Abstract
Truth is typically understood as the primary standard of news media organizations and of social media networks. Most codes of media ethics, including Al Jazeera’s, specify the reporters’ duty to tell the truth. Though interpreted in various ways, truthtelling has been centered on human rationality and empirical methods. In the traditional view, objective reporting is not only the goal of competent professionals, but neutrality is considered a moral imperative. The dominant scheme is increasingly controversial, and theoretical work in international media ethics contributes by finding a new pathway intellectually. A different concept of truth as authentic disclosure gives the idea of truth a global understanding. News, defined as disclosing the inside meaning, brings to light the underlying puzzles that enable audiences to work constructively on socio-political problems themselves. For research on Al Jazeera, the question is whether it practices what might be called interpretive sufficiency or in Geertz’s terms “thick description.” Interpretive sufficiency locates cultures in a non-hierarchical relationship to the moral dimension of human life. In this view, news is a form of knowledge production, in contrast with news as an information system. The intellectual history of truth in the Occident is accounted for, with the universal idea of aletheia providing the assessment of the Al Jazeera Media Network worldwide.
An early, abridged version of sections of this chapter, adapted to crisis journalism appeared in The International Journal of Crisis Communication (“Truth, Al Jazeera, and Crisis Journalism”), 1(2), December 2017, pp. 79–91.
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Notes
- 1.
For a comprehensive compilation of twentieth century scholarship on truth, see Lynch (2001).
- 2.
The Greek term alétheia is standard for those who define truth differently from correspondence theory. Marc Lynch (2001, 2004, 2011) is doing the most extensive contemporary philosophical work on truth; see his adjectival use of the term in “Alethic Pluralism, Logical Consequence and the Universality of Reason” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2008, pp. 122–140). Alston’s (1996) influential book on epistemology and metaphysics centers on the adjectival form, alethic realism . Heidegger’s Being and Time is preoccupied with the issues of truth as they are identified by the concept aletheia.
- 3.
Being and Time (1927) is Heidegger’s earliest systematic analysis of the correspondence concept of truth as well as his rejection of it. He developed truth further in his Introduction to Metaphysics. In Poetry, Language and Thought, works of art provide a symbolic frame that discloses the meaning of things in the world. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (2013) is a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg in 1931–32; cf. Habermas (2013). His latest essay on truth is “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.”
- 4.
Wadah Khanfar was the Managing Director of the Al Jazeera Channel in 2003, the Director General of the Al Jazeera Network in 2006. In 2011 he resigned as Director General of the Al Jazeera Media Network.
- 5.
Aletheia arises in natural settings, not contrived ones; therefore, the more densely textured the specifics, the more closely a deep reading is achieved. Following the methodological principle of external validity, the goal is finding representative cases that allow in-depth and holistic analysis, rather than spectacular ones that are idiosyncratic and not representative of social reality.
- 6.
C. Wright Mills (1959) introduced the concept of “abstracted empiricism” for quantitative social science that explained sociological and psychological facts through multivariate analysis. He argued that when social science procedures are derived from the natural sciences, the result is reliable coding, but limited knowledge of social structures. Empirical studies over longer periods will clarify details; mixed method approaches will undoubtedly yield thicker descriptions. But this chapter concludes from the relevant intellectual history that news as knowledge production requires a different epistemology.
- 7.
A substantial body of research has been constructed on the life histories of ordinary people (Yow 2005).
- 8.
For a review of the issues and literature on the relationship between propaganda and critical consciousness, see Christians (1995).
- 9.
Kant’s absolutism leads to the conundrum of conflicting duties. In his influential essay, On the Supposed Right to Lie Out of Love for Humanity, the categorical imperative against lying is exceptionless.
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Christians, C.G. (2019). Truth as an Ethical Principle. In: Sadig, H. (eds) Al Jazeera in the Gulf and in the World. Contemporary Gulf Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3420-7_2
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