David Cohn recently posted for the Carnival of Journalism about Universities and their Role. I’m going to quote him at length regarding how journalism students can work with students in other disciplines to the benefit of each:

Journalism students should be working with students from history, communication and other departments to train them. Yes, you heard me. Journalism students should be teachers. Journalism is no longer the art of story-telling. It can also be the art of story-enabling. If there was one change I’d want to see in curriculum across the board it would be to envision a class whereby journalism students find ways to get the broader student body involved in media projects. This, I believe, is the biggest change that needs to happen.

Or flip this on its head: History, communication, sociology, etc – all these departments should include journalism into their curriculum. Journalism doesn’t need to be done by big J-Journalism students. At the undergraduate level why isn’t every history major tasked with creating a blog and covering one local issue or partnering with journalism students? After all what is history but really really slow journalism

…

We’re too involved in our own journalism programs. Knight (or some other entity with a ton of money) should find a way to lobby/change curriculum in other departments to include elements of journalism. EVERY student should leave college with some experience of reporting and writing.

Certainly there is no dichotomy between “good” and “not good” epistemologies. But there might be “better” and “worse,” and the relative weight of journalistic epistemology is the likely subject of my thesis, and so Cohn’s idea caught my eye.

His idea, on the whole, seems like a fine one. But doesn’t just how fine of an idea it is depend on the degree to which we accept an assumption: that journalistic ways of knowing things are at least as trustworthy as historical, or sociological, or whatever field’s ways of knowing things?

This assumption is important because if it turns out that how journalists come to conclusions tend to lead to wrong conclusions, more so than how other fields come to conclusions, then we probably don’t want our historians too much influenced by journalism.

Another way of making the point: It could be that history is really slow journalism, and so historians-in-training have something to learn from journalists. But, it could also be that journalism is really fast and really sloppy history, and so who should learn from whom needs reversing.

Using a professional as as an authority in an argument can require some assumptions. One such assumption is that members of a professional class place the common good over their self interest.

Without this assumption, we might question whether professionals’ advice to us is tainted in ways that that benefit them, say professionally or financially. Or the taint might be one hiding an ignorance about the subject they do not wish to disclose for fear of embarrassment.

Whether we can rightly assume that professionals act selflessly is the subject of Thomas Haskell’s historical essay “Professionalism versus Capitalism,” from the anthology he edited, The Authority of Experts. He discusses and compares the views of R.H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C.S. Peirce on whether those in the professions act for the common good.

The soundness of this assumption is important for some arguments of authority, including those of journalism, particularly where the risk of an “expert” offering a self-serving or deceptive opinion is high. (A professional with the potential to act selfishly would cause us to question an authority. It does not, of course, render ipso facto the authority’s opinions unwarranted.)

How do we rate professionals today?

Haskell’s essay does not suggest how we might test this assumption today. The value of his essay is not in tellings us whether professionals act selflessly. Instead, the value of his essay lies in its indicating that different generations will think differently about the assumption.

The thinkers Haskell cites believe very different things about self-serving experts than do most of us today. The divergence suggests to me that as we evaluate appeals to professionals, we need to think about perceptions of authority. What might the arguer think of professionals? What would the people around the arguer think or have thought?

In asking these questions, we allow ourselves to act on the principle of charity: presenting an argument we want to critique in a favorable light. We also can think about our own answers to these questions and whether our evidence for them stands up.

Know your audience

The divergence also suggests to me that journalists should watch carefully the long-term trends in what is generally viewed as moral. They should watch trends in how people in professions are trained — what they’re told, the lenses through which they see the world that they’re taught to use.

Observing these trends can provide evidence in support of a view of the authority of professionals that is appropriate for our time.

Journalists, for their part, can use these observations to shape their arguments so that when they cite professionals in stories as authorities, they can be relatively sure that their use of professionals is attuned to how their audience is likely to judge the professionals.

On a side note, Haskell’s discussion of expert authority might offer lessons to some scholars of fallacies and argumentation. His essay suggests that the scholars who say arguments to authority are not per se fallacious are correct.

To reject these appeals out of hand rejects even the possibility that in some time or place the evidence we have about authorities leads us to conclude they are trustworthy. Before rejecting an appeal to authority outright, we need some reason to think the zeitgeist cautions us from trusting authorities to some degree.

This is the view taken by, for example, James Hyslop in Logic and Argument — and, I’m sure, many other argumentation philosophers I haven’t read yet.

(It could also be the case, though, that the experts are never right and also never trustworthy, in which case a search for the good expert might be like waiting for Godot.)

(It could also also be the case that this question needs to be settled discipline by discipline. Witness the seeming angelic qualities of computer scientists involved in the open source software movement.)

Douglas Walton’s book Appeal to Expert Opinion offers a method of evaluating someone’s use of appeals to authority to determine whether the appeal is fallacious. Chapter 1 outlines some of the difficulties we face when deciding whether to accept an expert appeal.

In this post I’ll describe those difficulties and offer my own thoughts on how the difficulties relate to our evaluation of arguments from journalists. What follows is heavily influenced by Walton’s book; page numbers in parentheses refer to it.

