Negotiating political news: The two phases of off-the-record interaction

Abstract

This article analyses the interference of political print journalists with the political process through off-the-record interaction with political sources and provides an explanation as to why ambiguity of meaning characterises this off-the-record interaction. The central claim is that the ideal – or ‘myth’ – of mutual distinction between journalism and politics in some situations constrains interactions between journalists and political actors, and in others is overruled by the same actors now attending more to their own organisational interests. The article thus demonstrates a loose coupling between back region behaviour and front region adherence to institutional myths. The empirical data comprise observation studies of journalist and political source interaction and qualitative interviews with political journalists, political press advisors and elected politicians. The article distinguishes between two different phases of news production in off-the-record interaction. In the explorative phase, journalists indirectly influence politics via the exchange of political intelligence with political actors. In the realisation phase, the journalist may orchestrate politics by inviting the political actor to political action on the record.

Keywords

Institutional theory interaction analysis journalist roles journalist–source relationship off-the-record political journalists production studies

Journalist roles and institutional demarcations

In his writing about news ethnography, Simon Cottle (2007) states that the strengths of newsroom studies are that they show the ‘invisible workings’ of news production, that they qualify or correct speculative theoretical claims and remind us of ‘the contingent nature of cultural production’ (p. 6). Cottle’s claims are especially relevant for this article’s case study since there are many theoretical claims about journalist–source interactions but fewer empirical studies. This article will contribute to the stock of knowledge already gathered about journalist–source interaction by making visible as a situational two-phase typology some parts of the actual interaction order in the off-the-record production space of news and politics. Furthermore, the article analyses how journalists and political actors alike in the off-the-record interaction are handling the ideal of mutual distinction between politics and journalism creatively. The central claim is that this ideal – or ‘myth’ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) – in some situations constrains interactions between journalists and political actors and in others is overruled by the same actors now attending more to their own organisational interests.

The everyday practice of off-the-record interaction between journalists and sources has been relatively unexplored in its own right, as noted by Davis (2007, 2009), though many American and European scholars have explored journalist–source relationships in general within a political context (see for instance Allern, 2001; Manning, 2001; Rosten, 1937; Sigal, 1973; Tunstall, 1970).

The relatively rare interactional studies of off-the-record news production that exist originate largely within media sociology and media anthropology (see, for instance, Davis, 2007, 2009; Peterson, 2001; Lemieux, 2000). They point out that the off-the-record space of news production facilitates the blurring of boundaries between journalistic and political roles and represents a means for creating a shared culture between institutions, a term coined by Blumler and Gurevitch (1995). As examples of a shared culture, they mention collective criteria of objectivity (Tuchman, 1972) and fairness, (un)acceptable areas of questioning and norms for the anonymity of sources (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 37). This study will show how some of these themes currently also seem to be central to the actors of the field, as has also been argued by Peterson (2001).

Older as well as more recent research describes how, in their relation to political actors, political journalists in varying degrees cross their neutralistic (Heritage and Clayman, 2010), institutional role demarcations by exchanging information, giving advice and acting as messengers between political actors/interests (Allern, 2001; Davis, 2007, 2009; Peterson, 2001; Rosten, 1937). A key feature of the sparse research into journalist–source interactions is the off-the-record situation as a possibility to co-narrate and co-construct news. For instance, in his case study of an off-the-record negotiation between a reporter and a US Congress Member, Peterson (2001) concludes that journalism research has largely ignored ‘the creative, performative and negotiated aspects of journalism’ described in his own study (p. 209). Peterson analyses how objectivity as a mimetic practice enables journalistic agency in constructing news on behalf of negotiated source intelligence.

Peterson’s anthropological study of off-the-record situations does indeed show how different agendas are negotiated in a complex web of journalistic and political interests, however leaving the reader with the sense of an American political journalism controlled by market logics and imbedded in political processes rather than meeting the adversarial and truth-revealing ideals of fourth estate journalism. This embedding is also demonstrated in Davis’ (2009) study among British Parliament Members and political journalists. However, this also focuses on the journalist’s willingness and capability to convey information that serves the goal of a good news story, whatever that may be, to Members of Parliament (MPs) in a strategical manner. However, in a Danish context a recent study by Van Dalen and Skovsgaard (2010) has tested the hypothesis that Danish journalists accredited to Parliament feel less influenced by market imperatives than do their colleagues in other areas and found that this is indeed the case.

