Managing the Press-Police Relationship in Ghana, South Africa, the UK, and US

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Tim Vos, whose focus is on the relationship between press and police in four liberal democracies. Journalism should usually maintain a critical distance from power, yet also have to have a transactional relationship with police in order to be able to do their work that sometimes gets rather too cozy; how are journalists now rethinking that relationship, especially in the wake of a wave of citizen-generated coverage of police violence and oppression? How does the rise in populism and animosity towards journalism affect the relationship – and how does this play out across different liberal-democratic traditions?

Journalistic actions are (ideally) guided by journalistic norms, but also exist in tension with each other; norms lose force over time as journalists are absorbed in the routines of their beat, and this might also produce gaps and blind spots in the application of norms. Some of the most lauded journalistic work covers police corruption, but the relationship is also characterised by quid pro quo exchanges, especially when journalists are embedded with police in their daily work.

The equilibrium of this relationship has been punctured by citizen journalism that has made problematic police actions far more visible, and by police authorities sometimes dropping all pretence of tolerance towards journalists in response to critical coverage. The present project examined these shifts over time, in news reporting, across liberal democracies in the US, UK, Ghana, and South Africa.

Across the four countries there’s a strong focus on monitoring the misuse of power; in Ghana, there’s also a relationship of collaboration and protection, though, while in South Africa there is a sense that police need to change and cooperative more with journalists. In the UK, claims are that the relationship is too cozy and that police are using social media to bypass journalists; while in the US there is more of a reckoning as the effectiveness of the watchdog role is questioned and changes are called for. In Ghana, the monitoring role is being redoubled, while in South Africa police are a consistent problem; in the UK journalists are feeling burnt by the changing relationship, while in the US journalists feel indignation but are also constrained by their neutrality.

This shows that there are common concerns, but these are refracted by local considerations; police are quite differently positioned but the tension between transactional and critical stances is common to all, and there is as yet limited evidence of a normative reckoning.