Abstract
Transparency is seen as a panacea for a major problem facing journalism and journalists today, that is, the loss of trust and credibility. However, the scholarly literature has focused primarily on normative considerations, without providing much empirical data that could confirm what are widely assumed to be the positive effects of transparency. In this paper, I argue, first, that editorial texts, in their various manifestations, are the most potent of the various established means of displaying transparency for opening up the production of news item. However, I then draw on my linguistic, process-focused research on quoting and highlight challenges this process creates for the use of editorial texts in the pursuit of transparency. It turns out that conveying the essentials of decision-making that occurs during newswriting requires profound understanding and awareness of the interplay between modalities, co-texts and contexts of language use. Finally, implementing the norm of transparency has allegedly led to the transformation of a well-intentioned goal into an institutional myth, leading journalists – constrained, for example, by the mechanism of impression management – to disclose only socially acceptable practices. Therefore, I conclude by arguing for transdisciplinary research in which scholars research ‘on, for and with’ (Perrin, 2018) other stakeholders in order to bring about a fundamental change in the culture of transparency in journalism.
Highlights
The mass media have been in a powerful position to support public negotiation on socially relevant topics
Transparency is seen as a panacea for a major problem facing journalism and journalists today, that is, the loss of trust and credibility
I have first argued that editorial texts are the most potent of the various established means of displaying transparency that are available for opening up production
Summary
The mass media have been in a powerful position to support public negotiation on socially relevant topics. Transparency has been suggested as the new ethical norm, ‘the new objectivity’ (Weinberger, 2009), which should be embraced in journalists’ daily work and implemented on the level of news items It is included in numerous journalistic guidelines (Accountable Journalism, 2019; EthicNet, 2018), and the media industry has introduced features that inform the audience about producers and production and call on the audience to join in the discussion. All this tempts me to argue provocatively that the established transparency features, which I will introduce, seem almost like ‘rituals of transparency’ (Karlsson, 2010: 535) By this I mean that they ‘signal audiences that journalists and news outlets embrace the new norm of transparency’ (Koliska, 2015: 202) by making the news item appear to be transparent without having to reveal much about the inner workings of their news organisation. I will support this claim by raising three possible points in answer
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