The main question of this article is, ‘How do political journalists interfere with political processes in off-the-record interactions with political sources?’ The case material for answering this question will be Danish. The abovementioned research implies that journalists are both constrained and enabled by professional logics in this interaction. I believe that the focus on elements of co-narration, creativity and negotiation opens a window to an initial idea as to how institutions operate in the off-the-record production spaces on the situational level: The above cases illustrate that news logics, political logics and market logics are simultaneously present and acting as resources for sense-making in journalist–source interactions off the record.

Theoretical framework: The political news institution

According to new institutional theory, news organisations are collectively interfering with politics in many different ways, however empowered by a basic autonomy towards the political system (Allern and Blach-Ørsten, 2011). The approaches of Cook (1998) and Sparrow (1999) describe the impact of news media on politics as an outcome of, on the one hand, autonomous news organisations’ organisational action and, on the other hand, the interference of political logics with news media, due to the interdependence between the systems. To Sparrow (1999), the primary argument is that the press is not a fourth estate, but rather an institution that safeguards its own economic interests (p. 133), while Cook’s (1998) more general claim is that the press is an integral part of the three branches of (American) government.

The overall theoretical argument is that journalism and the news media are strong political factors because of their institutional nature, which is, to a large degree, constituted by their common production processes and organisational and professional values, whose collective nature invites political actors to react and accommodate to them. The institutional approach to news media therefore invites analyses of power balances and culture through process analysis.

In a much earlier institutional approach to understanding isomorphism between organisations – that is why some organisations claim to abide by the same values and practices – Meyer and Rowan (1977) stress the embedding of organisations within larger cultures. For political news, this larger culture would be the specific media system that a news organisation is part of at a given time and in a given area (Kaplan, 2006). This system represents what Meyer and Rowan (1977) call institutionalised ‘myths’. These myths sometimes conflict with organisational possibilities for efficacy, but according to Meyer and Rowan, organisational actors solve this problem by creating a loose coupling between the front region ceremonial adherence to institutional myths and back region behaviour. As an alternative to the theory of loose coupling, we find structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), which, on the other hand, focuses on a tighter coupling between micro and macro patterns, but which, on the other hand, finds it problematic to explain institutional change. I believe that my empirical material reflects some elements of loose coupling between back region behaviour and front region adherence to institutional myths. This will become apparent in the following analysis.

Case study

The study presented in this article is a collective case study that was begun as an explorative study based on participant observations in news desks and party offices in the Danish parliament. The observational focus point was the situated interaction between newspaper journalists and party political sources in the parliament as a gateway to analysing institutional dynamics.

Being a collective case study, it will provide not only qualitative and particular knowledge about a distinctly defined case, but knowledge that points to patterns across cases (Stake, 2000). Accordingly, the premise of the study is the institutional nature of the news media, by which is meant that the news organisations are embedded in a larger common culture and political field (Kaplan, 2006).

The empirical data are participant observations and interviews with journalistic and political actors. Observations were conducted in six party press offices, in the semi-private halls and corridors of the Danish parliament, in three newspaper desks (two in Parliament and one outside) and at two semi-private events. Observations were made over a period of 1 year and 9 months, however, summed up to approximately two full-time months.¹ Three journalists, four political press advisors and two politicians were interviewed. The interviews were used to gain a deeper understanding concerning institutional identities and situational sense-making, partly through discussion of previously observed interactions. Observations and interviews were produced with a pre-understanding of interdependence between the actors. This means that the interviewees may to some extent have been primed to articulate and construct their relations within this discourse.

The majority of the interviewees chose anonymity explaining that they felt they would be able to talk more freely under these circumstances. However, most of the written observation notes are not confidential. The observed actors have read all observation notes and only two instances have been requested to be kept confidential.

Analytical design

The analysis of given interactions was informed by an ethno-methodological perspective, inspired in many ways by the microsociology of Erving Goffman (1959), whose theorising of back and front region behaviour informs parts of the analysis, together with the institutional perspective of interdependence between news and politics. According to Goffman, back region is a distinct interaction order. In this order, individuals may rehearse their front region behaviour as well as simply be relaxed or at least less observant of appropriate behaviour. Schudson’s distinction between sociable and problem-solving interaction comes in useful here. According to Schudson (1997), actors engaging in a sociable conversation will generally express an egalitarian attitude verbally and non-verbally towards each other. Their conversation does not have a problem-solving goal, and it is not an argument. The main function of the conversation, as it takes place, is simply the interaction itself and the mutual recognition, for which reason parts of the conversation may be perceived as spontaneous. Within journalism research, this social form may be part of the journalists’ way of nursing their sources, as described by for instance Allern (2001) and Kristensen (2004). The problem-solving conversation is, on the other hand, more task-oriented and may be less egalitarian.

