Keywords

Truth is an enduring issue in media ethics. Nearly all codes of ethics include the reporter’s over-riding duty to tell the truth, as does Al Jazeera’s Code of Ethics: “Endeavour to get to the truth and declare it in our dispatches, programmes and news bulletins unequivocally in a manner which leaves no doubt about its validity and accuracy” (Al Jazeera English, Principle 2, June 2008; revised 2014). Credible language has long been considered central to the media enterprise in all its facets, including news and editorials, documentaries, magazine features, and online formats. Without stating it in these terms, media professionals tend to agree with philosopher Karl Jaspers (1955): “The moment of communication is one and the same time the preservation of, and a search for, the truth.” Media ethics as a scholarly field and as a professional practice recognizes that truth is the sine qua non for ethical theory and news morality.

This book is distinctive in understanding Al Jazeera in terms of global communication ethics. In examining the extent to which Al Jazeera is reversing the North to South information flow, the book’s purpose is to specify the consequences of this reversal for international media ethics short-term and long-term. By situating the Al Jazeera Media Network (AJN) in the heart of the debates on global communication ethics, this book examines the deeper meaning of this major player’s influence on non-Western approaches to media ethics. Rather than simply demand international perspectives on media ethics, this chapter will be echoed throughout the book as the authors demonstrate through theory and application how this reconstruction ought to be done.

Language is essential for social formation, or, in other words, human existence is impossible unless truth has priority. Social institutions are not sustainable unless it is presupposed that people are speaking truthfully. “Truth is a human need in the sense that human beings do not wish to lose their relation to tangible reality. They have to live in that reality; they cannot live constantly in an abstract state removed from it” (Mieth 1997, pp. 89–90). Truth is a pristine issue in human affairs. Without veracity, social and political institutions will become dysfunctional.

While truth is generally considered the norm of communication as a whole, truth also has priority in media theory and practice. Truthtelling is the occupational norm of media institutions, the standard that gives journalistic values coherence. Around the world, unbiased information has been given a central role in journalism. Tine Ustad Figenschou puts it accurately in these terms:

The professionalization process in modern journalism was first initiated in Anglo-American media throughout the nineteenth century in response to political and economic pressures, but it has had a global presence and became a global influence over the last century. International studies find that the core values of objectivity, accuracy and truth, are at the core of professional ethics globally and central to the understanding of good journalism worldwide. (2016, p. 193)

Truthtelling as the normative core of professionalism is not controversial. However, for this assertion to be credible for the global AJN, both the concept of truth and the nature of news must be redefined.

The objectivist worldview has been the standard definition of truth in the mainstream media. In Stephen Ward’s elaboration, traditional objectivity is a web of ideas, a doctrine based on “journalism’s realism and empiricism , disciplining it with rules, standards, and attitudes” (p. 73). The newsroom has operationalized it: “All opinion must be clearly attributed to the source, accompanied by direct quotation and careful paraphrasing. Objective practice asks reporters to verify facts by reference to documents, scientific studies, government reports and numerical analysis. To enhance objectivity, reports are written from the detached tone of the third person” (Ward 2009, p. 74).

Historically for mainstream journalism, the facts in news have been seen as mirroring reality. In the received view, journalism’s aim has been objective accounts of a domain separate from human subjectivity. In the formula of Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell, “Truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” (Russell 1912, p. 121 ). Typically, truth is defined as precise data for accurate representation. Professionalism in news is equated with impartiality toward people and events. As Ward concludes correctly: “Objective reporting has not been merely a technique, but withholding value judgments has been considered a moral imperative” (Ward 2015, ch. 6).

However, as is commonly recognized, the objectivist worldview is Western and, therefore, is ill-suited to global news systems such as Al Jazeera. Wadah Khanfar in his interview with Leon Barkho, gives a widely shared reason for rejecting the objectivity paradigm: “None of us can rid ourselves from his own perceptions and ideas and thoughts. Objectivism can never be achieved fully, so why should we pursue something that we humans cannot achieve? Why should we hide behind something called objectivity as long as we are not by nature objective?”

In reporting, objectivity is no longer defensible as the journalists’ professional standard. This narrow concept of truth as equivalent to neutral facts is now seen as too limited for today’s political and social vicissitudes. Wadah Khanfar in his interview puts it this way regarding the Eurocentric news paradigm: “With objectivity as its pivotal element, it focused on the corridors of power and did not take care of the periphery and the marginal. The Western objectivity norm has failed to represent the Middle East, a region that has turned into something like a center of the world.”

The idea of objectivity is based on Western intellectual history. In the objective Greek view of truth, Plato saw it as corresponding to reality. For Aristotle truth is a correct or accurate statement. Following the legacy of classical Greece, Descartes defined truth-statements as mathematical, non-contingent propositions. This view of human knowledge has been attacked steadily for a century, until there is today a crisis in the correspondence definition of truth. Therefore, one line of assessment in this chapter is the clarity with which Al Jazeera’s professionals and management understand the deeper problem than objectivity’s unsuitability; that is, the very concept of truth is in an intellectual predicament.

Opposition to this scientific view of human knowledge appeared already in the idea of fantasia in Vico and in Wilhelm Dilthey’s verstehen during the counter-Enlightenment beginning in the eighteenth century. The assault has intensified with critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, and Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy. For the British philosopher, J. L. Austin (1961), truth is an illusory ideal; there is no “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” about historical events such as the sacking of Rome. Taoism promotes a world where objective truth is inconceivable. Because of the anti-foundationalism of the social sciences generally, maintaining an incontrovertible domain separate from human consciousness has become nearly impossible.Footnote 1 Institutional structures and policies remain objectivity-driven, but in principle the conceptual momentum in the North is toward restricting mathematical rationalization to the natural sciences.

Because the truth principle is foundational to media ethics, this book’s appraisal of AJN’s role in international news and its impact on global media ethics must include this chapter on the ethics of truth. This chapter is not media criticism, but a scholarly evaluation. Media criticism focuses on professional values, and this chapter on ethical principles. The practices of Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al Jazeera English (AJE) will be included as relevant, but underneath, and for the long-term, the theory of truth is the preoccupation. The ethics of truth is presented as an intellectual standard and justified epistemologically. Regarding the norm of truth in global ethics, do AJA and AJE meet this standard and contribute to it? As a global media organization, how does AJN measure up to global media ethics?

