Not Partisans, But Participants

Abstract

There is ample research confirming that journalistic interventionism in political reporting has increased and that journalism has become more interpretive during the past few decades. Drawing from semi-structured interviews (N = 30) and a survey (N = 330), this article presents a concrete and practice-oriented view of journalistic interventionism in the professional ethos of Finnish journalists working in mainstream newsrooms. Theoretically, it suggests a distinction between the quantity (degree) and quality (nature) of journalistic interventionism, which will help empirical research to be more open to different kinds of interventionist practices and journalists’ own ways of incorporating them into their professional ethos. By analyzing journalists’ self-reported descriptions of how journalistic interventionism occurs in their actual work practices, this article describes how Finnish journalists negotiate their professional ethos as financial pressures, heightened competition, and assertive forms of public life seem to be questioning objectivity and nonpartisan neutrality.