(What do I mean by arguments from journalists? I’m talking about when journalists try to tell us something about how the world is or should be. I recommend you skim an earlier post to get a fuller sense of what I’m thinking about.)

Confronting appeals to experts

One difficulty in evaluating appeals to authority lies in that when we evaluate these appeals, we must grapple with the expert’s way of viewing the world (19). If that expert comes from a complex field, like medicine or ethics, then she will most likely come to her opinions (her conclusions, her “expert” opinions) using an epistemology sensible to people in the field but not necessarily those outside it.

When deciding whether to accept an expert appeal, our inability to understand the expert’s logic is troubling to us because it means we cannot test it. To borrow from Thomas Haskell’s introduction to The Authority of Experts, we want to use “our” reasons and logic to reach what we consider “good,” sensible conclusions. The expert’s opacity gets in our way, and, if nothing else, that’s troubling at a gut level. In terms of critical thinking — evaluating reasons and evidence given to support a conclusion — it’s a big roadblock.

A second difficulty in evaluating appeals to authority occurs when experts try to communicate their opinions to people outside the field. For one, the communication to non-experts must simply make sense to the listener. A “simple” explanation that I still don’t understand is still no good to me, assuming I’m honestly trying to understand it.

For another, we also need to have a reliable system for evaluating whether the lay explanation fairly represents the full expert opinion (23-27). We need tools to alert us to when the lay explanation is incomplete, self-aggrandizing, or simply wrong. When considering an appeal to authority, then, we might encounter this second difficulty if we lack a system for making such evaluations.

Our struggles here might not be our fault. Experts can be intimidating, sometimes to the point of belittling us or capitalizing on our powerlessness (22-23).

Whatever the cause, if non-experts cannot understand detailed, technical arguments offered within the field by experts, and if they can’t understand the arguments as intended for a layperson, then what is the poor non-expert to do when it comes time to evaluate the appeal to the authority?

Journalism and appeals to authority

Next, I’ll try to apply to journalism these difficulties of judging appeals to authority. I think the difficulties apply in at least two ways: in how journalists reach their conclusions, and in how we as audiences evaluate journalistic conclusions.

First, let me say that I assume it pretty obvious that journalists regularly utilize appeals to experts to draw conclusions.

As such, to accept journalist’s arguments, we, the audience, need to know that journalists can overcome the two difficulties outlined above. If we aren’t sure that journalists can overcome these difficulties, then our task of determining whether to accept what the journalist has to say about the world becomes that much harder.

Regarding difficulty 1: most journalists, at least by training, are not experts in the fields from which they find expert sources. Consider a situation where a journalist uses an internal report about something to draw conclusions for a story. The epistemology employed in their source’s report might be as foreign to journalists as it is to us (certainly, some journalists will be more familiar with source’s epistemology and more able to understand and express it).

Where journalists do not understand the epistemology of other fields, the audience faces a problem. The journalist can’t use her reason and logic to check the expert conclusion. So we can’t judge the expert and we can’t pin our hopes on the journalist. Is the only solution here having to simply trust that the journalist chose the proper expert?

Regarding difficulty 2: like the rest of us humans, journalists face the challenge of understanding the lay explanation of expert conclusions. An example here might be a journalist asking a political scientist how to best interpret some polling data. The political scientist probably will start offering a simpler explanation to the journalist than you’d find in an academic journal.

For us to accept a journalist’s conclusion that builds off appeals to experts like the political scientist, we need to know that journalists understood what the experts told them enough to correctly describe it in news stories. This, again, is not an impossible hurdle, but perhaps a tough one.

Furthermore, like the rest of us, journalists interacting with expert sources face the possibility of intimidation or rough treatment. Journalists might face this possibility more than non-journalists because of pressures to meet deadlines, or to impress the source, or to not alienate the source so as to keep information subsidies coming.

I don’t think there needs to be blame attached to when this happens; I do think that we need to be aware of it when deciding whether to accept a journalist’s conclusions.

If anything, the need to know how journalists interacted with experts and whether journalists understood what they were told only strengthens arguments in favor of increasing openness and intimacy between journalists and audiences. Journalists could start telling us not only “here’s where I’m coming from” or “here’s where I’ve donated” but “here’s how I felt after the interview.”

Journalists as experts

So far, the sense of “expert” as relates to journalism has leaned towards people who aren’t journalists — economists or doctors, maybe.

But what if we say journalists, too, are experts? I don’t think it too much a stretch to include journalists as a form of expert. We cite them as authoritative all of the time. Most of us have said “according to The New York Times…” or “Jane Meyer revealed that…” with straight faces. Unless we offered additional evidence, we used these journalists as authorities.

If journalists can be experts to whom appeals to authority are made, then what are the implications for us as audiences determining whether to accept their conclusions?

I’ll throw out a couple of ideas.

One implication regards difficulty 1 from above — our need to understand the epistemology used by a field to come to its conclusions. If journalists are experts, then audiences now face an additional epistemology to understand when consuming news: the epistemology by which a conclusion makes sense within the field of journalism (one example might be the objectivity and the view from nowhere).

