Tuesday, September 23, 2008 Malilong: The limits of journalism By Frank Malilong The Other Side
JOURNALISTS were challenged, Cebu Daily News reported yesterday, to continue sincere efforts to perfect the craft of truth-telling. “Continue” is the appropriate word; truth-telling by media is still a work in progress.
It’s not for lack of effort or intent, I assure you, and it is not a situation that is peculiar to the Cebu media. In fact, it is common to media all over the world.
“The function of news,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “is to signalize an event; the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”
The American journalist and political commentator went on to say that because of the difference between the ultimate purpose of news-reporting and that of truth seeking, “news could be expected to coincide with the truth in only a few limited areas, such as the scores of baseball games or elections, where the results are definite and measurable.”
“In the more complex and ambiguous recesses of political life,” he said, “where the outcome is almost always in doubt or dispute, news reports could not be expected to exhaust or perhaps even indicate, the truth of the matter. If the public required a more truthful interpretation of the world they lived in, they would have to depend on institutions other than the press.”
Contemporary journalists, according to media critic Edward Jay Epstein, will find it difficult to accept the distinction between news and truth. “Indeed,” he said, “ newsmen now almost invariably depict themselves not merely as reporters of the fragments of information that come their way, but as active pursuers of the truth.”
Yet, he said, “despite the energetic claims of the press, the limits of journalism described by Lippmann still persist in basically the same form”, adding that it is unreasonable to expect even the most resourceful journalist to produce anything more than a truncated version of reality.
He argued that because a journalist generally lacks the technical competence to evaluate evidence with any authority, he has to rely on the reports of authoritative institutions for their facts. For example, he said, a reporter cannot establish the existence of an epidemic by conducting medical examinations himself; he must rely on the pronouncement of the Department of Health.
This reliance, he explained, leaves the door open for manipulation by the news source. This catches the journalist in a dilemma whether to serve as faithful messenger or to recast the message into his own version of the story.
This tension in the dilemma could be alleviated “if journalists gave up the pretense of being establishers of truth”, Epstein said.
