The media's capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and mal information. To explore the epistemic role of verifications, covering their frequencies, predictors and underlying motivations, procedures, and contribution to reporters' knowledge, this study combines qualitative and quantitative reconstruction interviews, comparing verified and non-verified items. Findings show that verifications are driven primarily by reporters' risk and opportunity calculations. The frequency of verifications remains surprisingly stable, yet this steadiness might be misleading, as we found and typified different kinds of verifications: from the shallow efforts to reduce risk and enhance the precision of technical details, to the ambitious but scarce attempts to convey conflict and conduct investigations. In epistemic terms, reporters are anti-reductionists, setting a low epistemic bar, which allows them to rely on sources by default, as long as there are no "defeaters" (=counterbeliefs or counterevidence) inviting verification.

In recent years, many authors have observed that something is happening to the truth, pointing out that, particularly in politics and social communication, there are signs that the idea of truth is losing consideration in media discourse. This is no minor issue: Truth, understood as the criterion for the justification of knowledge, is the essential foundation of enlightened rationality. The aim of this article, based on prior research on social communication (especially as regards journalism), is to elucidate an explanation of this phenomenon, known as ‘post-truth.’ Because it is an epistemological question, the three main variables of the problem (reality, subject and truth) have been analysed by taking into account the manner in which digital social communication is transforming our perception of reality. By way of a conclusion, we propose that (a) the ontological complexity of reality as explained by the news media has accentuated the loss of confidence in journalism as a truth-teller, and that (b) truth is being replaced by sincerity, as an epistemological value, in people’s understanding of the news. The result, using Foucault’s concept of Regime of Truth, suggests a deep change in the global framework of political, economic, social and cultural relations, of which post-truth is a symptom.

The digital media environment provokes many questions about the state of journalism as a knowledge producing practice. As a means to better assess how changing digital news practices connect to journalists’ epistemic authority, this article combines Ekström’s emphasis on journalistic epistemology as a social practice of knowledge production with Bødker’s conceptualization of circulation both as a form of information transmission and as a site for producing shared meanings about journalism. To develop a model for analyzing the epistemic consequences of digital news circulation, three components of circulation are explored: infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. These components consider, respectively, the materiality of digital media, various usage patterns that arise, and public struggles over what news as a form of knowledge ought to look like and who should produce it.

News aggregation is often presented in opposition to reporting, though the two practices have much in common as journalistic evidence-gathering techniques largely built around quickly pulling together scraps of information from a variety of other accounts and validating it as knowledge for the public. This study uses participant observation and interviews with aggregators to explore aggregation as an epistemological practice, examining the ways aggregators weigh evidence, evaluate sources, and verify information and particularly examining the points of convergence and distinction between aggregation and reporting. It finds that aggregation is scaffolded on top of reporting’s epistemological principles and methods, but defined and distinguished by its additional distance from the evidence on which it relies.

This study investigates the epistemological implications of the appropriation of audience analytics in a data-driven news culture. Focussing on two central aspects of epistemology, epistemic value and epistemic practices, we ask two overall questions (1) How are audience metrics balanced and reconciled in relation to other standards in the justification of news as valuable knowledge? How are different practices of research and presentation, truth-seeking and truth-telling, prioritized in a news organization marked as a data-driven news work culture? The study presents a case study of a Scandinavian legacy news publisher that has pursued the embracing of a data-driven news work culture. It is based on a qualitative multi-method approach. The findings show how metrics are used as a superior standard in deciding on the epistemic value of news. This is expressed in strategies, guidelines and discussions in the newsroom, and put into practice in coaching, evaluations and rewarding of the performance of individual journalists. In the everyday news production, metrics are reconciled in relation to independent standards in journalism, related to the claims of news journalism to provide relevant and verified public knowledge about current events. Moreover, the study shows how the embracement of metrics radicalizes the focus on presentation, packaging and timing in the optimization of news material and in the valuing of professional practices. Efforts in research and truth seeking are more seldom explicitly valued. The work of fulfilling reasonable truth claims is mainly taken for granted.

Journalists’ epistemological activities—presumed to provide factual and reliable public information—have made journalism one of the most influential knowledge-producing institutions in society. However, changes—both slow and sudden—related to the digitization of news media and the diffusion of misinformation are challenging the social role and authority of journalism. This special issue advances research in two emerging sub-fields: (1) epistemologies of digital journalism and (2) the study of misinformation. This editorial presents an introduction to the sub-fields and a summary of the nine papers included in the special issue.