For this chapter, instead of abandoning the concept, a credible idea of truth is developed. Rather than defining truth in technical terms as static and objective, it is theorized as cultural and moral. As the framework for this chapter’s assessment of AJN’s ethics, a theory of truth is presented that meets today’s challenges to the idea of truth as an epistemological concept. This chapter proposes a substantive definition of truth, centered on the idea of truth in the Greek aletheia. In the global definition of truth presented in this chapter and developed in various ways throughout this book, truth means to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” (Pippert 1989, p. 11).

Truth as Authentic Disclosure

To summarize, the ethics of truth as the normative standard for the Al Jazeera Media Network confronts a double problem. Journalistic morality based on objectivity is no longer defensible; and the correspondence view of truth, from which objectivity is operationalized, has been discredited epistemologically. With both aspects of the dominant scheme no longer tenable, philosophical work on truth is critically needed. The concept of truth must be transformed intellectually, rather than limiting our analysis to news operations.

A theory of truth that is substantive enough to be international in scope is best defined as aletheia: uncovering the authentic, disclosing the genuine underneath.Footnote 2 Aletheia literally means “the state of not being hidden.” In his historical work on language, Heidegger identified its original meaning in ancient Greece as “unconcealedness.” As he explains it, aletheia is making something evident for human existence; aletheia is the process of reality become intelligible.Footnote 3 Nikolas Kompridis (1994) sees basic agreement on truth in Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey, each of them developing the idea of aletheia in different ways, but working from a common core: aletheia means to reveal “the symbolically structured world within which we find ourselves; it refers to the disclosure of new horizons of meaning” and to unveil “previously hidden dimensions of meaning” (p. 37).

Heidegger’s etymology is crucial to this new meaning of truth as disclosure. He recovers the original content of aletheia and connects it to the international world of ideas. In his essay, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger (1998) concludes that Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in his Republic, and his analysis of perception in the Theaetetus, define truth as “correctness of vision.” In Heidegger’s scholarship on language, he criticizes Plato for transforming the nature of truth from its original meaning of “disclosure” to the “correct perception of things.” In Plato’s redefining truth in terms of subject-object agreement, Heidegger argues that Plato made a ruinous mistake that continued in Western intellectual history.4

Truth as correspondence with the actual state of affairs is already evident in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione. For René Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), truth is determined by mathematical knowledge of the physical world. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presumes, and Russell and Whitehead in their classic Principia Mathematica argue, that factual knowledge has a “structural isomorphism” with objective reality. In Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1963), truthful communication reproduces information accurately following mathematical equations commensurate with the subject-object dualism (cf. Gunkel and Taylor 2014, pp. 32, 66–67).

In Plato’s mutation, the concept of truth is defined as exact representation. And living out of Plato’s legacy, today’s technical and scientific era tends to see the world as an ordered and measurable system of causes and effects, that is, what Gunkel and Taylor call a “calculable complex.” When causes and effects are specified scientifically, we produce what is considered “correct determinations” (cf. Gunkel and Taylor 2014, p. 62). Following that worldview, journalism news is said to represent events accurately. For the ethics of aletheia as developed here in international terms, Heidegger’s recovery of its original meaning as unconcealedness locates truth in human existence and thus de-Westernizes it. Heidegger captures aletheia’s deeper essence, and in so doing makes it available for this chapter’s consideration of truth and the Al Jazeera Media Network.

Aletheia as disclosure is situated in human language as a universal phenomenon; and in that linguistic location aletheia sustains transnational and cross-cultural usage. Language is the phenomenon that shapes reality and makes human existence possible. The constitutive understanding of language as indispensable for all people-group formation has important consequences for scholarship on truth and for implementing the concept in the media. If the subject-object dualism is rejected and reality is understood as constructed and ordered by language, this dissimilar perspective will produce an entirely different set of questions for theorizing about media ethics. What exactly are the differences in applying these two definitions? Considering authentic disclosure as the basic idea in aletheia, what are the relevant variations across cultures? How do changes in the form of communication technology influence what humans can apprehend? “How do groups in society struggle over the definition of what is real?” (Carey 1989, p. 26). If social scientific methodologies do not account for the depth dimension in the disclosure idea, what scholarship will do so? If truth as correspondence is single layer and described by the practices of objectivity, how do we accomplish the thick reading that the ethics of aletheia requires? If language is central to humanity and changes in mediation are therefore fundamental to our humanness, what does it mean for the digital age that the ethics of truth has been largely structured during the print era? In the aletheia of language as constitutive, humans live by interpretations. Thus we do not ask, “how do the media affect us” but “what are the interpretations of meaning and value created in the mediations”?

In calculative reasoning, from Plato to the Western Enlightenment, it is the mind alone which knows. But in the original meaning of aletheia as disclosure, there are no propositional truths corresponding to an objective reality, and therefore independent of human existence. For Plato’s tradition, truthtelling is a matter of cognition. However, aletheia is integrated into human consciousness and social formation. In aletheia, knowledge is life-related; it is not a product of mathematics but a property of human language. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, “a truthful account takes hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved” (1955, ch. 5). Therefore, in this holistic epistemology, we know and have moral convictions in the process. When we come to understanding, we consider it our moral obligation is act accordingly. Societies, and the culture from which they are constituted, are impossible without a commitment to truth as disclosing the meaningful. The news profession is an important public representative of the lingual world in which we live. The Al Jazeera Media Network—as with all international media organizations—has no alternative but to adopt aletheia as obligatory for its organizational policies and practices.

The Al Jazeera Media Network in Cognitive Terms

The rationale for this chapter can now be made specific. Aletheia as a substantive theory of truth is universal. Therefore, questions such as these are pertinent: Is aletheia the standard for AJA in war and political conflict, and for AJE in social issues worldwide? Does this international network meet the cross-cultural norm of authentic disclosure for newsworthiness, and as a result report in multidimensional and explanatory terms beyond the ephemeral? “Contrary to the sanitized Western media reporting which often conceals the reality of death and destruction, the ‘mediated closeness’ of Al Jazeera exposes the ugly face of reality as experienced by affected populations” (Zayani 2016, p. 92; cf. Figenschou 2011, p. 243). Whether or not AJN’s “mediated closeness” is more advanced professionally than CNN or the BBC is interesting, but the deeper question is whether this strategy implements aletheia. The primary focus is not professional practices and technological instruments as compared to other international news systems. AJN is evaluated in this chapter in terms of the ethical principle of truth. The issue is whether AJN is theorized, and its policies formed, consistent with truth as aletheia?

