The participatory intensities of actors in private media teams' investigative journalism programs: A case study of Program Sar-e- Aam (Pakistan)

Abstract
Private broadcast media, particularly news media, claims to be a true representative of the
public by involving the public in its media production processes. Hence, it becomes
worthwhile to evaluate the levels of participatory processes in news media teams given their
claims to be participatory. This study attempts to examine the participatory intensities of
actors in private media teams’ investigative journalism programs, and for that purpose the
research project takes the case study of ARY news channel Program Sar-e- Aam, which can
be regarded as a prototype of such media teams that claim to have extensive public
participation. More precisely, the research study aims to identify actors, categories their
participation intensities and their status of participation as privileged or unprivileged. This
case study presents an application of analytical model of media participatory processes in
political approach (Carpentier, 2016) 4-level, 12 steps analytical framework on the program
‘Sare-e-aam’ to scrutinize the participatory intensity of program’s participants. The data set
consists of the 70 episodes selected randomly of the programs aired during the months of
(June 2019- June 2022). The researches is an interpretive inquiry, and the data is collected
through field notes of the broadcast media content (textual + audiovisual) of the program. The
application of the analytical model on the case study, program Sar-e-Aam identifies three
major groups of actors i.e. media team, police department/local authorities and citizen
participating at different stages of the program. The findings of the study show that the media
team is the most influential and privileged group of participants in the program because it
has sole control over the execution stage. All other participants at this point are supporters or
minor contributors. The case study does not demonstrate an equal nature of the power
position owing to inequalities in the amount of involvement, even though the program
permits multiple actors to participate at different stages.
Keywords: Participatory intensities, actors, private media teams, investigative journalism.