Abstract
Autonomy is of paramount importance for journalism, but there is little empirically based knowledge of how journalists cope when it is threatened. Using a case study approach, this contribution examines a newsroom conflict that took place in the public service Radio and Television of Slovakia. It started when the new director general, a person believed to have ties to one of the coalition political parties, was elected by the parliament in 2017, and it culminated in layoffs and resignations of more than 30 reporters and editors in 2018. The case study is based on semi-structured interviews (N = 16) with the journalists who decided to quit in protest of what they called “creeping political pressure,” those whose contracts were not prolonged, those who decided to stay at their jobs, and the members of the previous and the new management. Building on the interviews and document analysis, the article inductively develops a classification scheme for resistance practices the journalists used to cope with the perceived interference with their professional autonomy that came from within their media organisation. These practices include having internal discussions, voicing concerns during newsroom meetings, writing an internal letter to the management, meeting with the management, establishing a trade union, requesting mediation, writing an open letter to the viewers and listeners, publicly criticising the management in the media, voluntarily asking to be re-assigned to another topic area or position in order to avoid interference, staying at one’s job in open opposition to the management, and resigning in protest.
Highlights
Professional autonomy is one of the holy grails of journal‐ ism
Even though the conflict affected both the radio and television divisions of Radio and Television of Slovakia (RTVS), this study focuses on the television only because the clash was more dramatic, more closely followed by the public, and led to more staff resignations
This article explored the resistance practices used by the journalists who worked for RTVS, the Slovak public service broadcaster, to cope with what they perceived as the undue and journalistically unwarranted interfer‐ ence of their superiors with their professional auton‐ omy
Summary
Professional autonomy is one of the holy grails of journal‐ ism. The freedom of journalists to make and follow their own norms and rules of practice is one of the key ideal‐ typical values upon which journalism’s ideology is based (Deuze, 2005). The question of how journalists deal with the pressure and interfer‐ ence is less often addressed, and if so, available stud‐ ies have focused mostly on external political interfer‐ ence that occurs in flawed democracies and authoritar‐ ian or hybrid regimes (Ataman & Çoban, 2019; Barrios & Miller, 2020; Slavtcheva‐Petkova, 2019) Another rel‐ evant stream of literature, the research on conflicts in public service media, zeroes in on cultural clashes between the content makers and top managers who are responsible for administering and running “the factory” (Nissen, 2014), and on concrete cases when the inde‐ pendence of public service broadcasters was breached and journalistic autonomy constrained (Dragomir, 2017; Dzięciołowski, 2017; Koivunen, 2017). This article is organised as follows: It first reviews the literature on the resistance practices that journal‐ ists use to cope with interference in their autonomy and, drawing from organisational studies, reviews the litera‐ ture on the practices that employees use to express their dissent (Section 2); it describes the research method and data (Section 3); it analyses the newsroom con‐ flict and introduces an inductively developed classifica‐ tion scheme of resistance practices through 16 semi‐ structured interviews with the journalists and managers from the RTVS newsroom (Section 4); Section 5 is the summary and conclusion
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