Leon Barkho’s research (2016) represents a productive methodology for assessing Al Jazeera in terms of the ethics of aletheia. His research centers on Tony Burman’s news model as developed for AJE during Burman’s years as Managing Director from 2008 to 2011. Barkho relies on groundwork materials that reveal a mindset, on in-house documents such as the major report: “AJE Renewal Project—Al Jazeera English 2008–2011” of which Burman was the chief architect. “The year 2008 is a milestone in Al Jazeera English reporting, as Burman tried to…rectify the mainstream Western news coverage mindset, particularly in relation to the reporting of sensitive and controversial stories like the Israeli Palestinian struggle” (Barkho 2016, p. 489 ). In applying his model to Israel’s war on Gaza, “the coverage drew plaudits from across Western media, including Israel itself” (Barkho 2016, p. 498).

“Burman’s approach represents a shift from the mainstream Western way of covering and reporting an event; it is a change from one mindset to another. I call it ‘Burman’s news model’ in line with Thomas Kuhn (1962, p. 23). … Kuhn defines a paradigm as ‘an accepted model or pattern’ that scientists and practitioners use as a guide” for understanding “how knowledge and information are produced” (Barkho 2016, p. 486). “Burman created a new ‘shared mindset’ among members of Al Jazeera English with its own ‘shared’ practices and guidelines on how to report controversial and sensitive issues of regional and international repercussions” (Barkho 2016, p. 486).

“Burman’s way of news coverage” is an “explanatory model but without compromising the foundations of the norm of objectivity. Good journalists, Burman says, should let ‘the world report itself’ rather than do the reporting themselves. To do this, journalists should provide comprehensive coverage of ‘every angle, every side…from as many angles,’” as possible. They should “bring the perspective of the marginalized and less powerful ‘to the forefront of public policy debates’; and make sure that truth is spoken to power ‘regardless of consequences’” (Barkho 2016, p. 494). “Burman’s strategy is to ‘let the world explain itself’ rather than journalists doing it for the world.” Journalists must “‘explain the stories,’ and ‘the background’ should be ‘more than contextual’ and ‘neutral.’” In other words, “‘we can’t play around with journalistic short hands when… dealing with different audiences.’ Reporters, according to Burman, should ‘help people navigate this ever-complicated world.’” In doing so, the goal is “revolutionary: we simply want people to understand the full story, not a narrow one’” (Barkho 2016, p. 494). As a result, Wadah Khanfar gives this directive to AJE professionals: “I do not ask you whether you are objective. I will ask you, is your explanation strong or weak? Is it good or bad? Is it profound or weak?” (quoted in Barkho 2016, p. 494).Footnote 4

“Burman’s news model points to Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm shift’ rather than paradigm repair. It is part of ‘peaceful interludes’ and an attempt in which ‘one conceptual worldview is replaced by another’ (Kuhn 1962, p. 10)….Burman’s news paradigm model does not threaten the ‘Western ’ news paradigm model, but rectifies it by giving the weaker or marginalized side (for instance, the Palestinians) the same voice western media bestow on the stronger and more powerful side (Israelis )” (Barkho 2016, pp. 498–499).

In her research on AJE’s “self-declared difference and counter-hegemonic mission,” Figenschou (2013) drew a similar conclusion: “The channel balances being different enough to stand out while being similar enough to matter” (p. 205). In her view, AJE aims to “alter global news within the constraints of its professional logic rather than aiming to revolutionize, replace or fundamentally alter it” (Figenschou 2013, p. 205). Nina Bigalke argues that this position, “allowed the channel to establish areas of disagreement with historically Western news values that had a better chance for translation back into the wider professional field” (quoted in Figenschou 2013, p. 205).

AJE’s news paradigm, as developed by Burman, reflects aletheia. In countering the Western techniques of objectivity by its explanatory reporting, AJE is serious about authentic disclosure. But an assessment of AJE in terms of the truth principle has multiple dimensions. In order to understand more comprehensively whether and how Al Jazeera reflects and contributes to the global ethics of truth, the epistemology of aletheia must be developed as knowledge production.Footnote 5

The Epistemology of News as Knowledge Production

This section acknowledges Erraji (2016), but it develops a different argument and uses alternative data.

With aletheia as the standard, news gathering and dissemination are not simply informational. Reporters do not merely hold up a mirror to reality, or in online journalism serve as a module of an electronic network. The ethics of truth is not primarily about the specifics of how reporters should treat their sources or relate to audiences or interact with media users, minimizing harm and seeking the best consequences. In the ethics of aletheia, the professional news maker’s task is knowledge production (cf. Hammersley and Traianou 2012, ch. 2). The media ethics of aletheia is intrinsic to the profession’s occupational character, with news understood as knowledge production. News is a cognitive exercise, that is, journalists constructing a lingual reality. News stories are lexical fields that reflect the news organizations’ values.

“News-as-information-processing” is based on the correspondence view of truth and uses social scientific criteria for its validity. However, aletheia’s “news-as-knowledge-production” follows the logical styles and patterns of proof that characterize the humanities (cf. Shanbhag 2006). While interpretation is typically unexamined in social science, in the humanities the logic of the interpretive process is central. Whatever is intelligible to us is accessible in and through language, and all use of language is a process of interpretation. Humans do not stand dualistically outside an objective world, but live in systems of thought and culture. This entails the actuality that human existence is always pre-interpreted. The accumulated history of meanings is the basis from which existential interpretations are made by the public, and, therefore, by media professionals as symbolic agents on the public’s behalf.

Gila Sher (1999, 2004) in developing a substantive theory of truth argues for its “logicality thesis,” and that concept is a basic component of news as knowledge production. In Sher’s philosophical approach, a specific feature of truth is the logical aspect. “The logicality thesis identifies” an epistemological concept that “is universally applicable to the domain of truth.” The logicality thesis says that one central factor in truth is the logic motif, a result of the role played by logical structure in rendering sentences true or false. “The logical factor does not determine all by itself the truth value of sentences,” but it is central in combining with other aspects to determine their truthfulness (1999, p. 134).

