38 research outputs found
Comparing Journalistic Role Performance Across Thematic Beats: A 37-Country Study
Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique âmicro-cultures.â Exploring this âparticularistâ approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables
The societal context of professional practice: Examining the impact of politics and economics on journalistic role performance across 37 countries
The impact of socio-political variables on journalism is an ongoing concern of comparative research on media systems and professional cultures. However, they have rarely been studied systematically across diverse cases, particularly outside Western democracies, and existing studies that compare western and non-western contexts have mainly focused on journalistic role conceptions rather than actual journalistic practice. Using journalistic role performance as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper overcomes these shortcomings through a content analysis of 148,474 news stories from 365 print, online, TV, and radio outlets in 37 countries. We consider two fundamental system-level variablesâliberal democracy and market orientationâtesting a series of hypotheses concerning their influence on the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment, and civic roles in the news globally. Findings confirm the widely asserted hypothesis that liberal democracy is associated with the performance of public-service oriented roles. Claims that market orientation reinforces critical and civic-oriented journalism show more mixed results and give some support to the argument that there are forms of âmarket authoritarianismâ associated with loyalist journalism. The findings also show that the interventionist and infotainment roles are not significantly associated with the standard measures of political and economic structure, suggesting the need for more research on their varying forms across societies and the kinds of system-level factors that might explain them
The Nature of Law and Potential Coercion
This paper argues for a novel understanding of the relationship between law and coercion. It firstly refutes Kenneth Himmaâs claim that the authorisation of coercive enforcement mechanisms is a conceptually necessary feature of law. It then claims that the best way to understand the law is as coercionâapt. The âcoercionâaptnessâ of law is clarified, in part, by appealing to an essential distinction between law and morality: Whereas it can be reasonable for the law to appeal to coercive means in order to motivate compliance, it seems decidedly unreasonable for morality to do so
Legal Validity: An Inferential Analysis
I will argue that the concept of (valid) law is a normative notion, irreducible to any factual description.
Its conceptual function is that of relating certain (alternative sets of) properties a norm may possess to the
conclusion that the norm is legally binding, namely, that it deserves to be endorsed and applied in legal
reasoning. Legal validity has to be distinguished from other, more demanding, normative ideas, such as
moral bindingness or legal optimality