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Abstract
The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journalism scholars, have distinguished between practices more and less conducive to the goal of truth. The current paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted in Israel, in which news-gathering practices are directly observed at controversy-laden press conferences. This arena avails a thorough observation of journalist–source exchanges, without breaching the principle of source confidentiality. The practices observed are juxtaposed against the news products, alongside reporters' own comments on their work and reasoning. We suggest that a pragmatic conception of knowledge among journalists is compatible with observable practices such as reporters' questioning tactics and choices of interrogative emphases, more so than journalistic notions of realism and the social construction of reality.
Notes
1. Three of the themes extracted from the findings below—“presentation/gathering dualism”, “non-verification”, “inaccuracies”—consisted entirely from cross-validated data. As we make clear in passing in what follows, news reports were juxtaposed against the actual questions and answers at the press conferences, and against a concise summary of reporters' interview comments in the case of “non-verification”. Another theme, “seeking assertions”, juxtaposes reporters' questioning tactics against a typical interview response personified, for the sake of concision, by a reporter's comment.