Mission vs. Money: Professional Values and Attitudes of Public and Commercial Media Journalists in the United States

ABSTRACTThis study compares the demographics, professional values, and attitudes of public and commercial journalists in the United States. Based on survey interviews with representative samples of 394 public broadcasting journalists and 1,491 commercial journalists, the study finds significant differences in demographics, attitudes, and role perceptions between the two groups. Public media journalists, who tend to be younger, more politically left-leaning, more racially diverse, and work in more gender-balanced newsrooms than their commercial colleagues, appear more mission-driven and prefer to tell complex, interpretive stories to help the public take action. By contrast, commercial journalists prize publishing quickly to the broadest possible audience while showing less interest in influencing public affairs.KEYWORDS: Public broadcastingjournalismNPRPBScomparativesurvey Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We define the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in relation to these two American political parties to separate our definition from broader conceptions that are often grounded in political ideologies. Feldman (Citation2013), for example, defines left-wing ideologies such as socialism to be “based on the values of equality, social justice, and widespread involvement in the political system” (p. 594) and right-wing ideologies—including nationalism and fascism—as those that “emphasize social control and unequal influence over political and economic systems” (p. 594). Since the United States is neither a socialist nor a fascist nation, we align political beliefs with the two dominant U.S. parties. In so doing, we follow a rich tradition of literature about the U.S. media, which equates “liberal” and “conservative” attitudes with being “Democratic” and “Republican,” respectively (e.g., Garrett and Bond Citation2021; Hmielowski et al. Citation2020; Lee and Hosam Citation2020). While we asked journalists to identify their preferred party affiliations, we also allowed them to place themselves on an ideological scale ranging from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” We offer these multiple opportunities at definition in part because, as Barber and Pope (Citation2019) note, researchers have consistently found that Americans identify themselves using an entanglement of both party and political affiliation.2 Because both commercial and public media journalists received the same questionnaire (except for a series of some questions on the performance of U.S. public broadcasting), this move of respondents from the main to the public sample does not affect the statistical analyses nor does it significantly impact the representativeness of each sample.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Syracuse University and the John Ben Snow Foundation.