Sher recognizes that knowledge production is linguistic. “Hypotheses are formulated in language, questions are asked and answered in language,” and knowledge “is expressed in declarative sentences.” Since language is the vehicle through which truths are discovered, the semantic branch of language “investigates truth as a property of linguistic entities,” and this investigation presumes the domain of logic. Abstracting from the “circumstances of utterances, we obtain truth as a property of declarative sentences” (Sher 1999, p. 134).

Another concept of relevance to knowledge production is what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1932) calls “retroduction .” In this perspective, news as knowledge production is not linear—neither inductive or deductive—but news is the more complex “retroductive .” Retroduction typically begins with insight, and works from there interactively. Retroduction begins with hypotheses and incomplete understanding, then includes creative interjection, to the likeliest explanation. In that interpretive process, there are leaps of imagination and the visualization of possibilities.

Objectivism’s news-as-information model follows a one-sided inductive reasoning process: evidence is gathered, relationships are identified, and a conclusion is formed. News is restricted by journalistic guidelines to double referents, primary sources, and on-site observation.Footnote 6 On the other hand, when news as knowledge production is based on the epistemology of retroduction, reporters interpret situations and discourse in the light of their several parts and each particular part in light of the whole. News professionals judge the relative importance of the specifics. They validate an interpretation by demonstrating its adequacy vis-à-vis competing interpretations.

Despite conflicts, criteria such as comprehensiveness and Occam’s razor enable journalists to determine which interpretation is the most valid. “Facts never speak for themselves. They must be selected, marshaled, linked together and given a voice” (Barzun and Graff 1992, p. xxii). In the hermeneutics of retroduction, both the theoretical and empirical are reconstituted through history and comparative analysis into an interpreted generalization.

Though Teun Van Dijk does not specifically use the terms “logicality thesis” and “retroduction ,” he incorporates those basic ideas into his definition of news as a form of public discourse. In his News as Discourse, “A news item or news report” is a “media text or discourse in which new information is given about recent events” (1988, p. 4). For this discursive form, Van Dijk provides “a qualitative alternative to traditional methods of content analysis” (p. vii). The textual structure of news is “systematically related to the cognitive and social conditions of news production, as well as to the processes of understanding by the readers” (p. viii). For Van Dijk’s paradigm, “the first major consideration in structural analysis” is the “various levels or dimensions of description and the units or categories used to explicitly characterize such levels or dimensions” (p. 1).

While examining the cognitive process of production, discourse analysis is also interested in the “reception and in the sociocultural dimensions of language use and communication,” that is, in “the complex relationship between text and context” (Van Dijk 1988, p. 2). Discourse analysis has these “two main dimensions, the textual and contextual,” but the structural analysis of texts is of primary importance in knowledge production. Textual descriptions are “usually differentiated as to their levels or dimensions…. Grammar is one level of description. Within it semantics deals with meanings of words, sentences, and discourse. It formulates the rules that assign interpretations to units and that combine interpretations of units into interpretations of larger units…. In philosophy and logic, semantics also deals with interpretations, but in that case it is not only meaning which is assigned to expressions, but rather truth, or general referents (or extensions, or denotations). A sound account of discourse requires both” (p. 25).

Knowledge production—understood in terms of Sher, Peirce, and Van Dijk—is of particular importance in investigative reporting, news features, and documentary journalism. And editorials are an obvious genre for expressing it. However, the retroductive framework of learning and thinking and rigorous argument should also be the standard for the everyday news cycle. When news is conceptualized as knowledge production, the existential is integrated with the analytical. Experience alone is not the same as understanding it, so the social must be made meaningful inside the text. In news as knowledge production, the reporter’s disclosures of the underlying meaning will be recognized as true on two levels: they will be realistic to those being reported and conceptually plausible at the same time.

As Gerhard Vander Linde (2001) puts it, though in a different context, knowledge production as an alternative model, is not measured by “credibility among peers but in terms of richness of implications, in terms of the capacity to generate connections among disparate elements, and in terms of freshness of insights and scope” (p. 58). The aim is always the multiple interactions of retroductive discourse instead of swiftly concluding what is thought to be the alethic truth of the matter. Interpretation emphasizes discovery, rather than the application of routinized techniques as in objectivity’s proceduralism.

Al Jazeera’s Salah Negm, in an interview in October 2016, expanded on this analytic strategy:

Analysis is one of the most important things we do. There is a confusion in people’s minds that mixes commentary and analysis. Analysis is actually dissecting events into the elements that shaped it and making people understand why it happened rather than giving an opinion. It is taking the facts, for example, and analysis will give you clues to the parties and the conflicts, what are the interests of different parties, how did this conflict start, what is the time. This is analysis; it doesn’t give an opinion. You can’t do news without analysis. You have to analyze. The analysis could be from a specialist in the newsroom, a very good journalist could do that, or an expert from the outside. Analysis is an explanation, as I’m saying, dissecting the events to tell people what they consist of and how they reach us. But this doesn’t say whether you like it or not, whether it’s right or not. Analysis is pure information and very objective. We make sure that it is objective. We do analysis, but we don’t do opinion and we are very strict.

When news professionals understand their craft as knowledge production, with aletheia its normative axis, they turn from objectivism to interpretive theory. The quest is not for quantifiable precision, but precision in authentic disclosure through interpretive procedures. Sophistication in the dynamics of knowledge production will enhance the news story’s analytical depth by bringing Sher’s “logical factor” to completeness.

The interpretive paradigm provides an alternative mode of public discourse. The interpretive model resonates with the attitudes, definitions and language of the people actually being reported on or studied. Rather than the fact-value dichotomy of the West’s ethics of rationalism, interpretation involves the fullness of human agency, with values included along with intentions and purposes. In Van Dijk’s “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis” (1993), in narrative production, the various dimensions of form, meaning, and action interact with one another. Lingual formation by Van Dijk’s symbolic elites (politicians, journalists, scholars, writers) is a “complex interactive process that shapes the meanings things have for human beings. The process is anchored in the cultural world” where “cultural objects and experiences” are mediated in terms of sociocultural categories, such as “family, race, ethnicity, nationality, and social class” (Denzin 2014, pp. 74, 78; cf. Benhabib 2002). In other words, by making symbolic forms publicly available, news produces what linguists call culture. “Cultural meaning” is an appropriate designation for the interpreter’s aim. When interpretive methodologies are understood and acted upon with professionalism, reporters are ethnographers of news-making people and events.Footnote 7

In interpretive accounts of aletheia, there is reflective immersion in the material until the journalists establish, in Blumer’s (1954) phrase, “poetic resonance” with it.

