Journalistic roles describe ideas about what function journalists should have in society and serve as a way of legitimizing the existence of journalism in society. According to Thomas Hanitzsch, journalistic roles consist of four categories: normative role, cognitive role, practiced role, and narrative role.
In the case of the normative perspective, the existence of journalism is seen as essential to the existence of democracy and the role of journalists is to provide people with accurate and verifiable information that can contribute to making informed political decisions. In this regard, Karol Jakubowicz mentions three normative functions of journalism: the civic role, the watchdog role of democracy, and the mobilizing role, which consists in the fact that the media seeks to mobilize citizens to be more curious about politics and to encourage participation. This does not mean, however, that all three normative roles are demanded in the same way in all countries around the world – typically the watchdog role is suppressed in authoritarian societies. The cognitive role of journalism, then, deals with what journalists themselves think their role is, and this idea does not always necessarily correspond with the normative idea of journalism, as the lived experience of the individual is taken into consideration. The practiced role refers to what the performance of journalists actually looks like, and the narrated role refers to journalists’ subjective reflections and perceptions of that performance.
