to accomplish.

The investigation of the gap between journalists’ perceived role enactment and media performance has important implications for journalism as a profession, as it sheds light on the potential discrepancies between what journalists claim to do and what is actually performed when reporting the news – hence, discrepancies that are pivotal to recent public and academic debates about the social responsibility and credibility of contemporary journalism.

To better understand the forces driving such discrepancies, the present study analyzes the professional behavior of individual journalists within a broader organizational and societal context. Based on standardized operationalizations of the disseminator, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, civic, service, and infotainment roles, journalists’ reported role enactment was measured based on a survey with 643 journalists from 33 media organizations in nine countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland-, and compared to the average performance of these roles in 19,908 content analyzed news published by their media organizations.

The results show a significant gap between perceived enactment and media performance across all six roles. In all cases, journalists assure they perform each professional role more frequently than what the average role performance rate of their respective news organizations actually indicates. For all countries and across all organizations, the biggest gap was found with regards to the civic and the watchdog role, while the smallest gap was found for the interventionist role. The data additionally revealed significant differences in the size of the gap across countries, organizations, and journalists. Most consistently, the magnitude of the gap between reported journalistic behavior and media performance depended on the journalists’ individual level of perceived autonomy in the newsroom, the news outlets’ orientation as either popular or elite, and the level of press freedom in the respective country.

Findings will be discussed regarding their implications for journalism as a profession in times of decreasing media trust, and the risks of relying only on journalists’ self-reports when studying journalistic and media cultures.