ABSTRACT

Journalists’ and publics’ relationship with truth-telling is so messy because the term “truth” holds multitudes of competing senses that are rarely acknowledged in journalism discourse. People approach contested subjects from many, sometimes incommensurate, senses of truth. When journalists fail to identify the competing senses embedded in varying truth claims, they reproduce confusion as to the validity and verifiability of such claims and contribute to a rolling epistemic crisis in the public sphere. This essay explores six senses of truth – logical, empirical, affective, ideological, authoritarian, and narrative – and discusses their interaction and problematic conflation.

摘要

记者和公众与讲真话的关系如此混乱，因为“真相”一词包含多种相互竞争的意义，而这些意义在新闻话语中很少得到承认。人们从许多、有时是不相称的真理感中接近有争议的主题。当记者未能识别出嵌入在不同真理主张中的相互竞争的意义时，他们就会对这些主张的有效性和可验证性产生混淆，并助长公共领域的滚动认知危机。本文探讨了六种真理意义——逻辑的、经验的、情感的、意识形态的、威权主义的和叙事的——并讨论了它们的相互作用和有问题的合并。