ABSTRACT
News is a phenomenon worthy of study because it is the pre-eminent way we understand our contemporary setting in all its diversity and complexity. Whereas an eighteenthcentury encyclopaedist or perhaps even a nineteenth-century polymath may have been able to set themselves the not entirely unreasonable task of understanding everything around them, today’s great thinkers are more likely to be specialists. To have a general and familiar understanding of the world in its bewildering range of developments and expressions-science and technology, medicine, engineering, the environment, culture, arts, sport, international and domestic politics, economics and commerce-it is necessary to rely on journalism of some kind or another to explain those things we are not specialists in, or indeed much interested in. Our reliance on accurate and sincere news reports is taken for granted. It is part of the furniture of the world.
