The Washington, DC Media Corps in the 21st Century

The Source-Correspondent Relationship

L. Hellmüller, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137389022
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The book provides a fresh perspective on the shifting media landscape within Washington DC, re-evaluating journalist-source relationships, the power dynamic within the media corps, and the ways in which technology have changed the description of DC political news - detailing the ways in which media relationships are changing within Washington DC.

1

Introduction

I would rather go to jail than to give up a source. Sources are always important. They are everything.

—US correspondent, personal communication,
Washington, DC, January 2012

Access to sources is the weather vane of journalistic success, and that is especially true in Washington, DC, where journalists cover one of the most politically powerful beats. Reliable sources in journalism are resources that build trust among audiences. Sources give meaning to an event, provide context and reasons, and a feeling of “being there” as they speak based on their own experiences and expertise. Trustworthy sources help establish the credibility of news stories and, in turn, of the news organization. While sources are important for journalists, the relationship journalists hold with key sources is also a delicate one, particularly in the capital where many journalists compete for the one sound bite and often keep their sources confidential.

Personal interviews and survey data collected for this book empirically examine how journalists’ relationship with sources plays out in the 21st-century media landscape. While much has been written about how political power is established through the agenda setting of political issues, not much attention has been paid to social power, the form of getting politicians’ voice heard through the relationship with journalists. Hence, the book maps out the delicate relationship between politicians and journalists from the perspective of US and foreign correspondents. This book analyzes the perception of correspondents about their relationships with DC politicians and their reporting strategies. In essence, the book reveals patterns of why sources get heard and how social power is established through building and maintaining close relationships with power holders. One political correspondent in DC revealed during an interview how strategic and complex relationships with politicians can be:

A key White House staff member—he is dead, but I am leaving him nameless—had been a close friend at The University of Texas. I called on him one of my first days in town [Washington, DC], and he suggested that we take a walk. Outside, he said, in essence, “OK, I know you, and I trust you, and I will answer your questions when I can. But NEVER AGAIN call on me at the White House, either in person or by phone. If you have a question, call my home number and ask [my wife] to have me give you a call ‘about the weekend.’ You will probably not hear from me until 8 p.m. or so, when I can call you from home. But I will help you when I can, and if I can.” He did just that. The spring of 1968, LBJ scheduled a long talk on Vietnam; the minute he opened his mouth, I filed a story with the Inquirer (written the previous day) with a lead that went something like this: “President Johnson stunned the nation Sunday night by announcing that he would neither seek nor accept nomination for re-election this year. (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012)

Source information is key to breaking a news story; important policy makers hold the power to know what will happen next and thus give journalists the material to inform their audiences about the future and consequences of important decision-making processes. Source materials enable journalists to carry out one of their main functions in society: to inform and to educate. Certainly, the power of sources over news is not news in itself: one of the most important examples involving the power of source materials is the Watergate scandal in 1972, in which the Nixon administration was discovered covering up its role in the break-in at the National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office. This scandal led to the resignation of President Nixon. The case bears an important place in the collective memory of journalism, as every detail of the investigation, from its fact checking to its organizational procedure, provides a role model of investigative reporting in DC. But more important is the strategic source use and source checking, which remains most often part of a side story rather than the main Watergate story. When journalist Bob Woodward was investigating on Watergate with his colleague Carl Bernstein, he came to conclusions based on information from sources, and the critical point was that Woodward’s quoting a source was important for the breakthrough in the whole scandal (as he was using a secret information source named “Deep Throat”). Regarding the case, one of the correspondents remembered the following:

And the managing editor came to Bob and he said to him, “I would like to speak to you. Who is your source?” And Bob said, “I cannot tell you, especially not in the newsroom.” “Okay, fine; let’s go.” They walked from Fifteenth Street to McPherson Square and they were sitting down on a bench and made sure that no one was listening, including the FBI and others. He went with him and asked him: “Who is our source?” And it was the deputy director of the FBI. But the managing editor did his job. People trusted the source, because these two guys did their job very professionally. (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012)

The way journalists interact with sources has changed since the 1970s because of technological advances and professional knowledge of how to communicate more strategically with important policy makers. What remains the same is that sources have limited time and may provide exclusive information to one media organization at the expense of other journalists aiming to get an exclusive sound bite or interview. As prestigious source access is for journalists’ own professional prestige, exclusive source material is still challenging for journalists to access, even though new communication channels such as social media provide enhanced opportunities to contact someone personally. Within that paradox, it is particularly important to point out that in the DC case, foreign correspondents struggle to gain access to important policy makers (Willnat and Weaver, 2003). Such lack of access to sources has become increasingly evident as the number of foreign correspondents in Washington, DC has increased over the past few decades; in 2008, the number was nearly 10 times what it was in 1968 when the US State Department first opened a foreign press center (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009; see figure 1.1). The increase in the number of foreign correspondents can be explained by international events that have led to an increased interest in US politics. For example, Al-Jazeera’s English-language service opened a Washington bureau in 2006, and within three years of being in DC, the organization had already hired 86 staff members accredited to cover Congress in 2009 (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009).

