Theorizing the Epistemologies of News Journalism

I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on Bødker’s and Eldridge’s innovative and inspiring contribution to the study of epistemology in news journalism. Research in this area has intensified in recent years, in response to general transformations within journalism, as well as the specific challenges related to the circulation of misinformation and fake news in online and social media. In the monograph, Bødker and Eldridge develop a theoretical framework to analyze journalistic practices of inferential reasoning, applied in case studies of news reporting related to Donald Trump. I will comment on what I understand as key conceptual components in the framework they suggest, that is, the conceptualization of journalism as knowledge, inferences, and the discursive and performative practices in journalism. I urge further theorizing these essential aspects of journalistic epistemology. Before I discuss the building blocks of the theoretical framework, I will briefly comment on two trends in journalism that were mentioned as a background of the study. In the introduction, Bødker and Eldridge argue that the discursive legitimization of journalism through various textual elements has become more explicit and more complex “because news presents not only knowledge but knowledge of a specific kind.” They assert that the knowledge produced in contemporary journalism has become more differentiated. I will come back to the concept of knowledge. Meanwhile, I am not entirely convinced about this clear shift. Diversity also characterized the subgenres of news journalism even before today’s transformations of the digital news media landscape. I think that the hypothesis of increased explicitness remains to be verified and explored more systematically. Implicit epistemological premises and unproblematic constructions of factuality largely characterize contemporary news journalism. Moreover, changes in the explicitness of epistemic claims, and transparency and contextualization of journalistic practices, have been noted in historical research on earlier transformations of journalism. Perhaps, we now see a new shift. However, we should be careful not to infer too casually a set of general conclusions based on observations of certain phenomena.