I. Introduction This master’s thesis represents study of female newspaper and magazine editors in Azerbaijan based on Western and Soviet definitions of journalism with explanation of local national features of this p

III.2.5 Chapter Summary

To talk about journalism is easier from afar than from up close, where many interconnected and sometimes contradiction elements come together. In the empirical chapter we presented results of tried to analyze female editors’ responses and answer our research questions. The focus of this research was to map community of female editors and research their ethical and value orientations. The first subchapters allowed us to formulate who are the female editors of Azerbaijan in terms of their education and personal characteristics like age, marital status, number of children, years of experience. The resulting map of the female editorial landscape showed us significant difference of this ethos from the male editors. Majority of female gate-keepers constitute editors that are university educated journalists in their majority possessing journalistic education and with long years of media experience under their belts. As it was pointed out in the subchapter III.1.7 selected Azerbaijani editors view their professional specialization and assess their role and influence in Azerbaijani society differently from their male counterparts. In comparison to male colleagues female editors manage their newspapers/magazines with a balanced or neutral stance towards political scene of Azerbaijan due to the fact that female editorship niche lies exclusively in semi-independent or pro-government newspapers as well as in non-political magazines aimed at specific auditoriums.

Based on our analysis of empirical data we can also state that female editors view themselves to be elite even though low financial status causes the less experienced editors to show lower self-esteem and regard their influence in the society as arbitrary. On the other hand, since majority of our respondents are experienced and thus over the years better known in the society they consider themselves capable of influencing major political actors.
Receiving their journalistic education during the Soviet era female editors still see themselves as missionaries or teachers whose prerogative is to enlighten, educate and inform public of positive development in the country. Yet, the main source of their professional ethical behavior is neither obedience to endorsed ethical codes nor their journalistic education but the Azerbaijani mentality that they were brought up as girls at home, their own moral culture and reproduction of rules once set by their experienced colleagues accepted by the respondents as their role models.
As it was mentioned above, female editors congregate in either independent, semi-indpendent, government or government-sponsored non-political press damping negative trends of political instrumentalization. It is also obvious that in comparison to the male editors (Valiyev 2008) female professionals have better preview over processes in Azerbaijani media community, most notably they provided better overview of such processes as deprofessionalization and proletarization in the key described by Hallin and Mancini (2004) in their Mediterranean type as well as Volek (2007) in the case of Czech journalists. Moreover, that the trend of proletarization caused by financial strains is growing in Azeri media community, something that male editors did not reflect upon. Female editors on the other hand point out that journalists are under constant financial stress and poor economical conditions push out the old professionals that are substituted by untutored and journalistically uneducated young generation.
That being said, we receive answer to our next question. Even though female editors in their majority acknowledge capacity of professional organizations to enforce professional standards yet, from their answers we can derive that existing professional organizations in Azerbaijan fail to control, test and educate new generations of journalists resulting in farther fragmentation of the spectrum and deepening processes of deprofessionalization and proletarization of Azerbaijani journalists. The female gate-keepers perceive those institutions as lobby groups for government subventions or in case of opposition-inclined editors as means to extend political struggle against current political regime yet completely neglecting function of journalistic organizations to create and enforce professional standards. Farther inquiry into the question shows that when it comes to professional organizations, none of the selected female journalists associates herself with specific female professional organizations like for example Azerbaijan Woman Journalist Association. The results provided in this subchapter, allow us to state that with some minor exceptions, selected female journalists are not involved in current polarization of journalistic spectrum in Azerbaijan taking rather a stance of neutral observers.
In case of objectivity our research yielded interesting results. The practice of female editors in our opinion is a transitional form that incorporates features of the Soviet and the Western models of objectivity with a significant tilt towards national mentality adaptation. The existence of the Soviet objectivity is mainly caused by its core values linked to education the editors received during the Soviet Union while Western model is mainly the result of transition efforts that are being made by the journalistic community after the break up of the Soviet Union and are reflected in the Ethical code of the Press Council. To summarize, the post-Soviet Azerbaijani objectivity model of the Azerbaijani female editors is neither the senile classical form described by Inkeles (1950) nor it is the “unrestrained” wild post-Soviet Russian version described by Richter (2007).