Soziodemografische Merkmale

Audience expectations of journalism: What’s politics got to do with it?

“…Although we know from long time series that professional journalists’ roles are rather stable and do not change during the course of some years (Weaver et al, 2019), changes both in the profession and in politics might lead to slightly different observations. However, for the largest discrepancies, we have no reason to assume a problematic bias: while we, for example, asked journalists under a social democratic–conservative government about the importance of being a watchdog – the role with the largest gap – we did so concerning the importance among the audience under a conservative right-wing government; against the background of journalists in Austria placing themselves pretty exactly at the middle of a left–right continuum (Dietrich-Gsenger and Seethaler, 2019) and the fact that the conservative right-wing government openly attacked the public broadcasting system (Egelhofer et al, 2020), which employs a considerable share of Austrian journalists, we see no reason that journalists’ critical attitude toward the government would have decreased meaningfully.…”