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In a proclaimed age of ‘post-truth,’ scholars have raised concerns about the spread of false information and the questioning of epistemic authorities. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to capture the digital transformation of knowledge order. Drawing on insights from social epistemology, sociology and history of knowledge, and media history, we identify epistemic practices as basic elements of knowledge order. We then analyze how epistemic practices are organized into an overarching structure of knowledge phases, contexts, roles, and hierarchies. Digital media tend to destabilize the traditional knowledge order. This destabilization is characterized by a more flexible order of phases, a dissolution of boundaries between contexts, an opening of professional roles to new actors, and a flattening of hierarchies.

Research on trust in media is on the rise. However, communication scholars have addressed related concepts (e.g. media credibility) for decades, and these concepts have often been used interchangea...

Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of journalists in terms of rank and salary, as well as their perceived professional autonomy. We hypothesize that editors reward and allow freedom to journalists whose political viewpoints coincide more precisely with their own. Political proximity to editors should lead to a better salary and rank for reporters and to a stronger perception of editorial autonomy among reporters. We tested our hypotheses through statistical analysis using data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. We analyzed the answers of 3,087 journalists interviewed between 2012 and 2016 in six European countries: Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The results support our hypotheses. The analysis reveals a polarization of media outlet editors, and robust results were achieved via a measure of political proximity that takes into account the particular influence of left-leaning and right-leaning editors. Such partisan leaning, however, seems less relevant in countries belonging to Hallin and Mancini’s Atlantic model.

Populäre Krisendiagnosen zur Verbreitung von Falschinformationen, zur Erosion einer gemeinsamen Wissensbasis und zur Infragestellung epistemischer Autoritäten haben in den letzten Jahren nicht nur Sorgen um die Wissensordnung in liberalen Demokratien ausgelöst, sondern auch zu erheblichen Forschungsaktivitäten in der Kommunikationswissenschaft geführt. Allerdings steht eine Integration der empirischen Befunde zu den zahlreichen Einzelaspekten in einen Theorierahmen noch aus. Der Zweck eines solchen Rahmens besteht darin, den digitalen Wandel der Genese, Prüfung, Distribution und Aneignung von Wissen in der medienöffentlichen Kommunikation systematisch zu beschreiben und zu erklären. Ausgehend von den Grundbegriffen Wahrheit, Wissen und Rationalität wird ein Modell der Wissensordnung entwickelt, das Phasen, Kontexte, Hierarchiestufen und Rollen unterscheidet. Das Internet tendiert zur Auflösung der bisherigen Wissensordnung, d. h. zu einem Kollaps der Kontexte, zur Nivellierung der epistemischen Hierarchie, zur Auflösung der Phasenfolge des Wissensprozesses, zum offenen Zugang zu bislang exklusiven Rollen und zur Entstehung von Hybridrollen. Es wird demonstriert, wie das Modell zur Aufarbeitung des Forschungsstands, zur Ableitung einer Forschungsagenda und für Gestaltungsempfehlungen eingesetzt werden kann.

Medienskepsis ist in allen modernen demokratischen Gesellschaften ein weit verbreitetes Phanomen. Eine kritische Haltung gegenuber Medien gehort gewissermasen zur Grundausstattung einer aufgeklarten Gesellschaft. Allerdings gibt es auch einen breiten Konsens daruber, dass Medien und Journalismus auf das Vertrauen der Rezipierenden angewiesen sind, um ihre Kritik- und Kontrollfunktion wahrnehmen zu konnen. Medienskepsis als kritische Haltung von Burgerinnen und Burgern gegenuber Medien steht im Zentrum dieses Beitrags. Ausgehend von einer Analyse der bisherigen Forschung von kritischen Einstellungen gegenuber Medien wird der Begriff „Medienskepsis“ entwickelt. Dabei werden zentrale Dimensionen von Medienskepsis herausgearbeitet: ihre Bezugspunkte, ihre Ursachen, die Skepsis auslosenden Faktoren sowie der Zusammenhang von Mediennutzung und Medienskepsis. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass die bisher uberwiegend quantitative Forschung zu skeptischen Medienhaltungen durch qualitative Studien zu erganzen ist, um ein umfassendes Bild von den Individuen zu zeichnen, die Medien skeptisch gegenuberstehen.

