The impact of socio-political variables on journalism is an ongoing concern of comparative
research on media systems and professional cultures. However, they have rarely been
studied systematically across diverse cases, particularly outside Western democracies,
and existing studies that compare western and non-western contexts have mainly focused
on journalistic role conceptions rather than actual journalistic practice. Using journalistic
role performance as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper overcomes
these shortcomings through a content analysis of 148,474 news stories from 365 print,
online, TV, and radio outlets in 37 countries. We consider two fundamental system-level
variables—liberal democracy and market orientation—testing a series of hypotheses
concerning their influence on the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service,
infotainment, and civic roles in the news globally. Findings confirm the widely asserted
hypothesis that liberal democracy is associated with the performance of public-service
oriented roles. Claims that market orientation reinforces critical and civic-oriented
journalism show more mixed results and give some support to the argument that there
are forms of “market authoritarianism” associated with loyalist journalism. The findings
also show that the interventionist and infotainment roles are not significantly associated
with the standard measures of political and economic structure, suggesting the need
for more research on their varying forms across societies and the kinds of system-level
factors that might explain them.
