Truth is not only a primordial issue, but a perennial one in normative media ethics.
Nearly all codes of ethics begin with the reporter’s duty to tell the truth under all
circumstances. Credible language has long been considered pivotal to the media
enterprise as a whole – accuracy in news, no deception in advertising, authenticityin entertainment. Media professionals have tended to agree, at least in a low-level
sense, with philosopher Karl Jaspers (1955): “The moment of communication,” he
said, “is at one and the same time the preservation of, and a search for, the truth.”
Though interpreted in various ways, media ethics as a scholarly field and professional
practice recognizes the wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition – truth is the
immovable axle.
Historically the mainstream media have defined themselves in terms of an objectivist
worldview. Centered on human rationality and armed with the scientific
method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true
and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness.
Truth is understood in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation
and precision with data. News corresponds to context-free algorithms, and
professionalism is equated with impartiality.
During a formative period for the media in the 1920s, a dichotomy between facts
and values dominated Western thinking. Genuine knowledge was identified with
the physical sciences, and the objectivity of physics and mathematics set the standard
for all forms of knowing. Journalistic morality became equivalent to unbiased
reporting or neutral data. Presenting unvarnished facts was heralded as the standard
of good reporting. Objective reporting was not merely a technique, but withholding
value judgments was considered a moral imperative (Ward, 2004, ch. 6).
James Carey has observed correctly that the commitment to objectivism is rooted
in both academia and the profession. Objectivity emerged in journalism out of the
struggle within the press for a legitimate place to stand within the complexities of
rapid industrialization. “Journalists, capitalizing on the growing prestige of science,
positioned themselves outside the system of politics, as observers stationed on an
Archimedean point above the fray of social life” (Carey, 1997b, p. 207). Originally
this form of journalism – beginning most prominently with the wire services – was
rooted “in a purely commercial motive: the need of the mass newspaper to serve
politically heterogeneous audiences without alienating a significant segment” of
them. Subsequently this strategy of reporting “was rationalized into a canon of professional
competence and the ideology of professional responsibility” (Carey, 1997b,
p. 208). With scientific naturalism the ruling paradigm in the academy, universities
institutionalized the conventions of objective reporting in journalism curricula.
Seeking the truth in newsgathering and producing the truth in newswriting have
been complicated by budget constraints, deadlines, editorial conventions, and selfserving
sources. Agreeing on visual accuracy in a digital world has been almost
impossible, even among competent professionals of good will. Even if we could get
our thinking straight, sophisticated electronics bury us with unceasing information
and little time to sift through the intricacies of truth-telling.
The prevailing view of truth as accurate information is now seen as too narrow
for today’s social and political complexities. Objectivity has become increasingly
controversial as the working press’ professional standard, though it remains
entrenched in various forms in our ordinary practices of news production and
dissemination. In Carey’s dramatic terms,The conventions of objective reporting were developed as part of an essentially utilitarian-
capitalist-scientific orientation toward events. … Yet despite their obsolescence,
we continue to live with these conventions as if a silent conspiracy had been undertaken
between government, the reporter, and the audience to keep the house locked
up tight even though all the windows have been blown out (Carey 1997a, p. 208).
As Ward describes it, “the traditional notion of journalistic objectivity, articulated
about a century ago, is indefensible philosophically, weakened by criticism inside
and outside of journalism” (Ward, 2004, p. 4). “Traditional news objectivity is, by
all accounts, a spent ethical force, doubted by journalists and academe” (p.261).
With the dominant scheme no longer tenable for this primordial principle,
philosophical work on it is critically needed. Instead of abandoning the idea or
appealing to coherence versions, the concept of truth needs to be transformed
intellectually. In Descartes’ mathematical reasoning, it is the mind alone that
knows. However, in a fuller understanding, there is no propositional truth independent
of human beings as a whole. Truthtelling is not considered a problem
of cognition per se, but is integrated into human consciousness and social
formation. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, a truthful account takes hold of the
context, motives, and presuppositions involved” (Bonhoeffer, 1995, ch. 5).
Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the
nub, the heart of the matter” (Pippert, 1989, p. 11). To replace newsgathering
rooted in the methods of the natural sciences, rigorous qualitative procedures
must be followed instead. Reporters aiming to inform the public adequately will
seek what might be called interpretive sufficiency, or in Clifford Geertz’s terms,
thick description. This paradigm opens up the social world in all its dynamic
dimensions.
The thick notion of sufficiency supplants the thinness of the technical, exterior,
and statistically precise received view. No hard line exists between fact and interpretation;
therefore, truthful accounts entail adequate and credible interpretations
rather than first impressions. The best journalists weave a tapestry of truth
from inside the attitudes, culture, and language of the people and events they are
actually reporting. The reporters’ frame of reference is not derived from freefloating
data, but from an inside picture that gets to the heart of the matter.
Rather than reducing social issues to the financial and administrative problems
defined by politicians, the media disclose the subtlety and nuance that enable
readers and viewers to identify fundamental issues themselves. Telling the truth is
not aimed at informing a majority audience of racial injustice, for example, but
offers a form of representation that fosters participatory democracy. Interpretive
sufficiency in its multicultural dimension locates persons in a noncompetitive,
nonhierarchical relationship to the larger moral universe. It imagines new modes
of human transformation and emancipation, while nurturing those transformations
through dialogue among citizens. The nature of truth as the larger context
requires continuing debate so that this cornerstone of communication ethics
continues to have credibility.
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