Journalism and philosophy have more in common than first meets the eye. While philosophy has seen a serious downfall in its creative activity in the last decades, journalism has only began to flourish. A fusion between the two can produce some very interesting material for the readers.
Lately, most of the philosophic discussions among people involve the news or a judicial or humanitarian story portrayed in them. Every social movement and upheaval does actually stem from conversations reading, watching or hearing the news and commenting with their acquaintances, friends and family all the new current affairs around the world.
Much of these stories are being written or at least shared by people who may have not background in journalism. That is, although the primary recollection of sources is usually done by professionals, the age of information has created a situation whereby anyone can share, tweak and change the news. In a way, like the game of Chinese whispers, you cannot be sure what the initial story was because so many people and other media have by that time picked it up and shared it their own way. At the same time, in the sharing process, there is a tendency to produce humorous memes out of the news. A
All of this information transfer is a global phenomenon. Naturally, some news interest the people of some regions more than others. Still, not everyone knows the same things about the world. It would be rather absurd if everyone was interested on the same things anyways. Therefore, companies, ads and the media have gone out of their way to filter news to individuals as opposed to having to only broadcast information that would be of interest to the general public. There are all sorts of news out there for all tastes.
The same cannot be said about the broadcasting and sharing of philosophy. Quit on the contrary, philosophical research and studies ar enot shared at all outside the academic community. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that much of the philosophical language in these studies is not understandable by people who have not studied it university or read a lot of philosphy. Another is the fact that nobody cares about the intricate problematics that some philosophers bring out. It should be no surprise that people are not interested in what X professor has to say about Y professor’s philsophy or that of some other philosopher’s. There is much more to philosophy than this, happily.
The opinions we care about are those that talk about the immediate world and our lives. In other words, we care about the journalistic news. In this sense I am encompassing a wide range of possible news subjects ranging from celebrity gossip to the dissemination of astrological discoveries. Some enws may have more specific targets than others but all are reliable and objective if they’re any good. Even if we come across opinion articles we know that those opinions are well founded.
Good journalism has commitment with society of telling things as they are. Likewise, good philosophy has the commitment of explaning the world how it is. Any competent philsophical theory; from the most radical skepticism to the most radical dogmatism has the pretense in at least one of its premises that it is telling the naked and raw truth about the world.
Philosophy is actually all about the broadcasting of knowledge even from the time of the early Greeks. The whole point of learning about the world is to be able to pass on the knowledge. Otherwise, the philosophical endeavour would be a personal and clsoed subject and there would be no possible philosophical dialogue between people, which there clearly is, in at least a minimal form.
As well, philosophers have always wanted to change the world. Even those who reject the blatant forms idealism, like myself, must admit that in questioning the world we are appealing to an alternate reality wherein things are not messed up, unclear and full of hidden deceptions. In the same way, many journalists have the hope of changing the crooked reality into something better by showing it to people in the hope that somebody out there will fix it. This is a healthy optimism, for sure.
For all these similarities between the two fields I think it is possible to combine them and produce more reflexive stories. Namely, to add interpretations of the news along with them that may help people understand the reality of it at a deeper level that they may not get at themselves. From the angle of philosophy, news could be used as a medium by which to express philosophical theories that go beyond the actual story but do serve to link it with our perception of the world as a whole. In a way, the story would be philosophy’s vehicle to reality.
The manner of telling the story should be objetive, of course, and it only the interpretation of it would have a philosophical weight. Really, the telling of the story would not be the aim of the philosopher; for that is better left to journalists, who can do such a task in a much more veracious and trustworthy method. What should interest contemporary philosophy is to judge the specific news, evaluate them and produce philosophical abstraction out of those accounts.
If you liked this post you may like this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Carlin Romano: https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Need-Philosophy-of/49119
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