‘Standing Merrill on his feet’

Chapter 15: ‘Standing Merrill on his feet’: Journalism and materialism: In the previous chapter we examined how John Merrill successfully used a metaphysical and idealist Hegelian dialectic to investigate the contradictions within the practice and philosophy of journalism. Our critique of Merrill mirrors Marx’s critique of Hegel; we must stand Merrill back on his feet. In order to do this, we must situate the current turmoil evident in the field of journalism in a concrete social reality. That is to say we must study the crisis afflicting journalism not as an idea or simply a clash of principles (freedom versus responsibility, for example) but as a series of antinomes mobilised within and by the system of news production itself (the internal material dynamics of the news industry). We also have to situate journalism within the contradictions and crises that animate the entire social system that is global capitalism. It is on this point that the materialist formulation of the dialectic diverges from the Hegelian or idealist view advocated by John Merrill. This means we must add to the dialectic the tools and methods of materialism. We define materialism as a way of viewing the world in which the concrete, sensuous objectivity of the world exists a priori. In Marx’s famous phrase, ‘being determines consciousness’ and it is our constant interaction with the material world that structures our thinking. A materialist analysis makes use of abstract concepts, but it recognises that there is a social relationship between the abstract and the concrete, within the social formation itself. Central to materialism is the methodology of political economy which begins from the proposition that humans are involved in a constant material exchange with nature through the mechanism of labour. In this chapter we argue that the materialist standpoint also has implications for what we understand as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’. Truth is based in material reality and exists regardless of what we think about it. This is a crucial point that is central to the arguments developed in the following chapter.