ABSTRACT
Journalism in the service of democracy and, in the United States, journalists as adversaries to government, both ensconced in a private ownership system: these then have been the hegemonic normative underpinnings of considerable research in journalism, from which vantage point global journalism practice and journalists’ beliefs and values have been, more or less, judged. In the in-depth interviews, journalists were asked to narrate the three main qualities of journalistic professionalism, the functions of journalism as an institution, and the roles of journalists who have their own agency. For a localization perspective to work, it is important to consider epistemologies. The epistemological aspect of this analytic strategy positions itself in opposition to the approach in much international media studies research that uses the premises and data mostly from non-academic agents, such as Freedom House, whose roots often lie in neoliberalism.
