Government: Journalists are not Comfortable with Government Involvement

Government: Journalists are not Comfortable with Government Involvement

  • Liberal democracies have free and fair elections, free and independent media, clear checks and balances on power, rule of law, and civil liberties.
  • Electoral democracies have free and fair elections and largely free media but may lack some of the three latter protections.
  • Autocracies largely lack freedom of expression, including media freedom.

We wanted to understand how journalists feel about the relationship between the press and the government — both overall and within each regime type. 

Why we did this study

Relationships with the government are getting attention, especially in autocracies

Few journalists see positive impacts of government

Many journalists are directly experiencing government overreach

Journalists do not want government to define the profession or its practitioners

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  1. In this section, we use regime type rather than region as our main form of geographical distinction because it is more relevant to the questions we asked. See "About this study" for more about why. ↩︎