Heuristic

Journalism might not be dead, but it’s tough to say where it’s going to go. The few who have turned to those who think about the big questions, it’s not so clear. But asking for answers from philosophy was never meant to be easy. Philosopher Charles Taylor hopes everyone can restore their faith in democracy. Diplomacy analyst Franz-Stefan Gady wants more philosophers in the Pentagon. One might also turn to the witty, easygoingness of Hume or the lighthearted disdain for mass media of Nietzsche for inspiration. Gady even goes so far to say, “In the post-truth world, victory is a delusional fancy, as was the case in Iraq, but the philosopher would have insisted on defining a military victory in war in clear and delimited terms predicated upon immediate and enduring peace as the only logical metric for defining success on the battlefield.” Such a thorough, deliberate course of thinking only brought upon by the philosophers would give the world a much-needed voice of reason or sigh of relief through whatever happens. And it’s more than just a simple matter of being trained in Hegel and Kant or doing well on philosophical essays and standardized tests, but a reflective and much-needed manner of intellectual growth that every soul desires. 

And surely there’s a battle going on inside everyone and everything in the world to not only make sense of the world but to find truth in a post-truth world. In my time working at the Indiana Daily Student for the past three semesters, I’ve found myself at ends with meaning. As many members of our staff shared personal experiences with sexual assault over Twitter, we took a bold move but risked integrity and objectivity to expose a greater harm. The way a reporter decides what to call a story and breath life into his or her own experience. And this raises a concern. Breathing life into stories we can’t touch might just be what’s wrong with journalism. Reporting unprovable anecdotes in sob stories, especially in the trite, contextless realm of social media, presents these existential struggles. But there might be a better way to look at it. In communicating an experience with assault this way, the journalists do not ask the readers to weigh in on their personal moments. There are no vendettas, malice, or personal agendas to get revenge on nasty ex-boyfriends. Rather, the meaning of the story comes from virtue of the reader imagining the journalist’s scenario. The reader adds a truth in his or her personal subjectivity of what sexual assault is like (much like Kierkegaard’s “Truth as subjectivity” claim), and, through an understanding of the values and experience at play, we bring light to this greater problem. The sharing of sexual assault stories becomes a sentiment-based movement that avoids the pitfalls of the “court of social media” while giving enough detail to make a statement. While it doesn’t truly overthrow the ambiguity and distrust of post-truth stories, it shares a lesson to understand people have been through, reconciling uncertainty with experience.