The roles and ethics of journalism: A comparative study of journalistic cultures in two student cohorts

This study uses journalistic instrumental-value surveys to compare how two cohorts of postgraduate journalism students, one of which completed undergraduate studies in Australia and the other in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), weigh the importance of journalistic ethics and roles. It finds that the students who previously studied in Australia consistently value the adversarial and interpretative functions of the press as more important, while the students who studied in China rate the mobilizer and disseminator function of journalists as more significant. While the differences surrounding perception of ethical issues are not pronounced, the students who had studied in China perceive greater difficulty resolving issues of taste and decency. Drawing on a schema used by Hanusch and Hanitzsch in 2019, the study analyses the results in respect of differing journalistic cultures and notes the implications for an Australian journalistic education system that increasingly services international students.