HOW JOURNALISTS THINK ABOUT FACTS

Abstract

Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Journalism” research project—attempts to analyze fact-related beliefs among 1800 journalists from 18 different countries, and test their associations with a wealth of individual, cultural and organizational variables. The study draws on a rich reservoir of data from diverse regimes, institutional and national backgrounds, types of news organizations, ownership and media, as well as different genders, years of journalism experience, education and seniority. Our research appears to be well placed to evaluate journalists' degree of awareness to the challenges of reality depiction, and to outline through quantitative methods the social conditions which promote epistemological naivety in the form of objectivism, and sophistication as expressed in interpretationist epistemologies. Our findings indicate that conditions of ownership, nature of the political regime, personal beliefs and social environment, produce variance in journalists' takes on reality depiction.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• journalism
• journalistic fact
• reality
• sociology of knowledge
• social construction of reality

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study was funded by several institutions to which the authors wish to express gratitude, including the German Research Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, Rothschild-Caesarea School of Communication at Tel Aviv University, School of Journalism & Communication at the University of Queensland and City of Vienna. The authors also thank Tali Avishay-Arbel for her statistical advice. This work is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Godler.