Work-Related Harassment and Intimidation in Journalism: Testing Identity-, Visibility-, and Influence-Based Explanations

Prior research shows that exposure to occupation-related harassment and intimidation varies considerably across journalists. This study tests three explanatory frameworks for this variation: identity-based explanations attributing heightened exposure to social hierarchies; visibility- and celebrity-capital-based explanations linking it to journalists’ varying levels of personal visibility and recognizability; and influence-based explanations attributing differences to the nature of journalistic work and its societal influence. Logistic regression analyses of survey data from Finnish journalists ( n = 932), examining verbal, legal, and physical forms of harassment and intimidation, lend strong support to influence-based explanations, partial support to visibility-based explanations, and limited support to identity-based explanations.