This article examines how Iranian journalists perceive, negotiate, and enact their professional roles under conditions of political volatility and structural repression. In existing scholarship, journalism in Iran is commonly portrayed as either incapacitated by state control or reducible to ideological instruments. Drawing on journalists’ own accounts, this study challenges such ideas by foregrounding agency, role negotiation, and strategic adaptation in a highly constrained media environment.
The study is grounded in journalistic role theory, particularly the process model of journalistic roles and the framework of journalistic roles in political and everyday life proposed by Hanitzsch and Vos. The study adopts a discursive institutionalist perspective, treating journalistic roles as dynamic constructs that are continuously (re)interpreted in response to shifting political boundaries rather than as fixed normative functions.
12 in-depth active interviews with Iran-based journalists, conducted in Persian, were conducted and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis through a hybrid inductive-deductive approach, allowing established role categories to be examined alongside context-specific practices emerging from the data.
The findings show that Iranian journalists articulate strong normative commitments to roles such as informing the public, monitoring power, educating citizens, and advocating social change. However, the enactment of these roles is highly selective and mediated by pervasive uncertainty, censorship, and personal risk. Journalists employ a range of strategic adaptations, including rhetorical ambiguity, coded storytelling, selective silence, organizational coordination, and role compartmentalization, to align professional ideals with what is practically possible. Rather than abandoning journalistic values, these strategies enable journalists to sustain meaning in their work while navigating repression.
By illuminating how roles are adapted rather than erased under authoritarian conditions, the study contributes to comparative journalism research and advances understanding of journalism beyond liberal-democratic contexts.