In the grip of politics? How political journalists in France and Germany perceive political influence on their work

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to find out whether countries with different media systems differed when exercising political influence (1) on political coverage and (2) in the exchanges of journalists and sources. France and Germany are suitable objects of comparison because Hallin and Mancini (2004) and others argued that French journalism showed higher levels of political parallelism. Hence, we should expect to find more influence in the French context. However, Hallin and Mancini did not focus on the rules shaping exchanges at the individual level. Taking this as our starting point, we compared high-ranking political journalists’ (N = 284) perspectives on their interaction with political elites presenting them two statements measuring political influence. Our results suggest that French journalists perceived greater political influence on news content than did German journalists. In contrast, journalists working in France perceived that their political views had less influence on access to information than did their German counterparts. These results are in line with institutional and cultural differences between the countries’ politics-media contexts and suggest that political parallelism at the individual level plays a stronger role in the interactions of political journalists and political sources in Germany.