Does the reporter know enough to identify the principal aspects of the event being studied and to distinguish these main features from digression and parentheses? Using the body as an analogy, the blood and brain must be separated from fingers and skin, all of which are parts of the whole organism but of differing significance. If true interiority has occurred—that is, if the details accurately reflect the natural circumstances—then the data are valid and reliable even though they are not based on randomization, repeated and controlled observation, measurement, and statistical reference. (Christians 2004, p. 48)

In sum, news as an interpretive process conveys the meaning of social issues and events. In the retroductive mode, journalists develop an integrating scheme from within the lexical field itself. Aletheia, the authentic truth, unveils the events’ and issues’ inner character. It gets at the essence of the matter. Following Van Dijk’s Discourse and Knowledge (2014), news discourse is a dialectic composite of insight, observation and history. The analysis arises from the self-interpretation of the arena being reported. News as knowledge production requires a reflexive form of writing that works in and out of the ethnographic and the insightful. The reporters’ frame of reference is derived from an inside picture that gets to the authentic meaning underneath.

The question for this chapter is whether AJN’s lexical field reflects the news-as-knowledge-production paradigm. Wadah Khanfar in his interview with Leon Barkho reflects on AJA’s epistemology of news as an alternative perspective:

We are trying to introduce an explanatory paradigm rather than be objective or subjective. This paradigm means the context of culture, the context of language, the linguistics, the context of history, the context of the human being himself and the diversity. We do not want to be reductionists. We do not want to fall into the trap of immediacy. We do not want to look at reality from afar and say “this is the Middle East.” The Middle East is a huge reservoir of diversity that is too complicated to be simplified or reduced into one or two single statements through which some colleagues of ours would like to portray the region. We try to go beyond the surface of the news. What you need to do as a journalist is to explain. Your power of explanation will either convince or no. If you are not convinced as an audience, you will find someone else who could give much better explanations.

We try hard to tell the full story. For example, we try harder to portray the Palestinians not simply as victims, or an afterthought in the story of that region. But as a central player in the story of the Middle East—with a history, a story, a case and a cause that merits a hearing.

Wahad Khanfar finds the philosophy behind his explanatory paradigm in the work of Arab and Islamic linguist Abdul Wahab El-Messiri. El-Messiri’s major areas of scholarship are literary theory and comparative literature. In his Epistemological Bias in the Physical and Social Sciences (2006), he argues that non-Westerners have their own cultural perspectives and conceptual configurations which must be developed free of foreign epistemologies. El-Messiri’s methodology is in-depth analysis presented in narrative style rather than in the collection-of-information-model of the West.

Khanfar translates El-Messiri’s thinking into the huge gap between the way Islamic and Western cultures view language and pictures.

In the Western media paradigm the pictorial, the picture, the pictorial approach is much more profound than the Arab media. It seems to me also that part of it, the context that we are referring to and the explanation, part of it is culture. I think that the Arab world through words draws pictures. We have the capability to use the Arabic language to describe the scene sometimes not less than what the picture would do.

In an interview with Mohamed Elmcotar Elkhalil, manager of the Arabic channel’s online department, he applied El-Messiri’s narrative style to the culture and histories of news events:

We arrange stories in a way that talks to the audience. For example, the convoy of immigrants to the West. We used to call it illegal immigration following Western standards, but we stopped calling it that because when a human being is forced to violate the law that cannot be considered a crime. As a result how can we call his action an illegal action? Most people migrate from our region to Europe because they’re going through political crises; they’re struggling with displacement and killing, so how can we consider them equal to those who are feeling comfortable and can travel between countries easily? I mean this is absolutely wrong and that’s why we called them “refugees,” rather than using the informal “immigration.” “Refugees” is the right term for those fleeing the terrors of wars and violence.

As is obvious from the commentary of Burman, Khanfar and Negm, news as the pursuit of knowledge is embedded in an ethical framework. As with education, the news profession’s obligation is the production of knowledge and the intrinsic character of this production establishes its moral obligation. “The most unique side to such knowledge are the facts and information at the foundation of its discourse, bearing in mind that knowledge is not merely knowledge but is an ethical case in a manner that makes it say the truth” (Van Dijk 2014, p. 268 ). As Broadbent (2017) argues, “Phrases like ‘knowledge production’ conceal the fact that knowledge answers to something beyond itself and beyond us. To produce knowledge is to find out about something. This means to risk being wrong about it.” That this form of knowledge requires a normative dimension is recognized “by Al Jazeera in its professional experience during the last two decades, turning it into an editorial policy  – documented in its ‘Editorial Policies and Guidelines’” (Al Jazeera Network 2015, p. 22).

Aletheia means to disclose the deeper meaning of news events, and further research is needed into AJA’s and AJE’s discourse, to determine accurately whether the ethical dimension is taking seriously enough to implement fully the ethics of aletheia. News as knowledge production, in its multicultural dimension, locates persons in a productive and challenging relationship to the moral universe. AJN’s interpretive model appears to be an alternative to objectivism’s typical reduction of newsworthiness to the financial and administrative problems defined by politicians. When aletheia comes into its own, the news media enables readers and viewers and users to understand the fundamental issues and act on them. Stated differently, if the ethics of aletheia is the norm for assessing AJN’s practices and policies, and knowledge production the framework for implementing alethic truth, this chapter looks for disclosures that reveal the genuine meaning beneath the surface.

Al Jazeera’s Disclosures

The explanatory paradigm described above positions AJN against objectivity, and this discourse model is a credible iteration of news as knowledge production. Presuming the basic validity of Barkho’s assessment of the explanatory model, the question is how AJN acts on it and discloses the authentic underneath. Three ideas are identified as summarizing the network’s truthtelling: pluralism, anti-propaganda, and Southern perspective. AJN’s knowledge production can be understood in terms of these three features that are of interest to international communication ethics.

