Researching With Our Hair on Fire: Three Frameworks for Rethinking News in a Postnormative World

Abstract

This article urges a jolt in journalism theory commensurate with the urgent state of planetary affairs—including catastrophic climate change and spreading authoritarianism—that journalism’s weaknesses have helped to precipitate and that its strengths might help to contain. The article explores three conceptual frameworks offering alternative approaches to conceiving news that might disrupt the stasis of our polarized societies: “existential journalism,” or a call to radical independence; Buddhist news values, based on ontological and ethical commitments favoring interdependence and compassion; and nonrepresentational news, inspired by an epistemologically expansive style of social research privileging affect, immanence, and wide-eyed attention. Attending to journalisms of engagement, compassion, and everyday joys might disrupt the heuristic partisanship and protective avoidance that characterize citizens’ contemporary relations with news, opening possibilities for more generative politics.

Reporting civilizational collapse: Research notes from a world-in-crisis

“…Fifth, journalism will need to seek to creatively deploy and innovate its established communicative architecture and traditional modes of reporting when visualizing and dramatizing, narrating and telling, expressing and deliberating stories that speak to our world-in-crisis, and to do so in and through the digital affordances currently available and in today's interconnecting and changing global news ecology (Cottle, 2012(Cottle, , 2014Parks, 2020).…”

“…When revisited 40 years later, Graham Turner essentially reaffirmed the study’s predictions of planetary overshooting and the validity of projections of collapse (Turner, 2014), as did the Club of Rome’s own revisiting 50 years later and its declaration of a ‘planetary emergency’ in 2019 (Club of Rome, 2019). Ideas of planetary boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2015) and overshooting have now informed major challenges to orthodox (ecologically myopic) economics, including influential formulations of doughnut economics (Raworth, 2017), steady-state economics (Daly, 1991), circular economies and regenerative culture and agriculture (Wahl, 2016) as well as ideas of post-growth (Jackson, 2021), degrowth (Hickel, 2021), sacred economics (Eisenstein, 2018) and ecological civilization (Eisenstein, 2021; Korton, 2021; Lent, 2021).…”

Mind the gap : Newspapers as a forum for democratic public debate on food production

“…Rather than reifying and reproducing normative patterns (Parks, 2020), the results presented and discussed in this dissertation suggest the need to reassess the expectations and/or standards against which we evaluate journalistic practice (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018;Fenton, 2010a;Pfetsch, 2018;, and to re-examine the assumptions that underpin such expectations, and the conditions under which it would be reasonable to expect news media and journalistic practice to deliver on such expectations. The present dissertation sought to evaluate journalistic performance from the perspective of textual evidence, in ways that support challenging unsubstantiated or outdated idealisations that may contribute to the current crisis of journalism (Conboy, 2017;Curran, 2019).…”

“…Normative approaches to the media are often taken for granted, and foundations are not frequently questioned; therefore, the underlying assumptions not only remain unchallenged, but are legitimised by theorisations that discursively reproduce these normative expectations without problematising or indeed questioning their underlying assumptions (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018;Parks, 2020;Pfetsch, 2018). Much of media scholarship and journalism research in particular frequently reifies and discursively reproduces such normative patters, focusing on Western-biased theorisations grounded on untested assumptions and descriptive analyses of what journalism is, rather than what it should or could be (Hanitzsch, 2019;Parks, 2020). While this research starts from descriptive analyses that build on such normative patterns, the point is precisely to lend empirical substance for the admittedly necessary normative discussion, supporting the epistemological necessity of rethinking and reconceptualising the democratic role of journalism for the current era (Conboy, 2017).…”

“…Our findings add to those voices calling for revision of journalism scholarship. Instead of reifying and discursively reproducing normative patterns (Parks, 2020) grounded on problematic assumptions (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018) and Western biases (Stetka & Örnebring, 2013), we should develop analytic frameworks and methodologies fit to describe media practice, and elucidate the conditions under which media practice is able to interpret normative expectations born of perhaps a simpler understanding for current disrupted public spheres (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018) and high choice media environments (Van Aelst et al, 2017).…”