Covering sustainable finance: Role perceptions, journalistic practices and moral dilemmas

Abstract

Sustainable Finance (SF) has been identified as one of the biggest trends in the financial industry in the past years. By channeling capital into sustainable investments, it is hoped that finance can accelerate the transition towards a greener and more sustainable future. However, given that the discussion about SF lacks consistency and a common understanding of SF, the role of financial journalists in reporting about this trend and in enacting their role as watchdogs becomes of paramount interest. To do so, 33 semi-structured interviews with journalists who have covered SF in six countries (AT, BE, CH, DE, NL, UK) were conducted to find out about journalistic role perceptions and daily journalistic practices (such as sources, style of writing and role of the audience). Findings show that journalists mainly enact the role of a chronicler, informant and educator when writing about SF, but fail to fulfil an active watchdog role. Furthermore, the coverage of SF is predominately event-driven, directed at a financial elite, and has become highly professionalized at financial news outlets. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, journalists reported that they found themselves in a moral dilemma between enacting their professional role as a journalist on the one hand and providing a platform for unsubstantiated claims about SF (greenwashing) made by the industry, on the other hand.

Reporting on the 2019 European Heatwaves and Climate Change: Journalists’ Attitudes, Motivations and Role Perceptions

“…Although the role of an advocate was the least favored among the journalists in this survey, the fact that the answers had an overall mean of 2.40 (not so much/somewhat important) implies that the role of an advocate is not entirely rejected. In fact, a trend towards advocacy roles in climate journalism has been observed in recent research (Lester 2013;Sachsman, Simon, and Valenti 2010;Strauß 2021;Tandoc and Takahashi 2014), in part prompted by the media-wide trend of expanding and intensifying coverage about climate change. Yet, the relatively low ranking of the advocacy role in our survey was matched by the high ranking of traditional journalistic norms (e.g., independence, neutrality, accuracy, objectivity) which stand in direct contrast with advocacy journalism.…”

“…Furthermore, with increasing climate change awareness and activism amongst the public, some scholars have identified a shift towards "soft" (e.g., pressing for more climate action) or "hard" (e.g., supporting NGO campaigns) advocacy roles in climate and environmental journalism (e.g., Lester 2013;Sachsman, Simon, and Valenti 2010;Strauß 2021). This is also reflected in a positive attitude among environmental journalists towards advocacy groups, as found in previous research (Brüggemann and Engesser 2014).…”

Devil’s Advocate or Agenda Setter? The Role of Journalists Covering Sustainable Finance in Europe

“…Furthermore, Frig et al (2018) assert that there is also a difference between business and watchdog press; hence, journalism that merely reports and conveys recent business news and updates and journalism that supervises, controls and monitors the financial and business sector. With regard to SF, several news outlets have developed an expertise on the topic, such as the Moral Money newsletter by the Financial Times or other stand-alone news providers such as the Responsible Investor (Strauß 2021). Hence, keeping these distinctions and new developments in mind, it becomes of interest to investigate: (RQ1) How do (financial) journalists perceive their role in influencing the public discourse of SF?…”

Mind the gap : Newspapers as a forum for democratic public debate on food production

“…Journalists have been socialised to accept and internalise these normative expectations as benchmarks for good journalism (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017;. Consequently, holding power and the powerful to account is part of what journalists say they do and what they consider their role to be (Hanitzsch, Vos, et al, 2019;Strauß, 2021). From this actor-oriented perspective, and considering that journalists appear to agree that their role includes holding power to account, it seems reasonable to ask to what extent their performance -as materialised in news texts -comports with expectations derived from this role; that is, to assess role performance against normative ideas.…”

“…Whether or not one endorses this normative goal -and, given the lack of consensus and the need to make ourselves accountable, it is worth noting that we do -scrutinizing business and economic elites and holding powerful private actors accountable is part of 5 120 what journalists say they do and what they consider their role to be (Hanitzsch, Vos, et al, 2019;Strauß, 2021). It is also what functioning democracies (Ogbebor, 2020) and corporate governance (Tambini, 2010) require them to do.…”