Internationalisierung ist zwar ein verbreitetes Schlagwort im heutigen akademischen Betrieb, und keiner bestreitet dessen Wichtigkeit, doch wie internationalisiert ist die deutsche Kommunikationswissenschaft wirklich? Manche deutschen Hochschulen verstehen unter Internationalisierung lediglich ein (kommunikationswissenschaftliches) englischsprachiges Lehrangebot, andere das Publizieren in englischsprachigen Fachzeitschriften. Dass dies zu kurz greift, versteht sich von selbst. Aber welche internationale Reichweite hat die deutsche Scientific community bisher tatsächlich erzielt? Welchen Stellenwert hat die international vergleichende Forschung, haben inter- und transkulturelle Perspektiven im Fach? Wie steht es um die internationale Anschlussfähigkeit der deutschen Kommunikationswissenschaft? International komparative und kollaborative Forschung und die Einnahme inter-/transkultureller Perspektiven sind Querschnittsaufträge für alle Forschungsfelder des Fachs und können nicht nur beschränkt sein auf so explizit getaufte Netzwerke und Fachgruppen der internationalen und transkulturellen Kommunikation unter dem Dach wissenschaftlicher Fachgesellschaften. Dieses Positionspapier plädiert daher für eine „tiefe Internationalisierung“ der deutschen Kommunikationswissenschaft.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz enthalt Kernergebnisse einer reprasentativen Befragung von 775 Journalisten, die zu einer Bestandsaufnahme des Journalismus in Deutschland verdichtet werden. Im Vordergrund stehen soziodemographische Merkmale, Anstellungsverhaltnisse, die Verteilung auf verschiedene Mediengattungen und Tatigkeitsbereiche sowie die wahrgenommene Autonomie und das berufliche Rollenverstandnis. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Zahl der Journalisten weiter geschrumpft ist, wovon insbesondere hauptberufliche freie Journalisten betroffen sind. Zudem steigt das Durchschnittsalter deutscher Journalisten weiter an. Politisch stehen sie weiterhin eher im linksliberalen Spektrum. Die Daten deuten auch darauf hin, dass die Akademisierung des Berufs weiter fortschreitet. Der Anteil von Journalistinnen ist im Zeitvergleich weiter angestiegen, wobei in hoheren Positionen immer noch weniger Frauen anzutreffen sind. Die Vergutungssituation ist fur Journalistinnen und freie Journalisten besonders problematisch. Journalistinnen sind haufig bei Zeitschriften und im Rundfunk tatig, wohingegen Zeitungen, Nachrichtenagenturen sowie Mediendienste eher mannlich dominiert sind. Zudem ist mehr als ein Viertel der Journalisten multimedial tatig. Die Mehrheit der Journalisten ist ressortgebunden und arbeitet zu speziellen Themen; die professionelle Autonomie ist in der Selbstwahrnehmung weiterhin sehr hoch. Nach wie vor ist das berufliche Selbstverstandnis dominiert von einer neutralen Vermittlerrolle; diese Sicht hat wahrend der vergangenen 20 Jahre sogar an Bedeutung gewonnen. Wichtiger geworden sind in den Augen der Journalisten auch die Bedurfnisse des Publikums sowie die Unterhaltungsrolle.

Based on interviews with 215 conflict journalists and 315 reconstructed articles, this article explores the way conflict coverage comes into being. The study used retrospective reconstruction to in...

Attempts to establish reliable predictors of journalists’ perceptions of the acceptability of various controversial newsgathering practices such as deception and intrusion have so far produced inconsistent results. This paper proposes an exploratory theoretical model, based on risk-taking theory, which identifies constructs that could be used to predict journalists’ use of these practices. It validates this model using data from a survey of practising journalists in New Zealand. It shows that economic and organisational influences on journalists, their role perceptions, and their ethical orientation predict the extent to which journalists see these practices as justified. Organisational influences are moderated by experience, as predicted by risk-taking theory, but seem to have significance only for mid-level experience. This has important implications for journalism practice, regulation, and education.

This paper looks at the extent to which journalistic culture in Muslim-majority countries is shaped by a distinctive Islamic worldview. We identified four principles of an Islamic perspective to journalism: truth and truth-telling (siddiq and haqq), pedagogy (tabligh), seeking the best for the public interest (maslahah), and moderation (wasatiyyah). A survey of working journalists in Africa (Egypt, Sierra Leone, and Sudan), Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates), and Europe (Albania and Kosovo) found manifestations of these roles in the investigated countries. The results point to the strong importance of an interventionist approach to journalism-as embodied in the maslahah principle-in most societies. Overall, however, journalists' roles in Muslim-majority countries are not so much shaped by a distinctively Islamic worldview as they were by the political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts. This study was made possible by the Worlds of Journalism Study, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; the German Research Foundation; Swiss National Science Foundation. Scopus

The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news outlets, and media organizations struggle over discursive authority in conversations about journalism's identity and locus in society. Journalistic roles are articulated and enacted on 2 distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive roles) and role performance (practiced and narrated roles). The process model of journalistic roles proposes a circular structure, where normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles are connected through processes of internalization, enactment, reflection, normalization, and negotiation.