The concept of roles provided an analytical gateway to analysing how journalists as institutional actors interfered in different ways with political processes through situational interaction with sources. Here, roles and role acting are defined as repertoires of individual action that have become institutionalised – incorporating distinct norms – as well as being potential objects of individual agency (Aubert, 1979; Goffman, 1959).

Four typical journalistic roles were chosen as concepts to analyse the interdependence between news and politics. These have been recurrent within research as well as in professional journalistic ideology (Allern, 2010; Janowitz, 1977; Lund, 1999). The first is the idea of the journalist as an information disseminator who is gatekeeping the news arena and selecting and relating unbiased information for the enlightenment of the public (Janowitz, 1977; Lund, 1999; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986). A second role is the journalist as a partisan supporter who argues and evaluates the news as an instrument of political particularistic interests. This primarily reactive role was particularly prominent during the age of the party press and is still dominant in polarised, pluralist democratic systems as for instance Italy (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). The third role is the journalist as a proactive agenda-setting watchdog who controls, uncovers and corrects political actions on behalf of the public (Allern, 2010; Lund, 1999). Finally, the fourth role is the journalist as an advocate (Janowitz, 1977) who argues and evaluates the news from a biased political – perhaps publicist – perspective, however being autonomous in relation to the political system. All these role positions may overlap with an interpretative journalism; however defining this genre is not relevant in this study.²

Together, these four roles present possible journalistic positions towards the political system and gateways for interfering with politics in different ways. In combination with Donsbach and Patterson’s (2004) two-dimensional graph with a passive/active and neutral/partisan scale, they provide an understanding of journalism in relation to the political system (see Note 2). In other words, this combination creates a bridge to the analysis of relational action in a production space in which journalistic and political actors may of course move between positions in specific situations. This will be demonstrated in the analysis below. The matrix will look as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The four typical roles of journalists on an active/passive and partisan/neutral scale.

In an analysis of the empirical data, the degree of proactivity and the character of the conversations between journalists and political actors connect to passive and active off-the-record action. At the same time, the degree of agenda-setting independence and motives in the off-the-record production space connect to partisan and neutral off-the-record action, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Analytical parameters for the study of the political functions of situational interaction between journalists and political sources in off-the-record situations.

Active–passive	Partisan–neutral
Degree of proactivity	Degree of agenda-setting independence
Character of conversation	Motives

Analysis: The Danish Parliament as an organised production space

The situated context of the case study was the shared and officially organised working space of the parliament building, Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen. It was – and is – a physically bounded area, which in itself proved to be an information subsidy for the journalists in Parliament, as has also been shown in other national studies (Allern, 2001; Tunstall, 1970), and it was the spatial setting of the professional practices of both the journalists and the political actors (including political press advisors). At the time of the study, 180 journalists were accredited to Parliament. The number had been rising since the emergence of free daily newspapers, a national 24-hour live news channel and a new policy of openness in Parliament. Thus, 180 journalists had the Parliament as their work base, which meant that they had access to office facilities, the shared canteens, the library, (some of) the Parliament’s internal, digital information system and easy access to party offices, their staff and the 179 elected MPs. The majority of ministerial offices were also located very close to Parliament, and generally provided easy access for journalists accredited to Parliament.

The period of 2007–2010 was significant in several ways. The war between no less than four free national newspapers was raging, and the national paid newspapers were experiencing a drastic decline in circulation. The response of the national newspaper Politiken was a stronger focus on background and commentary in print and fast and easy access to online news. The national newspaper Berlingske Tidende launched an ambitious reader survey followed by editorial restructuring, a new name from Berlingske Tidende to Berlingske, tabloid format and web-first strategies. Both political news desks experienced a slight cut in their number of journalists caused by rising demands on output.

