Early Career Work in Progress Seminar (Tuesday - Week 3, MT26)

Abstract: Philosophical work on journalism tends to sort its failures into two kinds. On one side, epistemic failures—a matter of evidence, reliability and the transmission of knowledge—are studied through the norms governing ‘he said/she said’ reporting (Simion 2017), the tension between balanced and reliable reporting (Gerken 2020), the dangers of balance (Terzian 2025), the duties of expert interviewing (Croce 2025) and the epistemic infrastructure of news circulation (Carlson 2020; Godler, Reich and Miller 2020). On the other, practical failures—a matter of professional ethics, incentives and institutional pressure—are studied through the genealogy of objectivity as a professional norm (Ward 2015), the market shaping of news (Hamilton 2004; Pickard 2019) and reflexive accounts of practice (Mason 2023). Each side treats its own domain as largely self-standing. This talk questions that division. Focusing on three familiar practices—balancing competing views, reporting by attribution and correcting errors—I argue that their characteristic failures are failures of a single normative structure, at once epistemic and practical. False balance, amplification through attribution and corrections that repair nothing are failures of a practice by its own standards—both as a way of knowing and as a way of acting. Each survives because it delivers something the institution counts as success: the appearance of fairness, a defensible position, a record of having corrected. I address this through what I dub a practice-first approach to normativity, asking what it takes for a journalistic practice to be normatively adequate.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

If you are interested in presenting, please get in touch with Rebecca Rowson (rebecca.rowson@chch.ox.ac.uk)

_{Workshop in Early Career Work in Progress Convenor: Rebecca Rowson}