Moreover, "journalism cultures that follow an interventionist approach may act on behalf of the socially disadvantaged or as mouthpiece of a political party and other groups whose interest are at stake".
Thomas Hanitzsch, associate professor of Communication Studies and Media Research at the University of Munich, proposes a continuum on which the degree of interventionism is measured.
[2] The "critical change agent", one of the four professional journalistic milieus that Hanitzsch suggests, tends to "emphasize the importance of advocating social change, influencing public opinion and setting the political agenda" and serves as an example of an interventionist reporting style.
[2] In the broadcasting of election campaigns, journalists intervene in the process of political change when they, for instance, navigate the politician's amount of speech.
[5] Here, politicians or political spokespersons "have to accept the maxims of media production as their own rules if they are to be in any position at all to communicate their messages".
[5] Frank Esser, professor of International and Comparative Media at the University of Zurich, conducted a research about the length of sound and image bites (short quotations and visual images of politicians on television news) in order to analyze journalistic intervention.
Esser shows in his work which factors influence journalistic intervention in the broadcasting of election campaigns (in different national contexts).
[6] Jesper Strömbäck, professor of Media and Communication at the Mid Sweden University and Daniela V. Dimitrova, assistant professor at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at the Iowa State University, developed indicators with which the degree of journalistic interventionism can be measured in, for instance, election campaigns.
[9] It is interventionist since its primary goal is not to report neutrally but it creates reality, sets examples and calls for change.
[5] Additionally, in a culture in which public opinion is rather distrustful of political institutions, adversarial – and thus interventionist journalism – is socially accepted.
"It is exceedingly difficult to determine, for example, whether negative or positive coverage of a politician or issue is a result of partisan bias, the nature of events, or other factors".