Being off the record

As opposed to the general journalistic practice outside parliament in that period, the unspoken agreement between journalists and political actors in Parliament was that face-to-face situations were, as a rule, off the record. Going on and off the record was regulated by cues. Turning on the dictaphone would signal to the politician that she was now on the record. A political editor said,

[…] and a cue – and it’s not always a verbal agreement – but I may say: now I ask you for the record, or now I ask, and then you turn on the microphone. That is, the recorder is a cue for being on the record, the fact that you write something down is usually also a cue. If I write something down during a background conversation I always say: ‘this is not because I’m going to quote you’. (Political editor, 2009, personal communication)

Actors were also informed about the situation by the spatial frame. For example, in meetings between members of the press lobby and an invited politician, everyone knew that they were off the record. It would be inappropriate to take notes and certainly to turn on the dictaphone during such an informal meeting. This also applied to conversations in the canteen, where formal banning of television cameras underscored the more private, back region status of this area. By contrast, it was obvious that anything being said at the Prime Minister’s weekly press conference was on the record.

As mentioned in the beginning, the case study identifies two phases in the off-the-record situations when journalists and political actors interacted. Focussing on journalistic action, these phases can be identified analytically by

The degree of problem orientation versus information dissemination focus in conversations and interactions. This refers to the spectrum of active/passive in Figure 1.

The character of interests involved in contacting and interacting with political actors. This refers to the spectrum of partisanship and neutrality shown in Figure 1.

These key aspects will structure the presentation below.

The explorative phase of off-the-record situations

I have chosen to label one of these two phases the explorative phase, which indicates the two major characteristics of this phase, as experienced by the journalists. One is that the degree of proactivity and independence in identifying what is news was seen to be relatively low, and the journalists were not deliberately seeking to realise a news story or to exert agenda-setting influence. To the journalists, this phase was a routinised way of gathering information. More interestingly, political actors generally valued these ‘visits’, because they served as a way to monitor and predict the news agenda as well as a way of obtaining intelligence. I propose, however, that this type of interaction was political in more subtle ways as a situational intermediate function (Cook, 1998), supporting the ‘indirect mediatization of politics’ defined by Hjarvard (2013). This is the process in which media logics interfere and intertwine with other institutional logics in organisational settings and not directly in media platforms in the form of for instance strategic sound bites, which on the other hand is coined direct mediatisation (Hjarvard, 2013). This political element will be elaborated in the next section.

Both MPs and press advisors placed great emphasis on daily conversations with journalists. Especially senior press advisors saw this as a core feature of their professional identity. The immanent power of these interactions seemed clear, according to a senior advisor who described a high level of shared culture of information exchange although he could not fully describe the actual power relation:

I cannot exactly remember a case when something changed, when I suddenly got another picture, but there definitely has been, because I talk to a lot of journalists both on the phone and during the day because they come by – either because they have a concrete question or because they are out fishing. That gives me the chance to hear what they believe is going on, what their picture is, and there has definitely been cases where it has changed something. (Senior political advisor, 2008, personal communication)

Former leader of the Social Democratic Party and MP Mogens Lykketoft supported the picture of journalists contributing to the parliamentary information flow and constituting a political factor by saying that conversations with journalists were not a one-way process ‘because they talk to people from the other side who you perhaps do not talk to yourself’ (Lykketoft M, 2010, personal communication).

Another MP mentioned how journalists were a source of information to him during budget negotiations, and he used the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ about these conversations, thus pointing once again to a shared culture and a communal relation:

We often share information, for instance about the coming financial report from the government coming some time this February, in which they account for the challenges to the Danish economy. We are exchanging intelligence about this all the time; when will it come out, and what have we heard? (MP, 2009, personal communication)

The (not so) sociable conversation

The characteristics of the sociable conversation were prevalent in the explorative phase of off-the-record interactions. Journalists and political actors in the parliament recognised these conversational characteristics of their interaction, as did my research observations. However, these characteristics could not be empirically separated from the professional contexts, party politics and journalism. It was clear that the actors were sometimes acting reflexively as professionals, and that elements of strategic action may have interfered. This made it difficult for the researcher as well as the actor to conduct an adequate and clear analysis of the institutional power relation in the off-the-record situations. Perhaps this was the very crux of the matter. MP Morten Østergaard from the Social-Liberal Party described the dilemma of trust in these labile situations by constructing an exemplary situation in which he and his colleague engaged in a conversation with a journalist about an inter-party crisis during budget negotiations:

