Comparing Risks to Journalism: Media Criticism in the Digital Hate

This paper addresses “digital media criticism” and its implications to journalism. Digital media criticism refers to publicly shared evaluations and judgements of journalistic text and actors on various digital platforms. The overarching aim of the paper is to investigate how journalists cope when digital media criticism poses a risk to journalism. The special focus is to inquire how digital hate (in the forms of online harassment, cyberbullying, racist, homophobic remarks in digital spaces, etc) portends to journalism when it poses as a risk to journalists and the news practice. In a quick summary, this paper identifies two important points worth exploring empirically (through qualitative interviews with practicing journalists). First, how journalists are positioned as central actors in the discursive struggle over journalistic authority. And two, how they negotiate risks to journalism in a digital discursive ecology. I therefore ask: How do journalists discursively respond to digital media criticism?

Sample

As for the method, this paper employs qualitative interviews with 27 practising journalists 27 journalists i.e. 15 practising journalists in Kenya and 12 in South Africa (11 identified as female and 16, male). These were journalists that were active on social media (mainly Twitter and Facebook) because in this study, it is important that the journalists have a presence within digital space. To add a layer of analysis, this study took a contextual comparative approach of Kenyan and South African journalistic cultures. The two contexts were chosen for this study because understanding the influence of digital media criticism on journalistic practice globally today, can be enriched through cross-national studies that could reveal similarities and differences into how practitioners negotiate criticism and its risks within their own journalistic cultures.

Main Findings

The key findings of this research are described using the term “digital discursive resistances”. Digital discursive resistances are journalists’ reactionary practices or sentiments when faced with criticism in digital spaces. From the interviews with practicing journalists, it became clear that their description of their responses to critics and criticism largely tend towards defensive strategies in shielding journalism as a profession. This paper then offers four main forms of digital discursive resistances. These are: consolidation, filtering, rationalisation and counter-discourses. Consolidation describes the ways journalists shield the profession in digital spaces. For example, when journalists assert their editorial independence when criticised on Twitter or Facebook over their news coverage. Filtering has to do with strategies to undercut critics, evade criticism or simply dismiss them. For example, when journalists block critics from their social network pages or report abuse. Rationalisation is about coping with the information-glut in digital spaces through strategic choices about when to respond and who to respond to. These are, for example, conscious choices by journalists not to participate in online debates especially when there is public outrage over the news or their behaviour. Counter-discourses entail journalistic sentiments to counteract criticism in digital spaces. For example, when journalists dismiss critics for being uncivil on social networks.

Policy recommendations/implications

Today, journalists in digital spaces produce and disseminate the news while also engaging with their audiences – which is an important part of their practice. However, they are at the same time, the subjects of cynical commentary, anti-press rhetoric and even personal attacks within this digital spaces. The paper concludes that in a largely chaotic terrain of digital media criticism, the foremost challenge to journalists is how to cope with factionalised platforms, diverse sets of critics and, at the same time, highly polarised spaces. Second, what is of utmost importance to traditional journalists is to maintain news journalism’s authority as the first line of defense against a deluge of critical and unpredictable anti-media discourse. The findings are an important contribution to policy on journalistic safety as well as media accountability (specifically ways to balance the need for criticism against the potential for risks that come with journalists’ presence in digital spaces).

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Readers might also be interested in this other paper in a related research project: The paper titled “Popular criticism that matters: Journalists’ perspectives of ‘quality’ media critique” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2018.1494511), introduces novel categorisation of good and bad criticisms from social media as defined by career journalists.