The mode of journalistic truth: an ethnographic inquiry into news-making through Latour's modes of existence

In our modern society, ‘news’ effortlessly infiltrates our daily existence, appearing on our digital screens, airing through radio waves, and saturating the pages of print media. This study ambitiously aims to provide an empirically nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between news, journalism, and the concept of "truth." Employing a multiple case study design primarily reliant on ethnographic information, the study seeks to interrogate news production and its association with truth. The association between truth and journalism has long occupied journalism scholars and practitioners, with entrenched views divided between objectivity, advocating and describing a ‘truth out there’, and subjectivity, arguing for a truth made instead found as a result of social factors such as politics, technology, economy, and so forth. Both fall short of adequately speaking about journalism. While objectivity—an out-there truth—has historically been upheld as the gold standard of journalism, it fails to account for the diverse perspectives and interests that influence the selection, framing, and presentation of news stories. Conversely, while recognising the role of individual interpretation and context in news reporting, subjectivity risks legitimising the dissemination of biased or misleading information under the guise of "alternative truth." The challenging research gap that this study attempts to address is this shortcoming of not adequately speaking about journalism, a need that has become more imperative in the wake of the proliferation of fake news, as discerning truth from falsehood in the world news becomes increasingly crucial. Moreover, this knowledge gap is not only relevant to journalism scholars and practitioners but also to a diverse array of stakeholders, including innovators, policymakers, activists, and citizens at large, all deeply invested in news. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's Modes of Existence framework, which explores how modern societies produce truth, and employing ethnographic investigations across 11 diverse news-making contexts in four different countries (Sri Lanka, Turkey, Serbia, and Nepal), this research seeks to build an alternative description of journalistic truth. Based on Latour's ontological pluralism that lists science, religion, law, technology, politics and more as separate regimes that produce distinct forms of truths, the study subverts the complex inquiry about journalism and truth into a new research question: Can we empirically define the conditions required for the journalistic speaking of truths and untruths? In the process of answering the question, the study identifies journalism as a distinct mode of existence, characterised by its unique logic and methods for establishing truth, distinct from those of science, religion, technology, law, and politics—an alternative answer that enables better ways to ask questions about news and truth, an answer enabling better respect for both journalism and its surrounding context, may it be technology, politics, law, or religion. More importantly, it provokes new ways of acting upon journalism, whether reporting, teaching, innovating, policymaking, or simply consuming news.