Journalism and Democracy

Journalism provides people the information to help them understand the world and make decision on particular issues (Franklin et al. 2005: 124). Journalism also has an obligation to be loyal to interests of citizens. This differentiates journalism from the business such as information service provider or PR industry.

Strömbäck discusses its indispensable relationship between journalism and democracy. In democratic society, freedom of speech, expression, and information is necessary for citizens, and journalism needs the independence from the state (2005:332). This scholar classifies four pattern of democracy in terms of matureness. In the process of evolution, the role of journalism is getting complicated. At the premature stage of democracy, journalism’s role is just to act as a watchdog for a powerful or burglar alarm exposing wrong doings. This is the basic role in democracy. At the mature stage, journalism plays a role to set the agenda, mobilise citizens’ interest, and present public discussions.

Kovach and Rosenstiel summarise that there are the nine basic elements of journalism: (1)journalism’s first obligation is to the truth (2)its first loyalty is to citizens (3)its essence is a discipline of verification (4)its practitioners must maintain independence from those they cover (5)it must serve as an independent monitor of power (6)it must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise (7)it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant (8)it must keep the news comprehensive and proportional (9)its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience (2001: 12).

2-2-2. Business/Financial Journalism

Business/financial journalism is a part of the journalism and there are the same expectations from the public as discussed above. It covers economic issues such as the central bank’s monetary policy, the movement of economic index, companies’ strategies, companies’ earnings, and the like. However, the contents of business/financial journalism require journalists to have the basic knowledge of economy, and its audience has specifically financial concerns to read or see the business/financial media (PS Burton 2002).

Its audience is not only the individuals but also the professionals such as the bankers, fund managers, the companies’ executives, the academic people and the like. Some of the audience may make decisions to sell or buy the stocks or the foreign currencies, and demand quick information. In response to this demand, for example, Reuters has started to provide the electric machines which show not only the business/ financial news but also the economic indexes on the screen all at once (Hargreaves 2005: 106). This will be the risk to change business/financial journalism into information service provider business.

2-2-3. Problems of Business/Financial Journalism

One of the problems of the business/financial journalism is to fail to draw a big picture of the story. Davis discusses “business news will always follow corporate agendas and ignore non-corporate interests” (2000: 286). The agenda tends to focus on financial issues too much. Hargreaves, who has experience working for the Financial Times for fifteen years, confesses its characteristics as “the atmosphere was intellectually bracing and wonderfully international. But it could also be deadeningly narrow” (Hargreaves 2005: 90).

Another problem is that the business/financial journalism misses to predict and warn future incidents, and contributes to economic boom. According to Uskali, the reason is “the business journalists need to find ‘scoops’ in order to satisfy their paying customers”. Their sources are the analysts and investors who judge the trend quickly and roughly and invest based on their assumption. He argues that the business/financial journalism is influenced by the sources’ framework. In addition, “weak signals” which alarm the potential risk in the future are hard to detect for the journalists because “they[weak signals] are uncertain and irrational” (2005: 6).

The bankruptcy of Enron and the collapse of ‘the dotcom bubble’ in the United States are the examples of the business/financial journalism’s failure to alert the potential risks of those companies’ management style to citizens. Hargreaves introduces the comments of Richard Lambert, the editor of the Financial Times throughout the nineties which says “The Enron affair reveals something about the culture of business journalism”. According to Lambert’s reflection, there are three reasons of the failure to find out the problems: too much influence from the big financial institutions which rated Enron positively, too much concerned with personalities rather than deep analysis, and companies’ lack of transparency and the strict libel law which protect them (2005: 107).

Longman analyses there are six problems in the business/financial journalism which allowed Enron’s fraud and the dotcom bubble. Firstly, many business journalists had little self-consciousness about lack of enthusiasm on business issues. Some journalists cared about the salaries, and that was why they chose the job. Secondly, those companies were not only news sources for journalists but also the advertisers. Business/financial publications were financially supported by advertisers. This would be the pressure not to criticise them. Thirdly, the journalists did not have enough knowledge about the business and the skill to analyse companies in terms of their financial situation. It made them depend on expert sources and fail to have the objective point of view. Fourthly, the news organisations became a part of conglomeration and this “many of the biggest business stories involve media companies themselves” (2002: 21). This would affect the lack of neutrality in news selection or judgement of news value. Fifthly, the rise of public relations was systematically successful to block journalists to contact with executives directly who were the actual players of the stories. Lastly, the restructuring of news organisation such as lay-offs and cutting the budgets affected the number of resources to cover the business news. This led to the lack of enough time for journalists to detect problems.

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