Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work

Abstract

How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews with journalists covering humanitarian issues, we explain how they minimized tensions between their diplomatic role and dominant norms of journalistic autonomy by drawing on three – broadly shared – legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In the first ‘exclusionary’ narrative, journalists differentiated their ‘truthful’ news reporting from the ‘false’ state ‘propaganda’ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second ‘fuzzifying’ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of ‘soft power’ as an ambivalent ‘boundary concept’, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final ‘inversion’ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater ‘operational autonomy’. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalists’ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital.

Understanding RT’s Audiences: Exposure Not Endorsement for Twitter Followers of Russian State-Sponsored Media

“…The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) purportedly aims to provide a Russian perspective on events and issues to international audiences. In doing so, RT blurs the lines between news reporting, propaganda, and soft power (Wright et al 2020: 2), and has, since its creation in 2005, become the subject of much controversy—especially in the “Western” states in which it operates and seeks to exert influence. The controversies vary in different parts of the world.…”

Crumbled autonomy: Czech journalists leaving the Prime Minister's newspapers

“…For a long time, the journalists employed various strategies of appropriation (see Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017), among which the legitimization of staying in their positions was prominent. The frequently employed legitimizing strategies included exclusion and inversion (Wright et al, 2020): the journalists excluded themselves from the group of those who lost their autonomy and saw the ownership as enabling individual, operational autonomy. On one hand, they needed to take care of families, pay mortgages, and enjoy relatively decent and stable incomes.…”

“…Our interviewees' retrospective justification for staying in the newsroom can be understood as a strategy par excellence for appropriation (cf. exclusionary legitimizing narrative, Wright et al, 2020).…”

“…socialization above; Godole, 2015); or adjust “their professional aspirations in a way that brings the journalists’ cognitive roles into consistency with—actual or narrated—practice”; or leave the newsroom and even the profession (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 128). Wright et al (2020) further explore the legitimizing narratives of journalists working for state-funded news organizations, that is, ways of appropriation. These narratives are exclusionary (we are better than others), fuzzifying (we will soften the deal with the powerful) and characterized by inversion (dependence on the state funding strengthens our operational autonomy).…”

News production and intercultural communication at the crossroads of disciplines

“…In addition, media ventures such as the European news channel Euronews, Russian government's Russia Today and China's CGTN underline the centrality of translation in news production. In a study of a number of transnational news media, Wright et al (2020) stressed that, given its unclear nature, the concept of soft power may be conflated with that of state propaganda, although in the interviews they conducted with journalists, news writers attempted to portray their work in a different light. In other words, in their view state-funded media does not necessarily undermine the credibility of their work.…”