In contrast to foreign media, the US mainstream media has reduced the number of staff in DC. However, this has led to a sharp growth among niche US media organizations and foreign media now represented in the capital, and DC has emerged as a transnational journalism news-gathering environment. That is, an increasing number of journalists from around the globe, carrying with them their journalistic culture and native languages, compete for political sources in DC and gather news alongside US journalists—traditional journalists, bloggers, or freelance staff. However, that is only one part of the transnational journalism story. News organizations increasingly target a transnational audience and thereby expand the audience size. In fact, the launch of Al-Jazeera America in August 2013 is just another example of how global media outlets headquartered in the United States have become more global in their news-gathering routines by operating 70 offices overseas and approaching news content as building global understanding. The same holds true for foreign correspondence in the 21st century and for national news outlets targeting a culturally diverse audience within one country. For example, Univision, a US-based news organization, provides content in Spanish to more than 50 million Hispanics in the United States. There is no doubt that globalization and increasing immigration have not only intensified the need for such a network but they have also opened up new markets for targeting different ethnic groups within one country. National borders no longer reflect cultural borders or ethnic borders, as Reese (2001) has argued: “More important than national differences may be the emergence of a transnational global professionalism, the shape of which will greatly affect how well the world’s press meets the normative standards we would wish for it” (p. 173).

Figure 1.1 Foreign Correspondents Based in Washington, DC.

Source: Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009.

The increase in foreign reporting alongside the emergence of transnational and global media outlets challenges long-believed standards in journalism; standards mostly learned and embraced within one country. News gathering in DC presents an environment where journalists from different countries come together and work at the same place. Because those journalists were mostly socialized to journalism practices in their native countries, they bring with them a variety of journalism cultures. Now, what happens if journalists work in a different environment than their home base? Does their “‘journalism culture” change? And how do foreign correspondents affect the news culture in DC, if they have an impact at all? The idea in generating such questions is the fact that globalization has led to an interconnectedness of social systems; countries are no longer necessarily distinct but rather span national boundaries (de Mooij, 2010). Hence, the book contextualizes the relationship between correspondents and politicians based on criteria of transnational journalism culture explanations.

These research questions are important to consider because journalism culture is known to shape media content (Graber, 2002). Hence, the news-gathering environment in DC in the 21st century might have changed the way correspondents report about political sources. This book is novel in its approach to empirically map the dimensions of a transnational journalism culture, with DC providing the ideal case for such an analysis. The empirical study elaborates on the source-reporter relationship in a new transnational environment. Before explaining the details of the study, it is necessary to understand what is currently known about journalism culture and the importance of moving toward a more transnational, connected, and multicultural approach of studying the source-reporter relationship to theorize journalism culture.

State of the Art on Journalism Culture

Most studies on journalism culture have looked at journalists functioning in a particular social system. For example, scholars in various countries surveyed journalists’ perception of their professional roles and work (e.g., Keel, 2011; Marr, Wyss, Blum, and Bonfadelli, 2001; Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, and Wilhoit, 2007; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986, 1996; Weischenberg, Malik, and Scholl, 2006), compared different journalism cultures (Hanitzsch, 2011; Quandt, Löffelholz, Weaver, Hanitzsch, and Altmeppen, 2006), and examined foreign correspondents working in a different social system than the ones in which their news organizations are based (Peterson, 1979; Willnat and Weaver, 2003). This direction of research is to be expected, considering that theories explaining levels of influence on news such as Gatekeeping Theory (e.g., Shoemaker and Vos, 2009) have rested on the assumption of five levels of influence, in which social systems (e.g., culture, nation-state, individual history of countries) represent the outermost level. Such theoretical and analytical models like Gatekeeping Theory have the power to direct and organize the research findings. For example, the nation-state is considered to shape the individual professional attitudes of journalists. Most studies on journalism culture argue that journalists from different countries are different because they work in different countries under different political and economic structures. However, the privatization of television and convergence toward the US model has led scholars to conclude that distinctions among social systems have disappeared while a global ideal is appearing (Benson and Hallin, 2007), which would question the application of theoretical models like Gatekeeping Theory by taking the nation-state as the basis of comparison. One of the contemporary paradigms in comparative media research results from such a paradoxical coexistence of the differences and the universal (i.e., the West and the Global) in media structures and media content across the globe (Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch, 2009): National borders may no longer draw distinctions among media cultures, but differences in media cultures might be based on cultural, linguistic, or ethnic criteria, which may cross over national borders. Waisbord (2004) argued that global and national media trends are not necessarily contradictory to each other but can also complement one another. Furthermore, global trends in national media contexts reflect internal struggles of a media industry in how “the globalization of the business model of television and the efforts of international and domestic companies deal with the resilience of national cultures” (Waisbord, 2004, p. 360). Hence, the next step in journalism research is to empirically investigate such global or transnational journalism cultures to understand how globalization affects journalism cultures. Now, to understand the phenomena, we have to first map out a way to approach the concept of transnational journalism culture and a definition of the meaning of journalism culture and transnational journalism. The coherent understanding of the concepts will set the road map for the empirical study and build new knowledge on journalists’ relationship with sources in the 21st century.

