Discursive Professionalization of Journalism Amid Violence: Normative Anchoring, Discursive Distancing, and Collective Autonomy for Safety

This article examines how anti-press violence in Mexico has reshaped-journalists’ understandings of professionalism by catalyzing a process of re-institutionalization. Building on cyclical theories that conceptualize journalism as discursively constituted through normative, cognitive, and performed roles, we analyze how an exogenous shock disrupts this cycle and how journalists subsequently realign it through three key discursive mechanisms: normative anchoring, collective autonomy for safety, and discursive distancing. Methodologically, the study draws on retrospective coding of 20 journalists’ narratives describing disruption and realignment in professional norms, routines, knowledge, and control over work. The analysis captures a moment, approximately a decade into sustained violence, when adaptations had become widespread yet remained recent enough to be critically articulated as shared and no longer optional. Journalists describe the emergence of new routines and forms of knowledge that produce a collective model of autonomy oriented toward safety, anchored in enduring commitments to the public interest. These include practices such as collaborative reporting, regular check-ins, and digital localization. By contrast, practices perceived as undermining autonomy or violating public interest norms are discursively distanced from professionalism by framing them as externally imposed by threat, including self-censorship, reliance on official sources, and omission of sensitive information.