807353
research-article2018
JOU0010.1177/1464884918807353JournalismHanitzsch
Representativeness
Journalism studies still
needs to fix Western bias
Journalism
2019, Vol. 20(1) 214­–217
© The Author(s) 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918807353
DOI: 10.1177/1464884918807353
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Thomas Hanitzsch
LMU Munich, Germany
Granted, studying journalism without any sort of ethnocentric bias is an epistemological
impossibility. Just like all human beings, researchers bring their own selves to bear on
the object of study. As scholars, we tend to calibrate our understanding of journalism to
a convenient set of familiar concepts and cultural experience. This does not necessarily
need to be a problem. In an ideal scholarly world, all voices compete in academic discourse regardless of geographic and linguistic origin, ultimately leading to a truly cosmopolitan vision of journalism and news production. Unfortunately, this is not the world
we live in. In this short essay, I argue that, despite successful efforts to internationalize
the field in terms of quantity, journalism studies is still struggling with the consequences
of a continued Western hegemony in the way we approach and understand journalism on
a global scale. This hegemony, understandable its reasons are, is doing the field a
disservice.
Most of what we know and take for granted in the Western world, but also elsewhere,
about ‘journalism’ rests on concepts and evidence generated from within Western concepts and experience. Despite globalization, Western countries are still the dominant
sites of both the production and subject of research in the field. In part, this Western
dominance has resulted from, and is reinforcing, a concentration of academic and textbook publishers in the Anglo-Saxon world using English as the default language.
Furthermore, the culturally asymmetric recognition of academic research and intellectual authority in global knowledge production give scholars from the Global North a
considerable advantage. Western researchers often take it for granted that their work is
relevant to readers around the world, while researchers from non-Western contexts often
have to defend their choice of countries and country-specific literatures. Western publications, particularly journal articles, have a structure, format, and academic writing style
as well as a quantitative methods bias that non-Western researchers may not always be
trained in or be acquainted with, making it difficult for them to publish in journals that
offer their work greater visibility.
Corresponding author:
Thomas Hanitzsch, LMU Munich, 80539 Munchen, Germany.
Email: thomas.hanitzsch@ifkw.lmu.de
Hanitzsch
215
Browsing through the field’s major publication outlets yields impressive evidence of
the field having become much more international than, say, 25 years ago. Part of this
move toward globalization is a growing number of publications coming out of the nonWestern world. However, despite an increasing quantity of publication output from the
Global South, its qualitative impact on the field is still relatively minor. By far, most of
the studies we typically consider groundbreaking or field-defining were authored by
scholars from the West. Internationalization in journalism studies has largely taken place
within the confines of the Western world, with European scholars gradually gaining
weight in international associations and academic journals. Even so, US scholarship still
reigns supreme when it comes to defining key areas of inquiry (such as ‘fake news’ and
verification, most recently) and to directing the field in theoretical, epistemological, and
methodological terms.
The paucity of recognition of non-Western scholarship is also reflected in the way
journalism scholars recognize and distribute scholarly prestige. The dominance of US
scholarship is particularly noteworthy. While currently more than 52 percent of the members of the International Communication Association’s (ICA) Journalism Studies
Division are working in institutions outside the United States,1 the field’s symbolic capital, indexed through major awards honoring scholarly achievement, tends to be allocated
to researchers based or trained in the United States. Between 2011 and 2018, ICA’s
Journalism Studies Division has given all of its book, dissertation, and outstanding article awards to scholars from universities located in the West. Of the 20 major awards, 13
went to US researchers.2
Arguably, this Western dominance, and the uneven coverage of world regions by
researchers, has consequences for our understanding of journalism. ‘International’ journalism research, still too often, problematizes journalism from within the Western experience and a Western analytical framework. Western cultures of journalism, and
particularly the news media in the United States, have become the prism through which
we have constructed normality with respect to how we understand journalism globally.
This framework builds on the idea of the separation of powers, accomplished through a
system of checks and balances. Grounded in a liberal pluralist view, journalism is seen
as essential to the creation and maintenance of participatory democracy. Acting as Fourth
Estate alongside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of power, this understanding assumes that the news media are independent of the state and that journalists are
autonomous agents who represent the people.
This approach privileges liberal democracy and individuality, which may be different
from norms that exist elsewhere as exemplified by the debate over the value of development journalism. For many countries newly emergent from colonialism, development
journalism, based on a collectivistic precept, was one way to overcome the destitution
left behind by colonialists, but for many in the West it represented a stifling of the press
by government. One will, therefore, have to understand that the genesis of theory,
research, and practice in the field of communication, and thus also of journalism, lies in
Western tenets. The Western experience has even become a standard against which we
tend to gauge journalism and the news in other regions of the world. As a result, journalistic cultures in some, mostly developing and transitional societies are sometimes portrayed as needing to ‘catch up’ with the norms and practices celebrated by the West.
216
Journalism 20(1)
Nowhere is the problem of generalizing and exporting the Western view to other parts
of the world more obvious than in academic and professional discourses lamenting a crisis
of journalism. Responding to unsettling developments in selected Western countries,
scholars have issued calls for ‘rebuilding’, ‘reconsidering’, ‘remaking’, ‘reconstructing’,
‘rethinking’ and ‘reinventing’ journalism (Alexander et al., 2016; Anderson, 2013;
Boczkowski and Anderson, 2017; Downie and Schudson, 2009; Peters and Broersma,
2013; Waisbord, 2013), and even for ‘rethinking again’ (Peters and Broersma, 2017).
The alarmist tone of this debate may well be appropriate in parts of the Western world,
notably the United States, but the situation in many other countries may not necessarily
call for such a response. The political and economic conditions of journalism in the
United States, as well its historical tradition and cultural mythology, render the US media
system substantively distinct, if not exceptional, when put in comparison with other
nations, including those in the West (Curran, 2011). While traditional journalism may be
contracting in large parts of the Global North, the industry is still expanding in many
developing nations, such as China and India.
Through journalism studies’ obsession with problems experienced in the West (such
as shrinking revenue, a loss of media trust and journalistic authority, competition from
social and ‘alternative’ media, and a growth of precarious labor), the field is ignoring
some of the really burning issues faced by journalists and news organizations in other
parts of the world. Among these problems are issues of journalists’ safety and impunity,
declining press freedom and the return of censorship, as well as clientelism and instrumental use of the media by politicians. Other issues are more broadly related to the social
conditions of journalism, such as authoritarian resilience, pervasive corruption, low
human development, and strong socio-economic inequalities.
Hence, the proclaimed crisis of journalism may actually be, at least in part, a crisis of
the professional paradigm celebrated by journalists in the West, and – by extension – the
expression of an intellectual blind spot in journalism scholarship. Shrinking public confidence in the news and the erosion of journalism’s epistemic authority to speak truth, for
instance, may less be a universal phenomenon but one specifically related to a general
crisis of democratic institutions in parts of the Western world.
Journalism studies as a field can, and must, do better to become truly international, not
just in quantitative terms (conference attendance and publication output), but also by recognizing a global diversity of journalistic cultures and intellectual thought lines that look
beyond North America and Western Europe. Studying journalism from a non-Western
perspective should be more than just a sideline of journalism research; it has the potential
to call into question key assumptions about journalism that we have long taken for granted.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1.
2.
E-mail exchange with ICA Member Services, from 18 December 2017.
https://www.icahdq.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=186103&id=631059.
Hanitzsch
217
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