IS THERE A UNIVERSAL BASIS IN JOURNALISM STUDIES AROUND THE WORLD?

This key question was provoked by a discussion on westernization of the journalism/communication field. This discussion started at the end of the XXth century as a reaction on the failure of Lerner’s and Schramm’s mediaconcept of democracy development in the countries of the “third world”. These investigators supposed that the main role of mass-media was to bring a democratic “sunrise” in the postcolonial world. Overcoming this concept, specialists of the journalism/communication field started to rethink the role, objectives and functions of mass-media in contemporary society. D. Halin and P. Mancini (2004) insisted on the co-existence of several types of Journalism in Europe, and – as a consequence – they showed the chimerical essence of journalism “unity” in democratic countries. The absence of a widely accepted “ideal model” of journalism currently generates some attempts to reinvent this commonly respected model (for example, S. Gunaratne, M. Pearson and S. Senarath try to show the Middle Way of World Journalism as a Buddhism concept).

So the failure of one “universal” model of journalism immediately motivates the appearance of the following one.
Thus a process of de-westernization and theoretical debates around the major oppositions (universality – particularity, commensurability – incommensurability etc.) is currently progressing. But this makes the research field too vague and uncertain. How, in these circumstances, can one manage Journalism Studies which are directly related to the research field, much more than practical journalism is? The Russian situation is quite obvious in this case. Russian journalism education in the post-soviet era has been completely oriented towards the USA-UK democratic model of journalism (considered as a watch-dog of democracy, objectivity, division of facts and opinions and other high standards of the liberal journalism model). K. Jakubowicz qualified this period as “a rough awakening” meaning a shock of ideological paradigm change. So Russian teachers and professors aimed their pedagogical and intellectual efforts to the preparation of good “watch dogs”journalists However, this model was too far away from the audience expectations and cardinal re-building of the journalism model toward democratic ideals. The conflict between the educational concept of the journalist as a social actor and the real necessities of the audience, or, following J. Habermas, public sphere, became stronger. After 20 years of this situation, Russian journalism became commercially helpless editions without clear perspectives. That is the why the propagandist turn of 2014 was enthusiastically accepted by its audience but coldly by the intelligentsia and Journalism Education circles.

De-Westernization of journalism could help to understand this dramatic gap between journalism and society in Russia.