Comparative research in journalism studies typically involves systematic comparison of two or more countries or territorial entities with respect to some common dimension (e.g., journalistic practices, orientations, and cultures). Early works in this tradition can be traced back to the 1930s, but it was not until the late 1990s that cross-national research gained popularity in the field. Comparative journalism studies have historically evolved and developed around four distinct but partly overlapping paradigms: the United States and the rest (1950s–1960s), the North and the South (1970s–1980s), the West and the West (1980s–2000s), and the West and the world (2000s–2010s). In all these eras, comparative journalism researchers have focused on three topical areas: journalists’ professional orientations (journalistic roles and professional ethics), the contexts of news production (influences on news work and their subjective perception), and news cultures (normative and empirical analyses of press systems and journalistic cultures). Overall, a growing awareness of the advantages of comparative research has led to an explosion of these studies since the turn of the century. Comparative journalism research has thus become a principal avenue of study in the field, and it has meaningfully contributed to both knowledge about journalism and the formation of journalism studies as a discipline.

This chapter looks at professionalism, professional identity, and journalistic roles as discourses through which journalistic agents articulate their centrality to social processes and public conve ...

Aktuell kommt kaum ein Bericht zur Lage des Journalismus ohne Krisenrhetorik aus. Als Treiber der Krise gelten sinkende Auflagen und Marktanteile, die Abwanderung von Anzeigen in das Internet, die Konkurrenz durch kostenlose Online-Nachrichtenportale und Burgerjournalismus sowie die Veranderung des Nachrichtenkonsums insgesamt (Meckel et al. 2012). Frank Patalong (2015) beschrieb den journalistischen Arbeitsmarkt im Spiegel unlangst als „Krisestan“, und auch die Journalismusforschung spekuliert betriebsam uber das „Ende“ bzw. „Sterben“ des Journalismus (Charles und Stewart 2011; McChesney und Pickard 2010). Bereits 2005 haben Rudolf Gerhardt, Hans Mathias Kepplinger und Marcus Maurer im Feuilleton der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung gemahnt, dass jede Journalismuskrise auch eine Krise der demokratischen Offentlichkeit sei.

Der Band liefert eine Zustandsbeschreibung des Journalismus in einer Zeit, in der Medieninstitutionen ökonomisch unter Druck stehen und journalistische Autoritäten zunehmend hinterfragt werden. Das Buch berichtet Ergebnisse einer Befragung von über 2500 Journalist*innen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Im Zentrum stehen die soziodemografischen Profile der Journalist*innen, die Anstellungsverhältnisse und Tätigkeitsbereiche, ihre beruflichen Rollenverständnisse und ethischen Orientierungen, ihr Vertrauen in gesellschaftliche Institutionen sowie die Wahrnehmung von redaktioneller Autonomie und Einflüssen auf ihre Arbeit.

Die in diesem Buch berichteten Ergebnisse basieren auf standardisierten Interviews, die in den Jahren 2014 und 2015 mit uber 2.500 Journalisten in Deutschland, Osterreich und der Schweiz durchgefuhrt wurden. Konzeptionell und methodisch war die Studie eingebettet in die zweite Welle der Worlds of Journalism Study, in der zwischen 2012 und 2016 insgesamt uber 27.500 Journalisten in 67 Landern zum aktuellen Stand sowie zum Wandel ihres Berufsfelds befragt wurden.

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.

The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.

Die Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft hat den Fachzeitschriften viel zu verdanken. Gleichzeitig lasst sich beobachten, dass Journals zunehmend zu einem Raum werden, in dem Reputation und Karrieren verhandelt werden. Damit entfernen sich Fachzeitschriften von ihrer genuin inhaltlichen Rolle und werden zunehmend als wissenschaftspolitisches Steuerungsinstrument missbraucht. Der Beitrag hebt drei besonders virulente Probleme hervor: 1) den okologischen Fehlschluss von Zeitschriften-Impact auf individuelle Qualitat, 2) die Gleichsetzung von Zitationen, Impact und Qualitat und 3) den unreflektierten Umgang mit dem Peer Review. Die Folge ist ein dramatisch gestiegener Publikationsdruck und ein geradezu wahnwitziges Publikations-Wettrusten. In diesem Wettlauf steht der Publikations-Output in keinem gesunden Verhaltnis mehr zum erzielten Wissensgewinn. Der Bedeutungsgewinn von Fachzeitschriften fuhrt uberdies zu einer schleichenden Normalisierung des Zeitschriftenartikel-Formats als „Publikationsstandard“. Dabei wird eine bestimmte Form von Forschung privilegiert, die sich prinzipiell fur eine Publikation in Zeitschriften eignet. In Kombination mit einem unreflektierten Einsatz des Peer Review ist dies ein gefahrlicher Nahrboden fur Normalwissenschaft und konzeptionelle Stagnation.

