The participatory intensities of actors in private media teams' investigative journalism programs: A case study of Program Sar-e- Aam (Pakistan)
Abstract
Private broadcast media, particularly news media, claims to be a true representative of the public by involving the public in its media production processes. Hence, it becomes worthwhile to evaluate the levels of participatory processes in news media teams given their claims to be participatory.
This study attempts to examine the participatory intensities of actors in private media teams' investigative journalism programs, and for that purpose the research project takes the case study of ARY news channel Program Sar-e- Aam, which can be regarded as a prototype of such media teams that claim to have extensive public participation. More precisely, the research study aims to identify actors, categories their participation intensities and their status of participation as privileged or unprivileged.
This case study presents an application of analytical model of media participatory processes in political approach (Carpentier, 2016) 4-level, 12 steps analytical framework on the program 'Sare-e-aam' to scrutinize the participatory intensity of program's participants. The data set consists of the 70 episodes selected randomly of the programs aired during the months of (June 2019- June 2022).
The researches is an interpretive inquiry, and the data is collected through field notes of the broadcast media content (textual + audiovisual) of the program. The application of the analytical model on the case study, program Sar-e-Aam identifies three major groups of actors i.e. media team, police department/local authorities and citizen participating at different stages of the program.
The findings of the study show that the media team is the most influential and privileged group of participants in the program because it has sole control over the execution stage. All other participants at this point are supporters or minor contributors.
The case study does not demonstrate an equal nature of the power position owing to inequalities in the amount of involvement, even though the program permits multiple actors to participate at different stages.