A realist point of view on news journalism

Bibliographic Data

ID5776415
AuthorsGuillaume Gauthier (0000-0002-2624-3508, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume6
Issue1
Pages51-60
Publication date2005-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1461-670X • E-ISSN: 1469-9699
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1461670052000328203
OpenAlexW2037460216
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited13

This article confronts the antirealist analysis of news journalism by introducing a realist perspective based on an application and an extension of some of John Searle's ideas on the subject. This realist point of view proposes two original hypotheses, namely that news is formally based on a prior reality and that this prerequisite reality is ultimately a given reality. Defending the first hypothesis is the idea that news is intentional in that it represents a state of affairs in a mind-to-world direction of fit. The second hypothesis argues that the social reality on which news is essentially based is almost always constructed from a brute reality through a process of iteration. The article then proposes a typology of journalistic brute facts: natural phenomena, biological facts, non-intentional mental facts, human accidents, selective actions, continuous behaviours, tendencies, dispositions, and other natural propensities and, finally, verbal manifestations. Keywords: AntirealismBrute FactsConstructionNewsPrior RealityRealism Notes I have also addressed the constructivist version (Gauthier, , ). Which is in fact why news is a form of assertion, or rather, that it is the product of a complex and informed speech act that is the result of the primary speech act that asserts. Moreover, while each news item is an assertion, every assertion is not news. The content of an assertion must meet some journalistic criteria (generally deal with current issues and be of general public interest) for it to become news. It is thus that the assertion that the Earth is round is not news, contrary to (in the summer of 2004) the assertion that John Kerry was nominated to represent the Democratic Party in the presidential elections. Mental states other than a belief and speech acts other than assertions have a distinctive direction of fit. For example, desire and intention (in their usual sense) and the order and promise in which they are expressed follow the world-to-mind direction of fit and the world-to-world direction of fit. The state of affairs involved must correspond to the representative content to enable the fulfilment of the desire, the execution of the order, the following of the intention and the holding of the promise. In the case of a news item reporting what someone has said, the state of affairs that must occur is that the person has actually said the words being reported. These statements may, however, be untrue, libellous, racist or sexist. The news item will remain true even if it is criticised according to any one of these aspects. Although in another respect, this presupposition also holds true with regard to news reporting future events. Therefore, the state of affairs does not necessarily occur prior to the news, yet it must occur for the news to be considered as true. The news logically depends on a forthcoming reality. Although not mentioned by Searle, the title of his work The Construction of Social Reality gives a wink to the study by Berger and Luckmann (), The Social Construction of Reality. However, Searle's views do not oppose those of Berger and Luckmann, no doubt because Searle understood the nuances. Berger and Luckmann were sociologists; they sought to analyse how a human society constructed what it believed was reality. Despite their study's title, which may lend to interpretation, it was not an epistemological essay exhorting a view that reality is only socially constructed. It is precisely in confronting this argument that Searle developed his realist theory on the construction of social reality. "The point ... is that for [these utterances] a condition of [their] intelligibility ... is that there is a way that things are that is independent of human representations. The consequence is that when we attempt to communicate to achieve normal understanding with these sorts of utterances we must presuppose external realism" (Searle, 1995, p. 184). Linking the three main concepts that enable one to understand the construction of social reality, those of assignment of function, of collective intentionality and of constitutive rules. The assignment or imposition of function is this capacity to attribute a function to objects that already exist or are created for this purpose. For example, we attribute the function of pumping blood to the heart, and that of being a paperweight to a rock. The collective intentionality is the capacity for representation that is collectively practised, for example, by a society. For Searle, the collective intentionality comes before individual intentionality. Finally, the constitutive rules are those that create the behaviour with which they are concerned. Such is the case in the rules of a game like chess, but also in the rules that govern the promise and human institutions as a whole. According to Searle, at the bottom of the institutional election fact can be found "... the individual expressions of preference of the voters ..." (1995, p. 116) under one material form or another: a mark on a voting ballot, a movement of the arm in a show of hands or the registration of a beep in an electronic beep. "Blizzard buries northeastern U.S., disrupting travel" (18 February 2003). Among others, "Al Hirschfeld, 99, dies; he drew Broadway" (21 January 2003) and "Mister Rogers, TV's friend for children, is dead at 74" (28 February 2003). "Chaos, or democracy in Iraq could be unsettling to Saudis" (23 January 2003). "Bush AIDS effort surprises many, but advisers call it long planned" (30 January 2003). "African town's pride and joy vanished when ferry sank" (20 February 2003). "As trails leads back to Newark, suspect in boy's abuse is caught" (10 January 2003). "For resolute girl, the traditions on India imposed no limits" (24 February 2003). "Life behind basement doors: family and system fail boys" (12 January 2003). "Peace and answer eluding victims of the sniper attacks" (10 February 2003). "Hundreds turn out in Newark to grieve for a too-brief life" (25 January 2003). "From New York to Melbourn, cries for peace" (16 February 2003). "Bush welcomes slower approach to North Korea" (7 January 2003); "U.S. demands Iraq show cooperation by this weekend" (10 February 2003). The realist theory exposed here has obvious repercussions on some aspects of journalistic practice. For example, I attempt to demonstrate in Gauthier (), that it forces journalism to seek the truth

Social reality · Media Studies and Communication · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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