Foreign correspondents seem to have become an endangered species. They are said to be increasingly substituted by new forms of foreign correspondence. These claims are often raised by researchers studying foreign correspondence to and from the United States and the United Kingdom. We test whether assumptions about the demise and substitution of the traditional foreign correspondent also apply beyond these contexts. Particularly, the study seeks to explore the differences in the working conditions of various kinds of foreign correspondents. Based on 211 responses gathered through an online survey of a carefully reconstructed population of 721 journalists, it describes the profile and working conditions of foreign correspondents in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It finds that the traditional correspondent – a professional journalist working full-time for legacy media – may be more resistant to change than expected. In the perception of correspondents, there is not much substitution through parachutes, locals, amateurs, or reporting from the headquarters. Working conditions are not worsening for everyone. Rather, we find diverging worlds of foreign correspondence depending on the media type, the country of origin, and the kind of job contract journalists have.

This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames

Despite signs of declining press trust in many western countries, we know little about trends in press trust across the world. Based on comparative survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS), this study looks into national levels of trust in the press and identifies factors that drive differences across societies and individuals as well as over time. Findings indicate that the widely noted decline in media trust is not a universal trend; it is true for only about half of the studied countries, with the United States experiencing the largest and most dramatic drop in trust in the press. Political trust has emerged as key factor for our understanding of trust in the press. We found robust evidence for what we called the trust nexus—the idea that trust in the news media is strongly linked to the way publics look at political institutions. The link between press trust and political trust was considerably stronger in politically polarized societies. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the relation between press trust and political trust is becoming stronger over time. We reason that the strong connection between media and political trust may be driven by a growing public sentiment against elite groups.

The study of journalists’ professional roles is a principal avenue to understand journalism’s identity and place in society. From the perspective of discursive institutionalism, one could argue that journalistic roles have no true “essence”; they exist as part of a wider framework of meaning—of a discourse. At the core of this discourse is journalism’s identity and locus in society. As structures of meaning, journalistic roles set the parameters of what is desirable in the institutional context of journalism: they are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. In other words, the discourse of journalistic roles is the central arena where journalistic culture and identity is reproduced and contested; it is the place where the struggle over the preservation or transformation of journalism’s identity takes place. Journalists articulate and enact journalistic roles on two analytically distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive) and role performance (practiced and narrated). The four categories of journalistic roles—normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles—correspond to conceptually distinct ideas: what journalists ought to do, what they want to do, what they really do in practice, and what they think they do. Normative roles encompass generalized and aggregate expectations that journalists believe are deemed desirable in society. Most normative roles of journalists are derived from a view that emphasizes journalism’s (potential) contribution to the proper workings of democracy. Cognitive role orientations comprise the institutional values, attitudes and beliefs individual journalists embrace as a result of their occupational socialization. These roles tend to appear as evident, natural, and self-explaining to the journalists. They index their individual aspirations and ambitions and the communicative goals they want to achieve through their work. Practiced role performance captures the roles of journalists as they are executed in practice; narrated roles, finally, denominate subjective perceptions of and reflections on the roles that journalists carry out in practice. Comparative research has demonstrated that journalists tend to subscribe to a variety of cognitive roles, largely depending on the political and social contexts they work in. Here, journalistic roles address six elementary needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative needs. In a time, however, when traditional social institutions cease to provide a normative framework, journalism increasingly provides collective orientation in a multi-optional society. In the domain of everyday life, journalism’s normative roles therefore extend to the contexts of consumption, identity, and emotion. Over time, researchers have shifted their focus from the analysis of journalists’ occupational values, attitudes, and beliefs to the study of journalistic performance and the way professional orientations are enacted in the world of practice. Studies of this type so far produced seemingly contradictory evidence: one the one hand, there seems to be a gap between the roles journalists aspire to and the roles they execute in practice, but at the same time, many studies also found a robust correlation between cognitive and performed roles of journalists.