ABSTRACT
Chapter 13: A crisis in empistemology and ideology: In the first section (Chapters 1–6) we outlined our explanation of the impact of several recent and ongoing crises affecting journalism. In this chapter we extend this analysis to describe and analyse what we are calling a crisis within the epistemology and ontology of journalism itself. We will show how this crisis in epistemology is manifest within journalists themselves and expressed by how they think. One glaring problem that speaks to the critical importance of the crisis of epistemology is the debate about ‘objectivity’. Our intention here is to explain this deeper, philosophical crisis using the explanatory tools of the dialectic and materialism. In this chapter and the next we will unpack our assertion about the form and development of crises within journalism and give you context for the new terminology—internal relations, contradiction, totality, social relations, materialism, idealism, mutual constitution, relations of production, appearance, essence, and dialectic as method. This last term refers to a method for thinking about journalism ethics and the process of change that occurs over time as ethical principles are developed, modified in practice, and discarded in favour of new ones. We argue that in order to fully understand this process we have to grasp the relationship between the social conditions in which journalists operate, and journalism is practised, as well as the ideas and ideals which motivate and form our thinking about ethics.
