How Journalists Visualize Fact

Abstract

Fact is a product of the communication practices of journalists. Journalists rarely have the resources or access to penetrate their sources' informational worlds to establish facts independently. Moreover, the norms of objectivity in journalism often preclude efforts to establish facts independent of sources' accounts. Therefore, journalists visualize the fact value of a story on the basis of a source's face value as an authoritative, normative witness to events. While television visuals offer a greater capacity for believability, the need for an orderly visual narrative leads to staged news events, retakes, reenactments, use of stock footage, and other fakes. These communication practices blur distinctions between fact, value, information, and knowledge and have literary properties. Like literary fiction, news requires the willing suspension of disbelief in order to have its knowledge accepted. This important literary character of news may be fading as the news institution breaks down into segmented markets and specialized information services.