Testing the Boundaries: Evolving Norms and Troubling Trends for Journalism

Auksé Balc?ytiené, Karin Raeymaeckers and Elena Vartanova

This chapter joins the widespread debate about the fluctuating boundaries of journalism. It analyses arising pressures and obstacles, mostly related to technological and managerial approaches which, as seen in their outcomes, are working against journalism's autonomous performance and professionalization. Furthermore, the chapter touches upon the most recent effects also noticed in older democracies that political influence and provocations have on journalism: we refer to information wars and propaganda messages that (although outwardly looking as news journalism) are driven by purposes opposing the goals and ideals of the profession.

The discussion offered here applies an 'integrated' and 'contextually sensitive' methodology and poses a number of questions: How has our understanding of journalism changed in a highly interconnected and hybrid news environment where different actors and interests compete for each others' attention? Which factors are making the uppermost effect on changes registered in the profession and news output? What is so distinctive about journalism and how (and why) the journalistic culture and professionalism (and autonomy) should be preserved? What State and governance rules are required to safeguard journalism in 'post-fact' and 'post-truth' times?

To overcome the challenges revolving around the definition of 'news journalism', this chapter suggests that a combined approach in media policy design is required. Instead of focusing on isolated components observable within media systems, such as legal conditions ensuring media diversity and content pluralism, the new approach should incorporate the concepts of 'media literacy' or 'news literacy', which rest on the combination of situational factors (such as contextual settings for media performance), communication rights and freedom of expression (such as skills and competencies of media users). Only through such collective action, integrity in news logic, journalistic reasoning and professional news discourses can be obtained and sustained.

Introduction

Democracy needs informed citizens. To become engaged in democratic processes, citizens need access to reliable, accurate and verified information (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Entman 1989; Graber et al. 1998; McNair 2000). A normative perspective to journalism rests on the idea that journalists operate in an institutionalized, morally and ethically defined professional Comparative Media Policy, Regulation and Governance in Europe framework. By selecting and presenting events as journalistic news, journalists set and define the societal agenda (Gans 2003).

Journalism and democracy are intrinsically correlated and indispensable for one another. As commonly disputed, journalism should give voice to the voiceless and provide a forum for public criticism and comment. Journalism must also carefully monitor those in power positions. It must analyse factual information in context and from a critical perspective. It should be independent, responsible and professional (in terms of mission and skills). It also must tackle societal needs and serve the public good, hence making clear distinctions between entertaining and empowering purposes of news remains as important as ever before, thus specifying journalism as a truly societal institution.

All the above-mentioned normative demands make journalism a key element in democracy with its exclusively defined and institutionalized professional role, ethical considerations and obligations (Nerone 2004; Christians et al. 2009). However, as noticed quite often, in daily practices these ambitions are not so clearly observed, followed or reproduced. As widely discussed, in times of crisis and volatility, abrupt changes (such as obliviousness to established ideals) in journalistic practices are identified, which all have a detrimental impact on journalistic professional values and autonomy (Schudson 2010; Lauk and Harro-Loit 2006). Whereas well-known, financially resilient and internationally respected media brands are still hoping to provide solid and correct information, the most of the mainstream media have diverted its attention from most of such obligations. Furthermore, citizen journalism and grassroots initiatives have partially taken over the role of criticism and of revealing information that the policy establishment wants to have unrevealed (Cooper 2006).

Appearances of new actors and intensification and growth of new types of news discourses are among the most indicative challengers in the journalistic field today. As noted by several authors, the likelihood of events and incidents to be reported in real-time has considerably increased; hence, serious effects were noticed on the lessened professional control and verification procedures in news making (Lewis et al. 2008a, 2008b; Reich 2009; Hermida 2015). As seen from various countries around the world, social media has turned into a truly global experience: today's audiences have interchanged conventional media to social networks, which, in turn, by supporting individualized and selective exposure to news, seriously undermine journalistic authority, previously held power and social influence (Hermida et al. 2012). Additionally, the monopoly of journalistic storytelling has been increasingly taken over by the new players (i.e. individual opinion makers taking part in collective construction of news narratives) in the networked communications arena (Petley 2011; Domingo and Le Cam 2015), which resulted in an overflow of opinionated and biased information, fake news, branded content, product placements and equivalent content production that embeds and packages messages of economic or even political stakeholders by using journalistic formats, genres and style.

Though such developments display diversified strategies applied by modern managers and (political) communicators, their social value appears to be critical since they turn the process of detection and distinction between original journalistic news and paid or manipulated messages (i.e. branded and embedded content, misinformation or even propaganda messages and various related informational attacks and fakes) into a very difficult, if not impossible, undertaking. By exploiting journalistic genres and destroying journalistic norms and values, such developments significantly influence professional standards and discourses. Consequently, previously safeguarded distinctive social borderlines between news journalism and other forms of transfer of messages (such as entrepreneurial communication, advertising, brand placement, promotional and marketing writing) appear to be shifting and considerably relaxed (Balcytiené and Harro-Loit 2009; Coddington 2015).

Whereas many of such changes are greatly inspired and linked to alterations in the business side of media operations, their outcomes have significant internal effects on the profession itself. It is not only that distinctions between 'proper' and 'profitable journalism' become synonymous or blurred (Wiik 2015). Even more, by slowly turning into a 'promotional industry', the news media increasingly appears to be less and less strict on its own managerial acts and functions. Although journalists still claim that they adhere to the role of...