Abstract
News and journalism are daily fixtures in our lives. They represent the chief means by which we become acquainted with the distant goings-on that we care about. They are how we come to know about the various who’s, what’s, where’s, when’s, and why’s of the world. They are, in this respect, both the vanguard and the bulwark in facilitating democratic discourse. Or, at least, that’s how the platitudes go. How, exactly, news and journalism accomplish this remains somewhat mysterious. Given the bevy of journalistic genres—ranging from political and science journalism to sports and entertainment journalism—we lack a precise account of what news and journalism are and how they feature in our lives. This dissertation is dedicated to figuring this out. In Chapter 1, I broach this issue through the lens of fake news. There, I critique the received view that fake news is necessarily insincere, that it’s produced either with the intent to deceive or with an indifference toward the truth. My argument rests on the observation that many cases of bad science journalism systematically exhibit the unique political-epistemic risks associated with fake news. Chapter 2 turns to news proper. It challenges a family of theories that I call aims-based accounts of news. Found in the fake news literature, such accounts maintain that news necessarily aims at truth-telling and knowledge production. Against them, I argue that aims—no matter how we characterize them—are a poor means of securing news’s distinctive normative status, especially given the prevalence of non-epistemic aims in news production. Finally, Chapter 3 presents my positive view. There, I propose that news and journalism are functional categories. To be news, or to be a journalist, is a matter of being disposed to perform a certain set of social functions, ones relating to the enablement of our participation in civic life. A functionalist theory, I maintain, helps us make sense of why news and journalism are justifiably subject to a unique suite of norms, ones pertaining to the shaping of—or being cited as justification for—civic behavior.