If we sit and discuss with him he may say: Well I went to the secretary of finance and he thought that you could easily overcome this conflict because it’s not worth fighting about. Now, is this the journalist’s judgement because it’s what he wanted to hear because he agrees with it, or was it really what was being said? There is a certain vulnerability connected to these functions. (Østergaard M, 2009, personal communication)

A political editor was also very well aware of his power potential during what was initially a sociable conversation and drew on the ideal of a separation between journalism and politics:

I believe that when they talk to me, many people think: how will this be perceived, or what does the press lobby think about this? Then they ask me an idiotic question and try to suss out my reaction. (Political editor, 2009, personal communication)

In a sense, this editor and the MP expressed two time lags and two different functions of their conversations, which I would like to elaborate. First, journalists are people who are around like colleagues and who may share information as gossip. In many ways, this conversational form shared the characteristics of the sociable conversation. The exchange of bits of information seemed spontaneous, but nevertheless, the information had the potential of becoming part of a problem-solving process later on in the conversation. If this happened, the sociable conversation would lose some of its sociable characteristics retrospectively. The interactions of this phase seemed egalitarian because the actors were to some extent exchanging information – or at least they did not resemble the formal interviewing situation often found between journalist and politician. It was clear, however, that both actors often did use the bits of information they received reflectively and professionally, and that they may also have engaged reflectively and professionally in their conversations. I will return to the latter in more detail later on in this article, since I define this as a strategic conversation. The fact that the interactions between journalists and politicians did carry the potential of a professional relation, and the fact that it had been journalistically institutionalised in ‘going rounds’ as a method of building a news net (Tuchman, 1978) were other interesting features of this type of conversation – and situation – that points towards something less innocent. ‘Going rounds’ was the journalistic routine of walking the hallways of the parliament at least every morning, checking who was in the party offices and having a conversation with some of them, either stumbled upon by sheer coincidence in the hallway or a press advisor more deliberately sought and asked about ‘what’s going on today’. Anecdotes about the use of these rounds are plenty, one of them being that a TV-journalist was the first to know and publish the exit of a party leader because he happened to meet the chief press advisor of the party who had not really decided that morning on who to give the story until he met the journalist and decided to reward this special journalist with the top story of the week. The press advisor’s own words about the incident was that ‘it pays to talk to us’ (chief press advisor, 2008, personal communication). This illustrates the intricate workings between perceived journalistic proactivity and political actors’ strategies for securing themselves as pipelines of news and thus possible influence on journalistic output.

Seen from a more critical angle, the fact that conversations and political actors were often not chosen at random proved itself since conversations were often centred on current topics on the political/news agenda. This connects to Schudson’s (1997) central argument that the interpersonal conversation is often permeated by the mediated conversation, and it highlights some central features of mediatised politics: the amalgamation and accommodation processes between media and practice (Schulz, 2004) as well as the central role of the news agenda in politics and thus the news medias’ structuring of political processes (Cook, 1998; Pedersen, 2000; Sparrow, 1999). But parallel to this, the off-the-record exploratory situations also featured conversations about soccer and family life. Perhaps the purely sociable conversation had a trust building function. According to Goffman (1959), back region is a space where slipping out of character is more common and also more acceptable than is the case in front regions. If we compare back region to off-the-record situations, this more personal, private space is not only a space for rehearsing and negotiating institutional roles. Furthermore, it may be a space in which the slightly risky business of being personal or even private and slipping out of character in front of each other creates the trust that is needed to negotiate the news. Seen from a political point of view, the apparent practice of off-the-record situations also reflected a reverent attitude towards on-the-record situations.

The observation studies showed another feature that supported the non-innocent nature of the explorative phase of off-the-record interaction. It was the unspoken logic of what I call deep off-the-record and conventional off-the-record interaction. Being off the record basically meant that the journalist could not quote a political actor by his or her name. Going deeply off the record meant that information was strictly confidential and must not be mentioned to anyone for the time being. Conventional off the record meant that information might be referred to, even publicly, but in such a way that it might be deferred by the source.³ This positive definition shows the shared knowledge among the actors in the political communication system. Observations showed that they very often knew who a source was, although the person or the information was anonymous. Therefore, the critical parameter seemed to be the possibility of publicly deferring a relation to certain bits of information and, but not necessarily, stay anonymous among the insiders of the shared culture. In other words, it was their public face that was of concern to the actors when they talked conventionally off the record and not their face within the more exclusive network of actors within the shared culture. Figure 2 shows how not only journalist–source interaction is a back region to the political news product. The analytical point here is that journalist–source interaction itself contains a back and a front region and that back region may either be a ‘conventional off-the-record’ region or a ‘deep off-the-record’ region.