Pluralism

With AJA came a new type of viewer, and these viewers were introduced to another kind of television. “Al Jazeera grasped the desire by Arab public opinion for pluralism and rapidly gained a following, highlighting the existence of pluralism and of a silent majority in Arab public opinion that has been repressed for decades” (Zran 2016, p. 48). These new viewers hear differences of opinion from “new elements—a plurality of discourses and issues around which national public debate” became possible, “such as local public affairs, political pluralism, resistance, foreign intervention, opposition and freedom” (p. 44). “Many ideas that had been expressed in secret are now open to scrutiny, interaction, exchange and reception…without the need for prior permission from ruling elites” (p. 56).

Whether it is reporting on the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza strip, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Houthis in Yemen, the Shiites in Bahrain, or the Rohingya in Mynmar, Al Jazeera has from the outset given prominence to the politics of the Other. In doing so it has more than served as a platform to otherwise non-state actors and alternative political players. It managed to infuse the geopolitical reality of the region with new dynamics and bring to bear additional vectors that would otherwise have been deflected…. More than simply report on various unconventional groups and non-official players, Al Jazeera thrusts them to the fore and weaves them into a powerful narrative . (Zayani 2016, p. 94)

In Figenschou’s (2016) summary of the research on AJE’s sourcing practices, she concludes that “although the channel is elite-dominated, it has expanded the range of elite voices, representing independent, oppositional and civil society perspectives, in addition to the political, economic, and military establishment.” Moreover, she concludes from the relevant research that “there are more independent elites on AJE than on its international competitors. Independent elites are quoted more often, given more airtime, accorded more authority and invited to speak in more analytical news frames” (p. 202; cf. Figenschou 2013).

One important result of Al Jazeera’s pluralism is that power dynamics are understood to be “more malleable than they seem, that power relationships are not necessarily the purview of conventional players” (Zayani 2016, p. 94). AJA’s and AJE’s exposure to social media activists during the Arab Spring proves “that history is not written any more by officials but by ordinary people” (Miladi 2016, p. 85). And Figenschou’s (2016) conclusion from the research on pluralism is of equal importance: Al Jazeera’s commitment to alternative sources “does not fundamentally alter the elite–grass roots distribution, the notions of hierarchical sourcing, sourcing relationships or even the elite notion of sourcing—it primarily alters the perception of which elites have been accorded credibility” (p. 202). Nourredine Miladi (2016) points to a byproduct of pluralism, in that “it has led to an ability to critique coverage of Arabs and Muslims by Western media as stereotypical” (p. 88).

Anti-propaganda

Guideline Number Nine in AJE’s Code of Ethics addresses the propaganda issue: “Distinguish between news material, opinion and analysis to avoid the pitfalls of speculation and propaganda.” Acting on that standard, AJE is mandated to avoid propagating a specific political stream or party. It rejects government propaganda that serves its own agenda by steering public opinion toward its own authority and eviscerating the citizen’s interests. Muhammed Krichen in an October 2016 interview puts the propaganda issue in these terms:

The dream in Al Jazeera’s founding was making the media freer and fair and uncontrolled by the traditional government restrictions. The Al Jazeera channel was the first to broadcast news without starting its news bulletin with His Highness and His Excellency, that hopeless order that starts with the state head, then prime minister, then ministers, etc. Al Jazeera totally smashed that tradition and it gave the Arab audience for the first time comprehensive Arabic news with Western standards but with an Arabic touch. So this was the first phase.

In the second phase, Al Jazeera started to achieve professional success such as in professional news coverage. In this phase, Al Jazeera pushes the press’ freedom limits by focusing on professional achievements on the ground. Al Jazeera always tried to show news as it happens, and then it tries to represent different points of view regarding that piece of news. For example, it would bring on those who are with Alsis as well as those who are not with him or against him, and someone else who has a neutral analysis and so on.

Expanding on multiple viewpoints as an alternative to the single voice of authority, Mohamed Krichen adds this perspective:

There is a difference in our news angle. We are not a kind of political party. Krichen is clearly different from Faisal Al Qassim, Faisal Al Qassim is different from Khadija Benguenna. If you try to analyze our news angle, our programs are different from one news angle to another. AJ can support Mohamed Krichen, can support Ahmad Mansour, who is a real Islamist, his way of asking questions, etc., can support Faisal Al Qassim, can support other people so that we are a real mosaic sometimes.

Teun Van Dijk clarifies the nature of propagandistic text as the genre of power and control:

The discourse of “power involves control, namely by (members of) one group over (those of) other groups. The much more effective power is mostly cognitive, and enacted by persuasion, dissimulation or manipulation, among the strategic ways to change the mind of others in one’s own interests. Managing the mind of others is essentially a function of text and talk….More control over more properties of text and context, involving more people, is thus generally (though not always) associated with influence, and hence with hegemony….Power and powerlessness is directly related to the extent of their control over discourse variables.” Therefore, “all dimensions of discourse that allow variable choice” is the critical alternative. (1993, pp. 254, 257, 260–261)

Tony Burman in his interview with Leon Barkho speaks to Van Dijk’s argument that access to public discourse by different social groups is the strategy for challenging exclusive discourse:

I think most of our competitors place their cameras very much in the halls of power, you know in the capitals of Europe, of London and of Washington and the coverage goes out from there. Our goal is to place our cameras primarily among the people; we look at the stories from their perspective, which is why I think in many cases human beings are far more at the core of our reporting than I think you would find in our competitors. The flow of information largely in our Western-dominated world flows from the main capitals of the world. We are trying to reverse the flow, and we do it in a way that flows into the capitals.

In terms of holding power accountable and telling the truth to power, we do it in our interviews and talk shows; we do it in our treatment of issues. We have a real aspiration when key newsmakers or policy newsmakers are part of our programming in an interview setting as part of a news item, but we do not find ourselves co-opted by our association with them. We are proudly on the other side of the street. We are trying to keep on the other side of the street. We are trying to ensure that our programming in a very real sense is in fact outside the kind of inner circle.

