ABSTRACT
What should news do? What role should news play, particularly in contemporary democracies? Focusing on normative perspectives and drawing on classic scholarship, the chapter discusses key features, complicating aspects, and shortcomings of different philosophical views of news. The first theory is libertarianism, with its focus on unbridled freedom and problematic consequences in an uninhibited informational age. The second perspective is social responsibility, with its five functions – informational monitoring; interpretation; social empathy and ritualistic healing; investigative watchdog; and facilitating democratic dialogue. The third approach is collaborative, focusing on collaboration, in different ways in different societies, between journalism and government, raising particular concerns when government controls a feisty press. The chapter ends with a stirring endorsement of the importance of news, imperfect as it is, in contemporary society, as a bulwark of (relative) truth that serves as a defense against excessive government power and ignorance in the populace.