Figure 2.

Back region within a back region: there are two kinds of off-the-record interaction in the back region of journalist–source interaction.

Thus, journalists and political actors all had the possibility of priming the public agenda indirectly by disclosing un-sourceable information – a type of indirect proactivity that gave the journalist a story and the political actor the chance to stay out of the public arena. This supports the hypothesis that the explorative phase of off-the-record interaction was not so sociable after all, and it supports on the interactional level Cook’s (1998) point that the press is an intermediary institution between branches of government. We will now see that the same logic can operate through the realisation phase described below.

The realisation phase of off-the-record situations

The other phase of off-the-record interaction has been labelled the realisation phase. Interactions in this phase were characterised by a high degree of journalistic proactivity and were driven by more intentional interests, that is, the journalist sought more deliberately to realise a news story. As underlined in this quote from a politician about how a policy proposal may turn out after an encounter with a journalist:

… then we may have chosen to do something we wouldn’t have done, but chosen an angle so we get the priority where we want it [in the media, ed.] instead of just sending out a press release. (MP, 2009, personal communication)

The perception of news priority was thus a factor that might cause a change of policy, according to this MP.

I propose that interactions in the off-the-record realisation phase of news production in this case study sometimes blurred institutional demarcations between journalism and politics. This happened when the journalist invited the political actor to political action on the record, or when she co-operated closely with the political actor. In short, the journalist was not only disinterested, monitoring political actions in order to disseminate the facts, but worked actively to influence these actions in off-the-record interactions. Therefore, in these cases, the conversations between the actors came closer to the characteristics of problem solving than to those of a sociable situation. What would a political source say and how would she say it? In this phase, this was the primary concern of the journalist rather than what did she mean or what was going on? as was the main characteristic of the explorative phase.

Tunstall (1970) already pointed to different types of journalistic influence in Westminster in 1970:

In some cases journalists perform some of the above functions, not through the media content, but on a direct face-to-face basis. Journalists sometimes show a politician a statement and ask him if he would like to ‘say’ it; in London journalists ‘suggest’ Parliamentary Questions to Members of Parliament. (p. 14)

Davis (2007, 2009) points to some of the same mechanisms in Westminster, but none of the studies quantify these situations, and they point at two different perspectives. Tunstall is predominantly interested in how news is produced, whereas Davis is interested in the journalist’s influence on politics. In the case of the realisation phase of off-the-record news production, the major analytical problem is, however, what type of interest is involved in the journalistic action. Is it partisan, neutral or partisan as a commercial strategy? Neither Tunstall nor Davis has examined this element of the production space systematically; however, Davis mentions that journalists may disclose information to politicians with the primary motive of creating a good news story, whatever that may be.

It did not seem that partisan loyalties were the primary motives for the journalist’s actions in the realisation phase of off-the-record situations, but rather an urge to produce news in competition with other news producers in a competitive market. The data of the study support a pluralist competitive perspective on news production, as previously defined by Schlesinger (1990); the journalist did have some autonomy in deciding sources and stories, and this autonomy was used to mobilise political actors strategically into action, for instance by creating conflicts. It also supports the view that the news institution may sometimes be successful in adapting political logics to media logics in the sense that party political actors were used by journalists as brands for certain political positions which in different ways fitted the news value of a certain story in a politicised news market (Hjarvard, 2010). Therefore, the journalist did to some degree relate to a political market position of his or her news organisation, but not, in essence, in order to satisfy political party members or out of party pressure, as was the case during the age of the partisan press.

