Journalistic Truth: Empirical and Contingent

Abstract

This chapter explores the concept of truth as it applies to journalism. It begins with a definition of journalistic truth: an empirical, not a metaphysical, truth grounded in evidence and contingent, capable of changing if the evidence changes. It requires far more than a recitation of facts. It requires the construction of meaning, which is created by an amalgam of the evidence with the words and syntax used to express it. This in turn requires fairness and fidelity to context. Passive acceptance of the proposition that Western society lives in a “post-truth” age is rejected as a betrayal of the social contract as conceived of by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Without truth there can be no trust and without trust society cannot function. Several theories of truth are examined. One is Donald Davidson’s correspondence theory, which postulates that a true statement is one that corresponds to something that can be established by evidence to exist outside that statement, expressed in words that have conventionally accepted connections to the world. This disposes of the concept of “alternative facts”. A second theory, also Davidson’s, is compositional meaning: meaning created by choice of words and syntactical arrangement. A third theory is Gottlob Frege’s, which concerns the way such communication subtleties such as tone, body language and gesture can convey meaning. A fourth is one proposed in varying terms by A. C. Grayling, Michael Dummett and Paul Grice. It holds that statements have what Grayling calls a “recognitional capacity”: that is, what the utterer knows to be the meaning and also knows the uses to which the meaning can be put. Grice calls it “utterer’s meaning”. This is an insight that allows us to get to grips with what has come to be called “dog-whistling”. Machiavelli’s defence of the “noble lie” in politics is argued to be inapplicable to journalism, since journalism, while it might be in politics is not of politics. Erasmus of Rotterdam’s argument for the rejection of the “noble lie” is proposed as the ethical journalist’s answer to Machiavelli.