This article focuses on news journalism, social media platforms and power, and key implications for epistemology. The conceptual framework presented is intended to inspire and guide future studies relating to the emerging sub-field of journalism research that we refer to as “Epistemologies of Digital Journalism”. The article discusses the dependencies between news media and social media platforms (non-proprietary to the news media). The authority and democratic role of news journalism pivot on claims that it regularly provides accurate and verified public knowledge. However, how are the epistemic claims of news journalism and the practices of justifications affected by news journalism’s increased dependency on social media platforms? This is the overall question discussed in this article. It focuses on the intricate power dependencies between news media and social media platforms and proceeds to discuss implications for epistemology. It presents a three-fold approach differentiating between (1) articulated knowledge and truth claims, (2) justification in the journalism practices and (3) the acceptance/rejections of knowledge claims in audience activities. This approach facilitates a systematic analysis of how diverse aspects of epistemology interrelate with, and are sometimes conditioned by, the transformations of news and social media.

This article sketches a theoretical framework for studies of the epistemologies of journalism. In this context epistemology does not refer to philosophical inquiries into the nature of true knowledge but to the study of knowledge-producing practices and communication of knowledge claims. The focus in the article is mainly on TV journalism. The theoretical framework distinguishes three fundamental areas and three main questions for research on the epistemologies of journalism: (1) form of knowledge (What are the characteristics of the knowledge that television journalism produces and offers its audiences?); (2) production of knowledge (What rules, routines, institutionalized procedures and systems of classification guide the production of knowledge and how do journalists decide what is sufficiently true and authoritative?); and (3) public acceptance of knowledge claims (What conditions are decisive for the public's acceptance or rejection of the knowledge claims of television journalism?). The article develops the framework by way of theoretical conceptualizations and empirical illustrations from concrete forms of TV journalism.

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.

In this article, we examine how the social disturbance precipitated by ‘fake news’ can be viewed as a kind of infrastructural uncanny. We suggest that the threat of problematic and viral junk news can raise existential questions about the routine circulation, engagement and monetisation of content through the Web and social media. Prompted by the unsettling effects associated with the ‘fake news’ scandal, we propose methodological tactics for exploring (1) the link economy and the ranking of content, (2) the like economy and the metrification of engagement and (3) the tracker economy and the commodification of attention. Rather than focusing on the misleading content of junk news, such tactics surface the infrastructural conditions of their circulation, enabling public interventions and experiments to interrogate, challenge and change their role in reconfiguring relations between different aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life.

News organizations have adapted in various ways to a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks. This article dissects a campaign to actively shape that environment led by professional fact-checking organizations. We trace the development of the Share the Facts “widget,” a device designed to give fact-checks greater purchase in algorithmically governed media networks by driving adoption of a new data standard called ClaimReview. We show how “structured journalism” gave journalists a language for the social and technical challenges involved, and how this infrastructural technology mediates between fact-checkers, audiences, and platform companies. We argue that this standard-setting initiative exhibits both promotional and disciplining facets, offering greater distribution and impact to journalists while also defining their work in specific ways. Crucially, in this case, this disciplining influence reflects internal professional-institutional agendas in an emerging subfield of journalism as much as the demands of platform companies.

In this essay I argue that a better understanding of the basis of journalistic professionalism lies in the combination of two ideological formations. First, we have the process of professional socialization of journalists, leading to a delimited range of voices and self-censorship. This formation alone is insufficient, however, as occasional self-criticism and scepticism of journalistic professional norms is needed. I argue that Žižek’s concept of ideology as fetishistic disavowal (that is, being able to actively admit the limitations of one’s ideology as long as one still follows it) is a necessary complement to the idea of ideology as indirect control. This is done with an examination of the discourses used by 20 US and UK-based political journalists to answer seven different interview questions.

By engaging with journalists in the networked media environment, audiences can play a role in shaping the epistemologies of journalism: how journalists know what they know, and communicate knowledge claims. While audiences have been offered opportunities to engage in news-production processes, ongoing reciprocal relationships between journalists and audiences online are rare. This study shows how sustained reciprocity takes place in a large-scale WhatsApp group opened by an Israeli journalist/blogger for her audience. Based on an analysis of group conversations, blog posts, and interviews, we demonstrate how a continuous conversation between the journalist and her loyal audience members allows the co-construction of journalistic knowledge across the news-production process. The online space that affords ongoing reciprocal exchanges is termed here a meso news-space, occurring between the private and public realms. This study contributes to understanding how sustained reciprocity can be accomplished and how it can promote shared benefits for journalists and community members.

This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1) produce a fragmentary narrative that (2) reflects particular moments in time, (3) curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce ‘networked balance’, (4) gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and (5) generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism’s position within networked information spaces.

Citizen participation in the news-making process has been a hopeful promise since the 1990s. Observers hoped for a rejuvenation of journalism and democracy alike. However, many of the enthusiastic theoretical concepts on user engagement did not endure close empirical examination. Some of the major fallacies of these early works (to whom the author contributed himself) will be outlined in this article. As a bleak flip side to these utopian ideas, the concept of “dark participation” is introduced here. As research has revealed, this type of user engagement seems to be growing parallel to the recent wave of populism in Western democracies. In a systematization, some essential aspects of dark participation will be differentiated. Finally, the benefits of (also) looking at the wicked side of things will be discussed.