A case from the observation studies proves this point. In 2007, two Danish newspaper journalists from the parliament news lobby had researched intensively on the issue that rejected asylum seekers in Denmark would go to Sweden and obtain asylum and then be entitled to move back to Denmark as a cause of the Nordic cooperation policy. They decided to try for at statement on this by the relevant minister and the relevant spokesperson of the nationalist Danish People’s Party, Søren Espersen. The journalists had thus already set the agenda of the news story, and they were also quite sure of the framing because they knew exactly what this politician represented, that is, a critical approach to immigration from non-Western, especially Muslim, countries. During an off-the-record meeting at Espersen’s office about the article they asked him whether he was aware that his position on this issue would be a challenge to the Nordic cooperation policy, and he answered positively. During the same meeting, the journalists mentioned to the MP that this story might become a front-page story, thus giving him the cue that this decision would also depend on his statements. Eventually, he did say the words on the record, and the story hit the front pages framed as a policy proposal by his party carrying the headline ‘Danish People’s Party: The Swedes are coming’ and the introduction saying: ‘Immigration to Sweden is a constant threat to Denmark, argues the Danish People’s Party. It wants to change the rules for the Nordic cooperation’.⁴

What is interesting in this case is that during their research, the journalists also discussed what would happen after the first article was published and thus who would be relevant to interview after the first article. In many ways, this process is an example of excellent, journalistic research. However, it also shows how a political actor was almost invited into a story that had been orchestrated in advance in minute detail.

A detailed analysis of the dynamics of the abovementioned example further incorporates the status of off the record in relation to on the record. In this case, the journalists blurred their own proactive role by framing the news story as a policy proposal by the said MP, and the headline of the story was slightly ridiculing the proposal. This allows for two interpretations. The first interpretation is that the news organisation adapted to the institutional myth of objectivity – through a mimetic practice – by attributing the proposal to the politician. An interesting detail is that it connects to the logic of off-the-record deference, which now applies to the journalists: Perhaps they did indeed orchestrate the news story, but the politician said the words. The second interpretation is that the ridiculing of the proposal is in accordance with the political market position of the newspaper Politiken, which – through its readership and opinionated journalism (Hjarvard, 2010) – is opposed to the Danish People’s Party. In both cases, off-the-record action became a vehicle for creative, journalistic political agency. In any case, it is not, however, an argument for a partisan press: first, because a main motivation for the journalists was to keep the story going; second, because they themselves were proactive and third, because the overall framing of the story actually set immigration on the political agenda in favour of different political positions at the same time.

Strategic cooperation

Another type of interaction within the realisation phase was asking a politician to pose a question to a minister in Parliament, in Denmark known as section 20 questions. Answering a section 20 question means for a minister to be forced to relate in public to a given political agenda or subject. A political advisor to an opposition party recognised this type of cooperation and tried to measure how often politicians were approached by journalists with this motive:

several times a week, I believe, if we count the whole parliamentary group of the party. But compared to the sum of suggestions we come up with ourselves and get into the media it’s a pretty small part. (Senior advisor, 2008, personal communication)

A Member of the Danish Parliament also recalled a special case when he had a close strategic relation to the journalists of a certain newspaper which was characterised by their mutual efforts of disclosing illegal behaviour and misconduct in the Ministry of Integration and its governing agency ‘The Danish Immigration Service’. Among the elements of this relation was the coordination of section 20 questions and the sharing of research. In some ways, their relation also resembled that of a problem solving interaction (Dindler, 2011).

However, cooperation between journalists and politicians on section 20 questions did not seem to be evidence of a partisan press either, but should rather be interpreted as part of the negotiation of news, however with the journalist taking a proactive part in defining the agenda. This implies a movement from the time of the partisan press when the rostrum of Parliament primarily set the agenda of the news until today when the news – or non-legalisation issues – increasingly sets the agenda of the rostrum (Green-Pedersen, 2005; Kepplinger, 2002). This can be seen as an example of the weakening of the public service media logic of the omnibus press in favour of the professional media logic of today’s media industries (Hjarvard, 2013). In other words, the realisation phase implies not only the news media’s colonisation of the political agenda within the news media. Instead, it suggests how the professionalisation of political journalism might be seen to be enacted as the colonisation of the core political institution of Parliament.

To sum up the characteristics of the off-the-record production space, we have seen that this is to a large extent of a non-innocent nature, and that political actors may sanction the interference of political print journalists with the political process. Furthermore, the study is able to further structure our knowledge of what is going on in this space, as defined in Table 2.

Table 2.

Summary of the findings of the case study in relation to the four analytical variables concerning journalists’ relation to the political system.

