The globalization of the scientific epistemology is a daunting problem, but no less significant is the attraction of the journalistic epistemology. They might work hand in hand.
The journalistic epistemology is the comfortable, common-sense idea that if you want to know something you go to the place where that thing is happening and you ask the people what is happening. You record this and your impressions of the people, moral or social or otherwise, then you write about it. This is seen by a great number of people as a very clear and easy path to the truth about things. Trouble is, this is a formula for creating good journalistic products, not a path to finding the truth.
Same with science. The Scientific Method is a great way to address scientific problems and figure out how to deal with them scientifically. Less attended to is the idea that the method forms what a scientific problem is or can be. We have an illusion that the scientific method, applied to anything, will clean it up and provide an answer that has the force and clarity of a science experiment. We leave out the part where the chosen method, by virtue of its structure, limits out what counts as science, a problem, worth the time to study, etc. Science feels comfortable because it appears to be certain but it can only be certain because of its weeding process on what counts as something worth studying. Instead of bracing our uncertainty, we race to laterally apply a very limited metric to huge, complicated questions in order to get some relief.
Same is true with the journalistic epistemology. We love it because we like the direct simplicity of it, the idea that “Someone knows” or “they know the truth, we just don’t know their story” approach. If we could just go there, get the stories, and share them with the decision makers, we would be in a much better world. This is much better than the alternative of uncertainty, which would stipulate a number of horrors: That the people there have no clue what’s happening, that they simply articulate the same corporate-supplied reasons that people far away do, that the leaders are uninterested in either compelling stories or the truth, that the leaders are very much aware of the truth and don’t care, that everyone is doing their best and the recalcitrance of the world means that someone has to simply suffer for anyone to get anything improved.
The appeal of comfortable certainty that such simplistic epistemological moves provide is typically called ideology. Ideology always feels good and right, there’s little discomfort in it, and your actions and beliefs are always moving you toward the “good.” Hegemony are the practices that make ideology, and yourself, feel like you matter. It works so well that we often call others’ beliefs “ideology” and our ideology “truth” and set out to correct them.
A great example of this is how the critique that we should leverage against the use of journalistic epistemology broadly is often leveraged against academic thinking. The Frankfurt School, with their use of dialectical social analysis to show the often contradictory results that emerge from actions are charged with being “ivory tower” impenetrable academic texts, or not in a position to be able to “know” since they are too far and too removed from the situation to comment on it. The journalist’s epistemology only provides one way to the truth, and makes it as uncomplicated as looking around or experiencing events to know what the truth of the matter is. This position is too being at a “distance” from things, albeit a distance that excludes other sorts of information, or the lack of information.
The approach of dialectical analysis has great explanatory power, but very low satisfaction power – it doesn’t offer or provide any easy solution, no blame, no bad guy at the heart of it all to remove. It also doesn’t do much for what is in demand these days, tools for the management of uncertainty. Dialectical analysis raises a lot more questions than it answers, and provides very uncomfortable points of view rather than causal solutions. It throws most everyone’s point of view into question via ideology and hegemony. This is why such analysis, or any sort of academic analysis that tries to be holistic, gets dismissed by most people.
It’s far more comfortable and easy to ascertain a singular cause as described by the people who are most proximate to the issue, or who are a part of that culture, then seek out those who don’t know, or don’t believe them and blame them for the issue. Then we can move on. I think Kenneth Burke’s notion of scapegoating is the best rhetorical approach to the appeal of the journalistic epistemology.
Academic or scholarly analysis has nothing to offer for those seeking comfort or ease. It ramps up the situation via explanation, explication, and then critique and questioning of those modes, sometimes to the point of categorical dismissal of the mode itself. Analysis of how things connect, how people articulate those connections, and how belief drives reasoning are the order of the day. These feed uncertainty to be sure, but if there is any hope in understanding the world and the people who have been and are in it, uncertainty cannot be managed or diminished, it has to be embraced. We must establish an epistemology that does not prefer solving issues to understanding them. A little bit of understanding and a lot of uncertainty keeps us asking questions instead of telling people to stop asking and start complying.