It is clear from Sher’s “logicality thesis” that aletheia in news production does entail true and correct information from trusted sources. But this is the immediate phase. Aletheia as authentic disclosure points to the deeper level of free speech for political and cultural transformation. Noureddine Miladi understands this explanatory disclosure correctly: “Whether in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Yemen,” Al Jazeera organizes “‘its media efforts to fight for democracy and free speech in those countries’” (Miladi 2016, p. 84 ; quoting Wadah Khanfar). To the extent that AJN sees itself as a platform for people’s discourse directed to social change, it is explicitly anti-propagandist. When its political symbolization is oriented to the public’s awareness and enables views and media users to engage in political change, then AJN is acting out of the ethics-of-truth principle.

In aiming toward this double motif of awareness and action, AJA and AJE are representing Van Dijk’s alternative model for the discourse of power and control. Continuing to refine its credentials as a promoter of public discourse that enables citizens to act politically will make it possible for AJN to be a credible news network internationally.

Southern Counter Flow

One of the aims of AJE’s knowledge production “is to balance the flow of information and to provide another perspective to mainstream news. By paying special attention to the Global South, it seeks to balance and thus enrich the dominant one-dimensional international flow of information and to offer discourses that are different from the ones offered by mainstream news organizations like the BBC and CNN and are of interest to a broader international balance” (Zayani 2016, p. 95). In Figenschou’s (2016) analysis of AJE official statements and promotional texts—confirmed by interviews with AJE staff and management—from its earliest history Al Jazeera saw itself as a global channel which would report “from a distinctive perspective to balance the current typical information flow by reporting from the developing world back to the West and from the Southern to the Northern hemispheres” (p. 196).

As stated by Mohamed Krichen in his October 16 interview: “Our news agendas are related to the Arab audience and taste. When you are watching Al Jazeera you are basically watching the world from an Arabian, Gulf Arabian, and sometimes Qatari point of view. Sometimes the horizon is broader: an Arabian view, other times it is Gulf perspectives and sometimes it is just a Qatari perspective. The news agendas in the world are linked to the cultural background and the entrepreneur’s political priorities.”

In his interview with Leon Barkho, Tony Burman sees the world through the lens of the global South. As Barkho summarizes Burman’s point of view: “The South does not mean a group of countries or a certain part of the world. It represents a pattern or model of news coverage that applies to the world out there”—in Burman’s words, “whether it is issues of emigration, multiculturalism, or diversity that are also evident in North American and European cities.”

Barkho (2016) confirms that the Burman model contrasts with international broadcasting where “the focus is ‘on the Western centers of power and inevitably reflects their own national American and British agendas in their reporting’” (p. 495). “A number of studies of AJE’s news have documented that the channel has indeed emphasized the Global South (Africa , Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) over the Global North (Europe and North America) in its news coverage—with more news items about and originating from the South, prioritized in the running order and in longer, more in-depth formats” (Figenschou 2016, p. 196).

“This explicit Southern perspective has been reflected in the channel’s editorial strategies: First, the channel has had a complex, decentralized production structure, with an extensive network of bureaus and correspondents in the South…. Secondly, an interrelated key editorial strategy has been to cover global events with local correspondents, particularly in the Global South. … According to interviewees (Figenschou 2012, pp. 60–65), local southern correspondents are perceived as better resourced to develop alternative independent news stories and news angles” (Figenschou 2016, pp. 196–197).

In essence, finding local southern correspondents, producers and editors who meet the professional qualifications perceived necessary in international television (English fluency, training and knowledge in the professional logic) has proved to be difficult. Consequently (Figenschou 2012), positions on the executive level were held by a closely-knit group of professionals with backgrounds and extensive careers in Anglo-American mainstream television. (Figenschou 2016, p. 199)

Salah Negm, in an October 2016 interview, states the logistics problems in different terms:

News has stemmed from West to West. Al Jazeera changed a little bit of that because it became an important source of news about the Middle East, so its contribution started to be part of the flow of news. But the main source of the news for the whole world is, in fact, the news agencies, Reuters, ATI, AFP. If you want to really have a full wave of news and information, you have to establish a news agency that would be strong and fill the gap. Al Jazeera Arabic has contributed to change the flow a little bit in the Middle East. And Al Jazeera English contributed in several incidents to change the flow about a lot of reports and news from Africa and Latin America, but still the dominant powers are the news agencies.

To summarize, these three disclosures help make AJN distinctive. They indicate the direction alethic truth pushes the media when it is taken seriously as an ethical standard. The evaluative question of this chapter is whether these features of Burman’s and Khanfar’s explanatory model, and AJN’s epistemic discourse production are consistent with the ethical principle of truth and a contribution to understanding it. The challenges of presenting pluralism, anti-propaganda, and the Southern perspective are ongoing and complex. In terms of knowledge production, pluralism has AJN’s organizational commitment; in terms of audience, pluralism faces an unrelenting fundamentalism of the opposite mindset. Regarding anti-propaganda, correct information and promotion of free speech are sine qua non, but propaganda’s opposite is critical consciousness and, as Jacques Ellul demonstrates, that task is more multilayered than rejecting totalitarian propagandists (Ellul 1965, 1970, 1981).Footnote 8 As noted earlier, Figenschou describes the institutional struggle to combine a Southern perspective with the logic of professional journalism. Wendy Willems (2014) underscores the conceptual problem here: “The Global South continues to be theorized from the vantage point of the Global North.” This Eurocentric perspective “has interpreted media systems through the normative lens of the Global North and has emphasized their lack, their deviation from Western norms” (pp. 1, 4). In its efforts to balance mainstream West-centric news with Southern voices, Al Jazeera’s mission statements and policies a priori may not be a fulsome counter-narrative.

Alethic Truth as a Universal Principle

This chapter is evaluating AJN as a global media system in terms of a global media ethics of truth. As presented, this chapter’s ethics of truth has been de-Westernized, replacing the correspondence theory of objective truth with the substantive theory known in Greek as aletheia. The character of aletheia’s globalism needs elaboration in order that it serve effectively as a warrantable canon for the international AJN.

