Harassed for Their Job: Exploring Factors That Render Journalists Prone to Harassment and Intimidation

Abstract

Amid growing concern over harassment and intimidation targeting journalists, scholarly attention to their occurrence and implications has mushroomed. One aspect of these phenomena that often gets overlooked is that not all journalists seem equally targeted or affected. Applying ordinal regression analysis of 505 sets of questionnaire responses from Finnish professional journalists, the authors found that only a small proportion of respondents experienced harassment and intimidation regularly, while the vast majority reported being targeted very rarely, if at all. The findings illustrate how certain positions and aspects of journalistic work bring increased risk of facing harassment and intimidation, with investigative journalism, published opinion pieces, work in public broadcasting, and social-media visibility as a journalist identified as strong risk factors. At least in the Finnish context, these facets of the work seem to outweigh personal factors (age, gender, etc.) in predicting overall risk. The evidence supports the call for more comprehensive and carefully designed research arrangements that also acknowledge the role of multiple facets of journalistic work in future studies of harassment and intimidation.