In all the information that comes at you in a day, how do you decipher, discern, sift and choose what is true, what is necessary and what you can trust? How do you know?
"The epistemology of journalism is an incredibly fascinating topic, one over which much ink could be spilled.
To the extent that journalism is itself a kind of public discourse, we can evaluate it as a kind of truth-telling. I would argue that our attitudes towards practices of truth-telling vary depending upon the medium in which that discourse takes place. [I think that one of the most interesting discussions on the relation between truth-telling in journalism and journalistic medium is Neil Postman’s short work Amusing Ourselves to Death.]
Consider the following examples:
- In oral cultures, sayings and proverbs are themselves a medium for truth-telling – bits of wisdom passed down from the elders. Such bits of wisdom both guide daily life and adjudicate civil disputes.
- In the American legal system, oral truth gets displaced by written truth – briefs, citations, law books, etc. – but in the courtroom speech itself gets privileged over print in that testimony is the medium for truth-telling. The short proverbs and sayings of an oral culture would not be accepted as a valid form of testimony or evidence.
- In academic writing, the printed word is privileged over the spoken. Postman tells of a story in which a doctoral candidate was rebuked by his dissertation committee because of a citation that read: “Told to the investigator at the Roosevelt Hotel on January 18, 1981.” The committee said, you are not a journalist, you are supposed to be a scholar. The academic practice of truth-telling takes the medium of print to be essential.
But why are these examples relevant? They are relevant, I would argue, because they draw attention to the way various practices of truth-telling themselves bias our attitudes towards what would count as “truth” or “objectivity” within that practice. And in journalism itself, the medium has changed dramatically over the past decades – thereby changing our attitudes as to what counts as objectivity and truth.
With the rise of television, the medium shifted from print to a combination of visualand oral. As television journalism grew, it gradually became more and more visual, relying less on reporting of the news and analysis, and more on images. The shift from the medium of language to the medium of image itself had an impact on print news as newspapers like USA Today sprang up that relied more on image than text.
As a result, our culture now privileges the visual in journalistic practices of truth-telling, perhaps far beyond any other medium. (One could have an entire discussion here on the so-called objectivity of the photographic image.)
I would argue that the privileging of the image as the bearer of truth over print is part of the reason that many in our society think objectivity comes simply by adding more voices. If you are in a place that I cannot see, you could take one picture, but that picture would be flat, it would be from one perspective, from one angle, and with a limited horizon. If you took two pictures, from different angles, I might see a bit more. Three pictures would be even better, and so on.
In short, when we associate truth-telling with the medium of image or film, moreseems like more truth. (I will leave aside whether or not that is a correct assumption.)
If we adopt that standard for truth-telling in journalism, then we will assume that simply showing one more “perspective” will add to the objectivity or truthfulness of the reporting. But I would argue that this is simply false. Indeed, I would argue that such a presumption is part of the reason that serious journalism continues to degenerate."
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