Journalism Is Not the Pursuit of Truth

Why Pakistani journalism must move beyond facts, inverted pyramids and artificial certainty to construct a more rigorous account of reality

The famous Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari once said that truth was expensive. In the process of discovering truth one needs to spend on investigation, evidence gathering, time, expertise and verification. I agree but only to a point. My argument is that even after spending a lot of resources on something, what we produce is not necessarily truth. Instead, we only produce a rigorous account of reality. Through investigation we produce knowledge about reality, not truth. The idea of truth and the finality and absoluteness attached with it is closer to theological conception—which is something very distinct from how human knowledge of reality operates. Truth also has philosophical connotations. But in our part of the world, it is usually associated with religion. The more we invest in the process of investigations the better our knowledge of reality will become. But that does not transform knowledge into truth.

Truth has the characteristics of absoluteness, finality and universality attached to it. Reality on the other hand is what exists and what happens. Humans perceive and encounter reality through observation, language, personal position, institutions, memory, evidence, and available information. Reality varies from time to place. Truth on the other hand is absolute and final.

These opening observations have been presented to bring home the point that I have always found Pakistani journalists’ claims that they are chasing truth to be deeply problematic. When we are doing journalism, we construct a defensible understanding of reality. We do not possess reality, we construct a picture of reality which could be based on facts, information and evidence.

Now this reality could change momentarily. Another crucial point is that journalists, who are constructing an understanding of reality for their viewers or readers, are not situated outside the reality. Journalists lie inside reality while observing it from somewhere. Nobel Prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen’s idea of positional objectivity could be a useful tool to understand what I am trying to say. Objectivity does not mean that the journalist has reached a view from nowhere.

Something which a journalist describes as objectively true depends on the observer’s position, his or her conceptual framework, and his or her relations to the object being observed. The concept of positional objectivity is based on the idea that when someone sees his or her conditions and position affect the knowledge produced by that observation. Positional objectivity does not mean that every individual perspective is valid.

Journalists worldwide are obsessed with gathering facts and putting them into their news reports without realizing that this is an extremely poor way of reproducing reality. Facts, one reports, can all be true and yet they can fail to represent reality of the time. Journalists do not simply gather and present facts; they conduct a process of selecting facts of their choice from what someone has described as an infinite universe of possible facts. Remember selection itself is a process of interpretation.

When a journalist prioritizes one fact over another, he is exercising an editorial judgment which in most cases is based on certain assumptions. In the process of authoring a report, a journalist exercises the authority to decide what happened, what matters, who matters, what goes into the lead, what gets buried, what is relevant, what history matters and what can be omitted.

All this process of selection and interpretation could produce a report which may be factually correct and yet presents an incomplete picture of reality.
I have 36 years’ experience of reporting both for newspapers and television channels. Even during the period when I was actively engaged in reporting, the idea that news reports and the format we use in journalism is lacking in depth and most of the time fail to capture reality boggled my mind.

Now that I am no longer engaged in active reporting, and have enjoyed considerable time introspection, I am convinced that the format we use in reporting and presenting news is terribly flawed. It is called inverted pyramid in journalistic and academic jargon. This model was developed during the American civil war when reporters from remote battlefields used to send reports to their head office located in major cities of the United States, through telegraph, which was unreliable and could send the reports in truncated forms. So that made reporters put important or sensational information at the top of their reports, followed by paragraphs with less valuable information.

This structure was justified under condition of unreliable communication technology. But the technology problem has long gone, while the inverted pyramid form has survived.

Reality is much more complex than this format of the new stories being used in Pakistani media, both print and electronic. With the advent of television journalism, we have only televised newspapers. In Pakistani media news items are adorned with an element of certainty. The reporter and his or her editor only seldom produce information related to what they don’t know about the development or event about which they are reporting.

When I look back at my career I often get flabbergasted by the fact that there was hardly any occasion when I was completely certain about the information I was giving out to my reader. Journalists in most cases are afforded an opportunity to connect with selective officials who are designated to interact with the media and leak information to their favorites. I now realize that I was able to present a much better version of reality to my readers when I quit inverted pyramid models and moved to longer pieces. Here again certainty was absent.

As my longer pieces were mostly related to field work, I was at least constructing a version of reality based on my interaction with society and people and not coming from remote-controlled, stage-managed, so-called official sources. I now understand that if journalists admit or clearly state what they do not know about the events and developments they are reporting, it will add objectivity to their reporting.

Someone may ask how a journalistic admission of not knowing something about the issue they reporting about can enhance the objectivity of the report? I think this exercise can prevent the journalist from converting uncertainty into artificial certainty and would set the limits of knowledge.

Pakistani journalists often produce single-source stories not because they cannot produce stories with multiple sources. But because information is tightly controlled in Pakistan and the regimented environment of strict information control journalists are never given access to officials beyond officials’ spokesmen who are happy to talk of the record and demand to be quoted as senior officials.

In Pakistan, a convenient way to create objectivity in a news report is to put two conflicting statements in one story. Maybe neither of the parties quoted in the story do not have a clear understanding of the reality being described. So, objectivity does not always lie in who is saying what. It could be contained in a fact or statement that is beyond the perspective of two conflicting parties.

Pakistani media has advanced technologically but methodologically it has remained fossilized. In other words, Pakistan media has entered the digital age without leaving the era of inverted pyramid. Pakistani newspapers have retained the old news-story structure and electronic channels have reproduced the same model in an audiovisual form. Digital platforms have not proved more innovative.

Pakistan media should reevaluate their forms with the goal and objective in mind that they should work towards better representation of reality. Harari says truth is expensive. He is right. But Pakistani journalism’s problem is not that truth is expensive because in Pakistan media houses have never spent a penny on news generation. Pakistani journalists’ problem is that they equate accumulation of facts with the capture of reality. Facts, investigation, and verification are all necessary parts of journalism but none of these gives us reality in its entirety. The future of journalism will not be in the hands of those who report a maximum number of facts in the fastest possible time. It lies with those who can explain the meanings of events and developments of the time.