Explaining the Endurance of News Norms in Humanitarian and Human Rights News

• In Event: Reinvigorating Theory in Journalism Studies: Rethinking Journalism-Advocacy Relations

Abstract

As legacy news outlets reduce the resources they commit to international news, scholars have suggested that increasingly influential advocacy groups might challenge extant news norms by grafting advocacy aims onto news stories. Yet the available research suggests that news norms remain largely intact: government officials and journalists still set the news agenda, and advocacy groups play a peripheral, if growing, role around it. Drawing on interviews with journalists and NGO professionals, as well as observations of human rights news production at the Turkey-Syria border, this paper explains the relative endurance of news norms. Newsroom editors remain skeptical of advocacy groups, thus limiting the extent to which reporters can include such views in their story. Simultaneously, the growing use of freelancers by NGOs diffuses news norms into advocacy settings, thus ensuring that advocacy groups produce material in keeping with journalists’ needs. The result is the relative endurance of extant news norms.

Author

• Matthew Powers, U of Washington