ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that more is at stake between journalists and their sources than the short-term power to sway public opinion. The study of reporters and their news sources draws its roots from questions about bias, power, and influence. The shape of the reporter-source relationship grows from core tenets of journalism’s professional ideology. If a central element of journalistic ideology is the media’s watchdog role over government and big business, then reporters’ struggles to gather important information from sources become crucial. Much of the research about reporters and their sources has been based on Western press systems and even more specifically, on how the relationship surfaces in the United States. The basic relationship between reporters and their sources can thus be seen as “portable”; that is, the relationship exists in all press systems, from the most authoritarian to the most libertarian, if in different forms.
