Political identification and professional values in tension in the journalistic practices of two newsrooms in the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

The goal of this article is to look at the tension between professional identity and political identification as experienced by journalists in the newsrooms of Página/12 and Tiempo Argentino between 2011 and 2015, when the editorial lines of both newspapers were in tune with the national government’s policies. From an ethnographic perspective (Restrepo, 2016), this article addresses the tensions and intersections between journalists’ political identification and that of their media outlets. By analyzing this topic, we can appreciate what values the former identify as part of their professional practice. To do this, we returned to the contributions of labor sociology, specifically to those on symbolic interactionism (Abbott, 1993; Becker, 2006; Becker, 2009; Becker, Geer, Hughes, y Strauss, 1961; Becker y Strauss, 1956; Hughes, 2012 y Geer, 1972) and
dramaturgical analysis (Goffman, 2006), in order to study two distinct moments in the process of identification. The first involves the hiring of young journalists and how their expectations, upon entering the world of journalism, are affected by the affinity between their own political identification and the editorial line of the newspaper they now work for. The second moment describes situations, in everyday content production inside the newsroom, in which journalists discuss their newspaper’s stance in relation to certain political events, leading to deviations from the editorial line. After studying these moments, we shall find, for example, that criterias for newsworthiness are not always starting points for journalistic work but are instead frequently called into question. Rather than using predefined parameters to analyze daily newsroom tasks,
we shall reconstruct the norms and values of journalistic ethics by looking at the continuous self-reflection undertaken by journalists during their everyday work.