“It Forces You to Publish Some Shit”: Toward a taxonomy of de-democratizing journalistic practices

Several studies argue that journalism can facilitate and shape democratic backsliding when news organizations are captured by business and political elites. Under these conditions, journalists will likely fail to hold political actors to account and provide information essential for public deliberation. Gradually, news outlets devolve to provide unfair representations based on private interests instead of news coverage guided by public interest. However, research still lacks a systematic and detailed analysis of practices in news production that could be capable of damaging democracy. Not only is evidence very scarce, but it is also limited to the content analysis of news outputs and editorials. Using forty semistructured interviews and three case studies, this research investigates how journalists from the most influential outlets in Brazil covered key political events within a period of constant decline in the quality of democracy (2016–2021). Then, I build on the results to propose a new typology of de-democratizing journalistic practices: soft steering (recommendations pretending concern with standards, including partisan interpretations of balance), hard steering (direct orders, including internal censorship or entirely pre-defined stories), and anticipatory steering (reporters and editors act on their own based on perceptions and previous instructions). Moreover, this research offers evidence that de-democratizing journalistic practices can be internalized by news practitioners and, over time, replace democratic norms. Finally, it suggests a dynamic relationship between censorship and self-censorship in which control not only inhibits actions but also compels journalists to perform in specific ways.