Journalism as a profession in Sweden is strongly guided by collective norms, ideals and ethical guidelines. Being subjected to crimes such as threats or harassment due to the nature of the work is common amongst the force. To combat this the Swedish journalist union has guidelines as well as the Swedish police having a task force specifically for what is often referred to as crimes against the democracy, that being the act of attempting to silence people with influence over the public opinion. Nevertheless no guidelines, and furthermore scarce research, can be found regarding the impact of the journalistic identity on the decision making in the journalist’s private life. This study aims to research how Swedish journalists view their journalistic identity and whether they perceive this identity to affect journalists' propensity to report crimes they are victims of that aren’t in relation to their work. Through a quantitative survey distributed to Swedish journalists as well as semi-structured interviews with nine journalists, the study found that the journalistic identity still is concordant with the ideals and norms defined by the theory of journalism as a profession. Some, although not a majority, of the 41 participants of the survey viewed the journalistic identity as a contributing factor for whether or not they would decide on reporting a crime. Furthermore the interview study suggested that younger and/or female journalists were the ones who were mainly affected. Some stated that the ideals and ethics of the work made them more prone to reporting the crime they’d been, or hypothetically would be, a victim of. Whilst others stated that working in media made it harder to report crimes due to unwanted public attention, as well as fears of their work, or treatment at the workplace, being affected. Due to the scale of the study the results cannot be generalised but can however be indicative of workplace cultures or phenomena that opens up for further research into the journalistic identity’s effects on an individual's private life and decision making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-128610 |
| Creators | Atlagic, Samael |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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