An Epistemic Approach to Best Practices in Journalism
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AN EPISTEMIC APPROACH TO BEST PRACTICES IN JOURNALISM A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Departmental Honors by Alexander Bryan Johnson December, 2020 Thesis written by Alexander Bryan Johnson Approved by ________________________________________________________________, Advisor ____________________________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Accepted by ___________________________________________________, Dean, Honors College ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE OR ACKNOWLEDGMENT………………………………………………..vi CHAPTER I. A Brief Examination of Journalistic Best Practices……………….………1 II. A Brief Examination of Contemporary Epistemology……...…….………8 III. The Application of Epistemological Principles to Journalism.…...…......17 IV. Case Study: Bob Woodward, President Trump, and COVID-19..............24 REFERENCES...........................................................................................................…...31 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank my advisor and professor Dr. Deborah Smith, who provided a great deal of guidance and showed an amazing amount of generosity with her time as I completed research. I would also like to thank the members of the oral defense committed which addressed this thesis: Associate Professor Mitchell McKenney, Dr. Deborah Barnbaum, and Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett. I want to express my gratitude to the Honors College for awarding me the Crawford Senior Honors Thesis Scholarship as I worked to complete this. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who expressed great patience and support each day I uttered the phrase, “I’ve been working on my thesis.” iv 1 I. A Brief Examination of Journalistic Best Practices How do we determine whether or not journalists have done their job well? Typically, best practices in journalism focus on whether or not journalists meet certain ethical criteria. For instance, there are at least three-dozen codes used by various industry organizations that provide guidelines based on ethical theory (Society of Professional Journalists, n.d.). While there is considerable variety in how organizations and individuals conduct moral evaluations and apply principles in the field, the concept of best practices is consistently seen as an ethical concern. For instance, in 2005, Media Studies professor Mark Deuze wrote that a key characteristic of journalists is an occupational ideology focused on meeting certain altruistic criteria: “Journalists share a sense of ‘doing it for the public’, of working as a kind of representative watchdog of the status quo in the name of the people” (Deuze, 2005, pp. 446-447). According to a 2009 survey of 400 journalists conducted by Beam et al., nine out of ten journalists believed that “it is quite important or extremely important for news organizations to do journalism that serves the public interest” (2009, pp. 738-747). Furthermore, focusing on journalism in Asia, media educator Eric Loo writes, “At its simplest level, best practices are often equated with the best tradition of journalism ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’” (Loo, 2009). Thus, there is a cross-cultural, intra-disciplinary conception of ethical responsibility to one’s audience that tends to shape journalistic best practices at every level—individual, organizational, and industrywide. 2 However, this single idea appears to be where consensus ends on best practices in journalism. Perception of a journalist’s ethical responsibility tends to diverge upon application of theory at an individual (and often even institutional) level, resulting in a lack of coherence (Deuze, 2005, p. 443-447; Martin and Souder, 2009, p. 129; Christians, Wilkins, and Cooper, 2009, pp. 69-82). “Everything depends on whose definition of [public good] holds sway,” Michael Ryan writes in his research for University of Houston (2001, p. 15). Hallvard Moe, another professor of Media Studies, notes that there are several conflicting perspectives on how public service broadcast and new media can be defined in a policy context, let alone applied for public benefit (Moe, 2011, pp. 65-66). Though the notion of public service is a widely accepted one, its breadth and ambiguity make it difficult to rely on for formulating best practices. A potential solution to this problem may involve looking for a unique and common thread among various conceptions of public service journalism. What features consistently dictate our conduct across the board for all conceptions of public service journalism? A research team under the guidance of journalism educator Paul Voakes developed four possible dimensions of “civic” or public service journalism: (a) enterprise, (b) information for decision-making, (c) facilitation of discourse, and (d) attention to citizens’ concerns (Voakes, 2009, p. 759). More expansively, civic journalism as described by Voakes could be an approach that: 1. consists of professionals who take the initiative to develop content aimed at solving a community problem; 3 2. provides the public with the information necessary to make important choices; 3. facilitates conversation on issues between audience members through the content produced by its professionals, or 4. brings the concerns of citizens to leaders who could affect change. In Voakes’ survey of 1,037 journalists, an overall average of 81% of those surveyed said that they either strongly (44.3%) or somewhat (36.7%) approved of the preceding approaches in journalism, though agreement varied significantly on the validity each specific one. (Voakes, 2009, pp. 760-765). It could be argued that none of these characteristics uniquely typify journalism, however. For instance, a social worker can be said to develop material that solves a community problem, provides the public with information necessary to make important decisions, facilitates discourse, and brings attention to important issues where appropriate. The legal counsel for a local government can be said to do the same in a different way, as could a community outreach officer at a police station. None of these qualities are particularly journalistic but are more generally public service-oriented. Generally speaking, the various occupational duties of the social worker, legal counsel, or public outreach employee largely differ from the duties of the journalist, even if they similarly involve the notion of providing a public service. For that reason, someone who provides a public service in the sense that Voakes or Deuze describe might be a good public servant, but this does not necessarily entail that they are a good journalist. However, once we know the purpose of something, we can determine what a good or bad instance of something looks like based on whether or not it achieves that goal. Therefore, 4 the question remains: What is the essential purpose of journalism qua journalism, irrespective of whether we consider it a public service or not? In order to answer this question, one must examine what is left when we separate journalism from the broader notion of public service. Traditional definitions of journalism focus on identifying it as a set of actions that include investigation, writing, selecting and editing information. However, like the public service-oriented definition, this description fails to distinguish the industry from other proximate ones such as “public relations practitioners, entertainers, lay ‘journalists’, technical supporters to media coverage” and others who engage in the same actions (Görke and Scholl, 2006, p. 651; Deuze and Witschge, 2018, p. 167). Another method of identifying the unique and essential qualities of journalism requires the pursuit of an answer not from the perspective of a journalist—many of whom see their own work as a public service, as previously noted—but from an external “instrumental” or “functional” perspective (Deuze and Witschge, 2018, p. 167). German science journalism professor Alexander Görke and economist Armin Scholl note that journalism as traditionally conceived “can be identified as a societal system providing society with fact-based, relevant and current information, whereas public relations information need not be fact-based or current and entertaining ‘information’ is not fact-based but fictional” (Görke and Scholl, p. 651). This definition of the industry as one with the sole end goal of providing information to society pushes us back into the discussion of journalism as a public service, and again overlaps with 5 other proximate industries; however, it does provide insight into other features that can best be used to describe the essential purpose of journalism. Görke and Scholl write that another “system theoretical” approach can distinguish the industry from these other fields by considering role it plays in society.1 As they describe it, “[The] systems theoretic approach states that journalism offers meaning and orientation by constructing and reducing world complexity with the help of its own rules and operations” (Görke and Scholl, p. 652). What is interesting about this other view of journalism as a societal system is that it discards typical notions of objectivity (which, in the context of journalism, focuses on neutrality and freedom from bias) and factuality in favor of the following view: “[S]ystem theoretical adaptations reject the idea that mass media could represent or reflect reality as it is. Consequently, it is not possible to criticize journalists and media coverage for distortions of reality.