ABSTRACT
Chapter 14: (Re)introducing the dialectic: Hegel and Merrill: The late American journalism scholar John C. Merrill introduced the concept of a ‘dialectic’ in journalism in the 1970s, but it has not been widely adopted. We believe that Merrill’s work needs to be ‘rediscovered’ and updated for the 21st century. The concept of the dialectic—the interplay of opposing, but mutually constitutive social forces that shape society and govern social relations—was first introduced by Socrates, but really came into modern philosophy via Georg Hegel and, later, Karl Marx. This chapter builds on the work of Merrill and offers a critical appraisal of how new dialectics shape journalism and the news industry today. In this chapter we introduce key terms such as the techno-legal and techno-ethical time gap as examples of the dialectic in action. This chapter situates and explains how the concept of the dialectic is both an organising principle of social reality and a method of thinking about the deeper meaning of surface impressions. In this chapter we put forward an argument that the operation of a dialectic in journalism is well established, but little understood in journalism scholarship. The exposition follows historically from the first explanations of the dialectic presented by the Greek philosophers, its further elucidation by Georg Hegel, and its adoption by John Merrill in his philosophical approach to journalism studies.
