ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies sources of influences on journalistic role performance in the news at the societal level. Using existing data on the countries under study, we discuss two categories of factors. First, we examine features that are closely (directly) related to the media, such as the press, legal, political, and economic environment. Second, we study broader context factors, such as the democracy index, indicators of deliberative and participatory democracy, and economic/market freedom in the performance of professional roles. Our findings show that political, legal, and economic freedom have a significant influence on the performance of the loyal-facilitator and—to some extent—on the watchdog and civic roles. Nevertheless, they also show that the societal level lacks explanatory power to account for the differences in the performance of the interventionist, infotainment, and service roles.
