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.

中文翻译：

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专业实践的社会背景：考察 37 个国家政治和经济对新闻角色表现的影响

社会政治变量对新闻业的影响是媒体系统和专业文化比较研究持续关注的问题。然而，它们很少在不同的案例中进行系统的研究，特别是在西方民主国家之外，而且现有的比较西方和非西方背景的研究主要集中在新闻角色概念而不是实际的新闻实践上。本文以新闻角色表演为理论和方法论框架，通过对 37 个国家 365 个印刷媒体、网络、电视和广播媒体的 148,474 篇新闻报道进行内容分析，克服了这些缺点。我们考虑两个基本的系统层面的变量——自由民主和市场导向——检验一系列关于它们对全球新闻中的干预者、监督者、忠诚促进者、服务、信息娱乐和公民角色的影响的假设。研究结果证实了广泛主张的假设，即自由民主与公共服务导向角色的表现有关。市场导向强化了批判性和公民导向的新闻报道的说法显示出更多复杂的结果，并为“忠诚新闻报道存在某种形式的“市场威权主义”这一论点提供了一定的支持。研究结果还表明，干预主义和信息娱乐的作用与政治和经济结构的标准衡量标准没有显着相关，这表明需要对它们在社会中的不同形式以及可能解释它们的系统层面因素进行更多研究。