The ethics of truth in this chapter is not an epistemic system presuming that humans are fundamentally rational creatures, with human existence ascertained by reason. Aletheia is advocated here as a universal principle explicitly and categorically distinct from moral absolutes that depend on rationalist epistemology. Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperatives are an iconic form of ethical absolutism. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and Critique of Pure Reason (1788), moral absolutes are equated with logical syllogisms that divide propositions into valid and invalid.Footnote 9 The ethics of absolutism defines universals mathematically. Ethical principles synchronize with linear abstractions that parallel the ellipses of longitude and latitude laid over the globe.

Moral absolutes in the Kantian tradition and aletheia’s universalism of this chapter are not identical. The two concepts, absolutes and universals, are epistemologically distinct; and it is a category mistake, a logical fallacy, to equate them. The ethics of truth based on the correspondence paradigm is judged in this chapter to be unsuitable for transnational and intercultural media ethics. Alethic truth is a different kind of ethical principle, and this is the theory—not Western objectivism—that is being used to evaluate AJN. Aletheia constructs a global ethics on totally different grounds than abstract essentialism (Nagel 1986), and, therefore, has direct relevance as a standard for understanding the ways the global AJN meets the truth criterion.

Mohamed Elmcotar Elkhalil in his interview recognizes the need for such universal principles as aletheia in a complicated world:

I can’t equate Israelis and Palestinians to each other in the war of Gaza. Israel is an occupier, and it is destroying people at their home place and declares war against them. Those two parties can’t be treated equally. Here, of course, I am biased. I am biased because of the facts and givens that have been forced on me by the journalism profession itself and not by anything else. Whatever the circumstances are, the media is part of a large context in a particular environment. At the end, that is humanities science; when you get to deal with human issues associated with other humans and humanity, bias will exist in some way or another. But those opinions/biases should be guided by universal values first, and they should not become the ultimate dominating behavior.

In this chapter’s perspective, aletheia is a world class alternative to absolutist definitions of truth which represent the global North. But aletheia’s global orientation is not a straight-line framework that homogenizes the planet by geometric coordinates. Truth as authentic disclosure takes seriously the one-and-many dilemma in philosophy. Paul Ricoeur’s (1976) surplus of meaning illustrates for global media ethics how the one-and-many problem can be solved. Ricoeur’s semiotics needs to be elaborated so that aletheia’s universalism is understood correctly.

Ricoeur (1974) affirms the interpretive modality in knowledge production; for him, all language use is interpretive. There is no elementary description or explanation of the world that is not mediated by symbols. Humans do not live first of all in a world of objective abstractions but in systems of culture and ideas. Just as the astronomer’s telescope and the biologist’s microscope yield mediated realities, so languages represent conceptions of the world (Nystrom 2000). Wahad Khanfar, in his interview with Leon Barkho, describes the symbolic framing of language this way: “Each language has its own mind. So, the Arabic language has its own mind and the English language has its own mind, and the French language has its own mind. We need to respect the English language mind and we do need to respect also the Arabic way of thinking which is represented through language.”

For Ricoeur, meanings that a language accumulates over history are a constituent of our own interpretations. In Ricoeur’s philosophy of language, interpretation is not for the sake of epistemic certainty but a necessity of our dialoging in language use with human existence past and present (1974, 1976). Thus, Ricoeur concludes, “our manner of existence remains from start to finish a being-interpreted” (1974, p. 11). We understand our lifeworld only through an interpretation of symbolic meanings within that world.

For Ricoeur (1986), our geographical location and our transcending the local are simultaneous, with their differences “to be understood through each other” (p. 138). For Sher’s logicality idea that belongs to human languages as a whole, in ethics it means that basic concepts such as aletheia’s disclosing the genuine carry enough commonness across cultures that reporters and media executives can understand the basic meaning, though they explain and apply the concept of “unconcealedness” in various ways (Christians and Ward 2013, pp. 82–84; cf. Ward 2011). In coming to grips with both cognitive unity and semantic diversity, aletheia offers a new way of thinking about truth. In aletheia’s surplus of meaning, there is Ricoeur’s “maximally coherent system of meanings” (p. 165) with authentic disclosure the epistemic core.

Is there a shared mindset in AJN’s documents, mission statements and reports that reflects aletheia’s universalism? In Fiegnschou’s assessment of AJE’s editorial mission and production strategies, “the channel questions and sets out to counter the professional practices of Anglo-American global news networks” (2016, p. 191). But that represents a focus on the organization’s professionalism, not a struggle with the ethics of alethic truth. For Al Jazeera’s journalism to reject the Eurocentric worldview is a first phase only. Aletheia also rejects hierarchical and abstract prescriptivism. Alethic truth is a substantive theory that reconceptualizes truth away from its mainstream tradition, and in doing so renders it universal as a global ethical principle. The challenge for AJN is also to take the second, constructive step and retheorize its global perspective explicitly in alethic terms. Media workers and educators in media ethics are responsible to the world. For AJN, is the principle of truth anchored in and does it flow out of universal human solidarity? Can domesticated—that is, professionalized—versions of truth be restructured as a truly global phenomenon for a global media ethics? AJN reporters and executives, because of the global technology that characterizes their news operation, are called to be professionals with a world mind. Mohamed Zayani (2016) sees the beginnings of that cosmopolitan vision extending beyond geography: “With a real global outlook rather than a mere global reach, Al Jazeera English proclaims to offer an alternative form of journalism” (p. 96).

Conclusion

Burman’s explanatory model indicates that Al Jazeera defines itself in alethic terms contrary to Anglo-American objectivism (Barkho 2016). Khanfar’s discourse paradigm reflects aletheia’s authentic disclosure in Al Jazeera’s commitment to pluralism, anti-propaganda, and the Southern perspective. Ensuring that these core values measure up to alethic truth requires ongoing and sophisticated work as noted.

Does Al Jazeera’s geographical scope reflect and contribute to a global media ethics of alethic truth? This is the question of this book. And the answer to it is ambiguous. The ethics of truth of this chapter theoretically is a global aletheia that requires a radical reorientation. In the history of ethical theory and application, the intellectual trajectory is largely from local to the world. However, in the ethics of truth of this chapter, the world is first, with our responsibilities and organizational policies framed by the universal. Internationalism inverts the trajectory in media ethics—from universal human solidarity to individual media networks and to program-specific curricula. That inversion requires sophisticated moral philosophy for a theory of global media ethics, and comparable sophistication for global media institutions such as the Al Jazeera Media Network.