20. Advocacy Journalism

Abstract

This chapter reviews the under-studied genre of advocacy journalism. I begin by locating advocacy journalism spatially. To do this, I distinguish between what I call segmented and woven advocacy, a distinction born of the distinct role advocacy plays within different journalism systems. I then examine the producers of advocacy journalism, with a particular focus on the distinction between voices within journalism and voices outside of it. Simply put, who are the people doing the advocating? I then turn to an examination of what advocacy journalism does, working on the assumption that discourse is always in service of meaning (Richardson 2007). I identify four threads in the existing literature that situate advocacy journalism as: 1. Analysis and interpretation, something I refer to as “news plus”; 2. Critique and change agent; 3. Political intervention; and 4. Emblem of journalistic decline. I then briefly discuss the argument that the separation between fact and value is arbitrary before offering some concluding remarks and suggestions for future research.

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