Amid digital developments, data journalism has gained a strong foothold among news publishers and in public discourse. With its authoritative claims and informative visualizations, it can play a significant role in the actions of citizens and people in power. This mixed-method case study explores a distinct epistemology developed in an independent form of data journalism in public service media in Scandinavia, not subordinate to traditional news values or investigative journalism. The study investigates its knowledge and truth claims, approach to data, transparency practices, and resources invested to claim reliable knowledge. The epistemology is characterized by innovative practices in the visualizing of essentially prejustified datasets. It claims public value offering general information and audience-friendly explorations of individual perspectives on topics on the public agenda. The approach to data views reality as measurable facts yet indicates epistemic ambiguity regarding figures’ reliability, guided by a principle of reasonableness in the justifications of truth claims.

Online media sites such as Breitbart News in the United States and The Canary in the United Kingdom have come to prominence as powerful new agents. Their reach and influence in the contemporary digital media ecology have been widely highlighted, yet there has been little scholarship to situate these important new players in the field of political communication. This article argues that, first, these ‘interlopers’ known as the ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-left’ need to be understood as embedded in the context of populist politics. Second, ‘hyperpartisan’ describes these sites better than the framework of alternative media as it mirrors populism’s ideological pillar of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Finally, a deliberate provocation is argued to name these digital start-ups as news to create a starting point for conceptualising these disruptive new media forces.

Terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ circulate freely today within the popular lexicon. It is an environment where objective facts have ‘become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (OED). Central here is to understand the conceptual grounding of subjective opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication. My paper will draw on the Hegelian tradition of critical theory that has in unique ways unified an analysis of the nexus between socio-economic structures and epistemological frameworks. Here I name opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of self-certainty, which receives validation within what Adorno called the Halbbildung of industrial culture, a form of social consciousness cultivated by the spread of information and economic imperative. It will be argued that the concept of opinion becomes a vital question for understanding, in this ‘post-truth’ landscape, current standards of instantaneous communication and cultural transmission.

This article examines the role of user comments in evaluating the climate of public opinion. It aims to evaluate the relevance of quasi-statistical assessment of public opinion - which was tailored to traditional media - to the digital era. The article, based on 21 interviews with Israeli users of news websites, argues that comments-browsing on the Internet gives a new meaning to the notion of a quasi-statistical assessment of public opinion. The aggregation of different comments, each of which contains an implicit cue for the climate of public opinion, transforms them together into a direct cue. The effect of the merging of journalistic contents with user-generated contents side-by-side on the same website is also evaluated through the perspectives of persuasive press inference and exemplification theories.

This article analyses the novel form of live political fact-checking, as performed by the Norwegian fact-checking organisation Faktisk.no during the Norwegian parliamentary election campaign in 2021. The aim of the study was to investigate the epistemological consequences of introducing a breaking news logic to political fact-checking. Through methods of participatory observation, interviews and textual analysis, the study finds that Faktisk.no used several strategies to bridge the ‘epistemic gap’ between the logics of breaking news and political fact-checking. Combined, these strategies pushed the live fact-checking towards a confirmative epistemology, implying that the live political fact-checking confirmed (1) knowledge already believed to be true and (2) hegemonic perspectives on what constitutes important and reliable information. The findings thereby point to a potential reorientation of political fact-checking from being a critical corrective of political elites to confirming the perspectives and knowledge base of the same elites.

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

This article develops the idea of an "emotional turn" in journalism studies, which has led to an increasingly nuanced investigation of the role of emotion in the production, texts and audience engagement with journalism. These developments have occurred in tandem with, and accelerated by, the emergence of digital and social media. Research on news production has shown that journalistic work has always taken emotion into consideration, shaping approaches to storytelling and presentation. However, the view of journalists as detached observers has rendered the emotional labor associated with news production invisible. Research on emotion in journalistic texts has highlighted the fact that even conventional "hard news genres" are shaped by an engagement with emotion. As studies on news audiences and emotions have shown, audiences are more likely to be emotionally engaged, recall information and take action when news stories are relatable. The affordances of digital platforms and social media have had a profound impact on the space for emotion. The expanded opportunities for participation have contributed to questioning traditional distinctions between news audiences and producers and have ushered in new and more forms of emotional expression that have spilled over into practices of news production.

In this article, we discuss the rise and use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies. Hybridity afforded a meaningful intervention in a discipline that had the tendency to focus on a stabilized and homogeneous understanding of the field. Nonetheless, we now need to reconsider its deployment, as it only partially allows us to address and understand the developments in journalism. We argue that if scholarship is to move forward in a productive manner, we need, rather than denote everything that is complex as hybrid, to develop new approaches to our object of study. Ultimately, this is an open invitation to the field to adopt experientialist, practice-based approaches that help us overcome the ultimately limited binary dualities that have long governed our theoretical and empirical work in the field.