Journalistic Voice: The Performance of the Interventionist Role

Abstract

This chapter reports findings from the Journalistic Voice domain, describing how journalists around the world use different indicators of interventionism when reporting the news. In our analysis, we split the indicators into two main categories: those related to the content of a news item and those related to the style. Our findings show that professional autonomy does not necessarily point to more interventionism, while lack of autonomy does not necessarily prevent the presence of this role in the news, as the journalistic voice may be used for different purposes. Still, we found that democratic regime and a high level of autonomy do correlate to the presence of content-related interventionism, while the style-related indicators of the interventionist role can be traced in all types of regimes. Also, newspapers’ audience orientation only affects style-related indicators, while there is no significant difference between the popular and elite press when it comes to content-related indicators.