	The explorative phase	The realisation phase
Degree of proactivity	Routinised journalistic proactivity	Proactive journalistic activity
Character of conversation	Sociable	Problem solving
Degree of agenda-setting independence	Relatively low	Relatively high
Journalistic motives	Discovering the news	Co-creating the news

Conclusion

The main question of the study was ‘How do political journalists interfere with political processes in off-the-record interactions with political sources?’ The study has explored and highlighted off-the-record interaction between political journalists and their sources as a complex political and journalistic space characterised by a two-phase interaction order in which journalists interfere with politics in different ways. The two-phase typology sums up some central characteristics of the interaction order between journalists and political actors concerning the degree of journalistic proactivity, the character of conversations, the degree of agenda-setting independence and the journalistic motives involved in the interactions.

The analysis has shown two types of journalist–source interaction, that is, the explorative phase and the realisation phase. I intend to point to the transitional character of news production concerning interdependence between journalists and sources (recently illustrated by Eriksson and Östman, 2013) by using the word phase to define the two typical off-the-record situations. The case study shows that journalists perceive the explorative phase as a reactive or indeed an explorative phase. But the character of a sociable conversation obscures the fact that this phase may constitute a strategic room for both journalists and MPs in which the mutual exchange of information is a strategic activity, however, constrained by perceived mutual autonomy and professional distinction. Furthermore, it was observed that issues that were already on the media or political agenda primarily defined conversations between the actors. Because journalists also became sources of political intelligence in these situations, I interpret them as intermediaries on a situational level, reflecting the intermediary position that Cook (1998) ascribes the news media as an institution. This becomes especially salient when we consider the fact that political actors did not share media intelligence with journalists. Taking the abovementioned elements into consideration, it is thus more fitting to talk of routinised proactivity towards political actors.

The analysis of the explorative phase contributes to journalism research by suggesting how the intermediary characteristics of the news institution is enacted in off-the-record situations and how on the record – or front region – is a powerful cognitive force that sparks the off-the-record creation of shared rules of anonymity: deep off-the-record and conventional off-the-record. The analysis confirms former research claims of a shared culture of anonymity, but also enforces the claim that this shared culture is not only an effect of system integration (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995) but also an effect of a perceived shared interest in a front region mutual distinction.

The realisation phase is a particularly creative and negotiated (Peterson, 2001) aspect of the off-the-record interactions. This phase is defined by a journalistic intention to mobilise political actors in different ways in order to (co-)create news efficiently. Journalists and political actors sometimes engage in this relation for their mutual benefit in a segmented political and national print news market. I interpret this order as connecting to Sparrow’s (1999) claim that journalistic actors attend more to their organisational interests than to the classical ideal of fourth estate journalism, although a central point is that the journalistic story may be adversarial to some political interests. Journalism must be seen as a market position in these instances. The analysis of the realisation phase contributes to our knowledge about this element of the news institution by showing that this practice is indeed also part of a shared off-the-record culture and that it is enacted through the instrumentalisation of political resources, for instance the rostrum of the parliament or law proposals. Front region objectivity becomes here a mimetic practice.

To sum up, the study shows that there exist tensions between journalistic passive and neutral positions and journalistic active and partisan positions towards political actors. In the off-the-record interaction, political journalists interfere with political processes by providing cues to political actors about priorities on the news media agenda and intelligence from other political actors and through offers of strategic cooperation in specific cases. It seems to be sanctioned by the unclear demarcations between institutional identities, the possibility of deferring information, and the journalists’ own difficulties in relating to the power relations that are also inherent in off-the-record situations. In these situations it is unclear when journalism ends and politics takes over – and vice versa. The shared rules of anonymity and rituals of objectivity indicate, however, that a neutral position towards the political system is still a powerful cognitive force. On that account, we may conclude that print journalists interfere with political processes in parliament through the creation of a loose coupling between back region situational interaction and front region conformity to the institutional ‘myth’ of mutual autonomy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), which requires another interaction order (see for instance Heritage and Clayman, 2010). The journalists’ role enactment reveals how journalists do indeed participate in co-constructing politics.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my great appreciation to Professor Stig Hjarvard and assistant professors Frederikke Winther and Mette Marie Roslyng for their scrupulous and valuable suggestions during the writing of this article. Their willingness to give their time so generously has been very much appreciated. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for being thorough and constructive.

Funding

This research was funded by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication.

Notes

Author biography

Camilla Dindler is an assistant professor in Aalborg University in Denmark. Her main research interests focus on journalistic production in an institutional perspective.

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