The historical roots of the normative model of journalism

Abstract

Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic western model of journalism, which has dominated normative discussions for the past century, derives from a set of relationships and practices formed around relatively monopolistic daily newspapers and wire services at the end of the 19th century. This model assumes that news organizations are relatively autonomous from the state and that individual journalists are independent agents engaged in an agonistic relationship to power while representing the people by, among other things, giving expert accounts of affairs of public importance. It assumes that journalists’ capacity for independence is provided by the media organizations that employ them. This model of journalism never described more than a sector of the news environment, especially outside the West. At the end of the 20th century, its usefulness in the West diminished with the erosion of the bottlenecks that had enabled some news organizations to acquire significant autonomous power, and with the rise of a new news environment with new news practices. These changes have opened the possibility of the redefinition of journalism, along with a rethinking of the relationship between journalism and democracy.