Journal of Media Studies, Vol 37, No 1 (2022)

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Professional Milieus ‎Challenged By Pakistani ‎Journalists On Twitter

Sabahat Afsheen, Shaheer Ahmed, Abid Ali Butt

Abstract


As the journalists' role conception manifests in their ‎journalistic outputs (role performance), this study attempts to predict the ‎role conception of Pakistani journalists by examining their role performance on Twitter. Professional ‎milieus standardized by Thomas Hanitzsch, i.e., Populist Disseminator, Detached Watchdog, ‎Critical Change Agent, and Opportunist Facilitator, serve as the theoretical basis for the ‎current study. This research examines the tweets of the top 20 journalists of Pakistan with the most ‎followership on Twitter through Content Analysis of their six months' tweets. Findings reveal that the Detached Watchdog professional ‎milieu dominates the journalistic practices in Pakistan, which challenges the claims of Thomas Hanitzsch's study. He suggests that the Detached watchdog milieu dominates the developed or Western countries in the journalistic field but developing, transitional and authoritarian countries practice the Opportunist Facilitator professional milieu. Considering Pakistan, a developing country, the current study's findings show that the Detached Watchdog professional milieu dominates the journalistic practices in Pakistan.  The study also reveals that ‎despite the convergence of media and extensive Twitter usage in Pakistan, traditional electronic media is still a popular medium and Twitter traffic of ‎Pakistani journalists highly depends on their active presence on electronic media.   


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