By the definition above, this epistemology can be as impenetrable to audiences, without additional study on their part, as those of our physicians or mechanics.

Yet, as we ponder whether a journalist was correct to write a story concluding, say, “Israel and the U.S. collaborated on Stuxnet,” we are unable to come to our own conclusion without a sense of how the journalist came to theirs.

We can, though, also question why journalism requires a separate epistemology from the “standard,” so to speak, reasons and conclusions available to all of us. What is inherent in saying “Israel and the U.S. collaborated on Stuxnet” or a similar conclusion that requires a different standard of evidence or reasoning than those taught in basic textbooks? Why do journalists require the same level of speciality as physicists in this regard?

A second implication regards difficulty 2 from above. Experts can deliver lay explanations of conclusions that are more complicated within the discipline.

Suppose that a news story was actually the lay version of the journalist’s complicated, intra-discipline conclusion. As audiences, then, we face again the problems and questions described above.

We have no easy means of testing whether the simple argument fairly represents the full expert opinion. Journalists presenting “lay” conclusions to audiences might puff up their work or omit important counterarguments. We need a reliable system for responding to these problems. (This is all, of course, on top of our need to evaluate the other expert opinions within journalistic stories.)

As with other experts, as audiences we also must be wary of intimidation or belittling on the part of journalists. I return, again, to Jay Rosen and his criticism of the “Church of the Savvy” political press for their assumption that only they have access to “the way things really are” in Washington, and so the press can write the way it does legitimately.

The potential for intimidation here is high given that, in many cases, journalists are our only source into politics or businesses; if we choose to reject journalists as authorities on these topics, we might have few other options for obtaining necessary news and information. Thus, “here’s the way it really is” holds some power over us as audiences trying to figure out whether it really really is.

Conclusion

I hope some of the ideas presented here about argument and journalism made sense.

As a reminder, this is a long-term project for me. I am eager to reconstruct my views based on comments and suggestions, especially from people with a background in argumentation.

I’m looking forward to reading critiques.

This semester I will study argumentation theory under the tutelage of Charles Davis in the Missouri School of Journalism. My research will probably be the first steps toward a graduate thesis on argumentation and journalism.

This post is a small announcement that I will update this blog about my argument research as it progresses. (I’ll describe the research in a moment.)

I’m going to write these posts for two reasons.

1. Self-improvement. My writing is weak in part because I do not write very often. I hope that this “public” commitment to updates will pressure me into practicing writing regularly.

2. Discussion. If anyone else is interested in argumentation or its relationship to journalism, that’s great. I have much to learn and want to converse. If you want to comment about which parts of my writing are lousy, that’s OK, too.

The research

I am interested in argument in the sense of using reasons and evidence to reach conclusions about how the world is or should be. An example of these arguments is “the economy is bad because unemployment is at 10%.” Another is “We should decrease taxes on businesses because at current rates they are discouraged from hiring workers.”

I am dividing my research into a few broad topics.

One topic is analyzing and evaluating arguments. In this part of the research I will develop my ability to outline arguments and test the quality of their reasoning and evidence using critical thinking skills.

A big part of this topic is the study of fallacies, such as appeals to authority or ad hominem attacks. Through the work of writers such as Douglas Walton, I want to think about the structure of fallacies and when they might be more or less appropriate to use in an argument.

A second topic is understanding arguments in context. Some have argued — I think Stephen Toulmin is among them, but I haven’t read his books yet — that different standards for what makes a “good argument” apply in different contexts, such as in a business context or in an academic one. How strong is this position?

A third topic is asking, when we are arguing, what are we trying to do? In a most abstract sense, what is argument? This topic has been influenced by three papers I understand to be seminal by Brockriede, O’Keefe, and Hample. When we study argument, are we looking only at the words involved? Or must we also consider arguments “about” things (argument₂, O’Keefe called it)? To what extent do we consider the psychological parts of giving and receiving arguments as part of studying “argument” (Hample)?

Argument and journalism

As I said earlier, I hope to eventually bring what I learn into a larger argument about journalism. Specifically, I wonder what we can learn and prescribe about journalism under a lens of argumentation.

My rough working thesis is:

1. Journalists usually try to say something about the way the world is: the house burned down, the mayor lied, the economy tanked, etc. They offer descriptive arguments.

2. To decide whether to accept a descriptive argument, we can use critical thinking skills.

3. If we apply critical thinking skills to journalists’ descriptive arguments, we might find their arguments tend to be poor.

4. If journalists do not tend to present strong descriptive arguments (a conditional I hope to investigate empirically), we might question why, given our limited time in which to read, we read journalism. There is plenty of other, non-journalistic (non-newspaper or blog) work out there offering descriptive arguments that might present them more strongly.

What’s next

My next post will summarize my first readings in argument from over the last few weeks. It’ll probably cover the work of Walton, Brockriede, O’Keefe, and others. I will, I hope, finish it in the next few days.