Journalism Culture

Understanding journalism cultures is important because of its impact on news coverage (Graber, 2002). However, Hanitzsch’s (2007a) conceptualization of journalism culture still rests on the idea that journalism culture corresponds to the country in which those journalists work. On the other hand, there is clearly a need for an elaborated theoretical foundation on which transnational journalism cultures can be analyzed and explained. For example, why do foreign correspondents have less access to important policy makers than US correspondents? How does less access affect the coverage of US politics?

Journalism culture is considered “a particular set of ideas and practices by which journalists legitimate their role in society and render their work meaningful” (Hanitzsch, 2007a, p. 369). In a transnational news environment, we might wonder what journalists’ meaning of society entails: What specific context are journalists referring to as “society”? Are they referring to a society from their home country where journalists were born and raised or where they were socialized (e.g., their first job), or is a transnational context creating its own logic of such a multicultural society? Is a class of cosmopolitan journalists (i.e., Reese, 2001) emerging?

Hanitzsch’s (2007a) theoretical piece published in Communication Theory has greatly contributed to contemporary understandings of how to operationalize journalism culture. He identified three basic levels that articulate journalism culture: the performative, the evaluative, and the cognitive (see table 1.1). The performative level (i.e., journalists’ practice) is defined as how journalists select, report, and frame stories; journalism culture is materialized in the way journalists do their work. The evaluative and the cognitive levels structure the way journalists perform their job (e.g., whether or not they seek balance in reporting). At the evaluative level, journalism cultures manifest themselves by professional worldviews or role conceptions of journalists. An evaluative level may serve prescriptive functions, as it functions as a normative guideline. In fact, a large body of literature examines role conceptions or professional worldviews, mostly with an underlying normative assumption that evaluative elements as part of a journalism culture will eventually inform performative elements of a journalism culture (e.g., Graber, 2002; Hanitzsch, 2011; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). The cognitive level bridges the evaluative and performative levels. At the cognitive level, journalism culture is shaped by a structure on which perception and attribution of news values to events is based. As such, the cognitive level is very much a component of the performative level, if performative elements are not solely to be analyzed on an output level but also with regard to how journalists perform their jobs, how they select sources, and how they gather news.

Table 1.1 The Three Levels of Transnational Journalism Culture

Schudson (2001) further distinguished between practices and norms that inform journalistic practices. In essence, journalism scholarship implicitly pays attention to the importance of the two components of a journalism culture: evaluative (norms) and performative (practice). However, journalism scholarship has mostly treated the two as independent fields of investigation. One strand of journalism research has focused on news values, news factors (i.e., indicators), source selection, and frames in news reports by content-analyzing performative elements of journalism (Iyengar, 1991; Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2006; Tresch, 2009). Another strand of research has investigated journalists’ role perception or journalism’s institutional role (i.e., its evaluative component). Journalistic role conception has been defined as journalists’ perception of journalism’s social functions in society (Donsbach, 2008b; Weaver et al., 2007). Those perceived social functions are assumed to shape the stories that journalists ultimately report, but a normative link between role conception and role enactment should be met with skepticism (Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos, 2013). In fact, media organizations are influenced by the demands of external factors such as financial concerns and competition with other media (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). To understand the multilevel concept of journalism culture, its practice and norms have to be considered. Hanitzsch’s (2007a) framework for conceptualizing journalism culture around the world remains on the evaluative level. He and his colleagues surveyed journalists in over 80 countries and asked them about their professional roles (worldsofjournalism.org), but they have not linked those statements to actual practices. To shed light on the concept of journalistic culture, this book approaches it empirically from the source-reporter relationship and analyzes those different levels of journalism culture to conceptualize, operationalize, and empirically investigate Hanitzsch’s (2007a) conceptualization of levels of journalism cultures—in a transnational context.

Transnational Journalism

Globalization has affected journalism at all levels. As Reese (2008) argued, globalization exists in many different forms and facets so that even a newswire in Africa using the Internet as a research tool can be considered an example of how globalization affects news gather...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• 2   Correspondents’ Perceptions and Interactions with DC Sources
• 3   News-Gathering and Sourcing Routines of DC Correspondents
• 4   The Correspondents’ Professional Worldviews of Their Interactions with Sources
• 5   The DC Transnational Journalism Culture of the 21st Century
• 6   The Analytical Model of Transnational Journalism Culture
• Appendix A:Web Survey Instrument and IRB Approval
• Appendix B: Semi-Structured Interview Guide
• References
• Index