Aviv Barnoy

Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists’ knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-to-day disagreements – contrary to former studies, which focused on large-scale scientific and political controversies based on content analysis that narrowed their exposure to the epistemic realities of disagreements. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative reconstruction interviews we show that rather than eliciting an ‘epistemic paralysis’, as widely expected in the literature, disagreements attract significantly greater knowledge-acquisition energy. Findings support the problem-centered approach of epistemology and pragmatics that highlight the complexities of disagreements, rather than the adjudication-centered approach of journalism studies, which ...

This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings show that journalists can distinguish source and message credibility. However, in practice they rely on source evaluations as an “autopilot” default mode, shifting gears to observations of source and message credibility in epistemically complex cases. The proportion between both is close to Pareto distribution. This extreme division challenges both inductive and mixed inference theories of epistemic trust and suggests revisiting the “typification” doctrine of newswork. Data partially support the hegemony and “epistemi...

This paper examines the anatomy of leaking in the age of megaleaks based on a series of reconstruction interviews with 108 Israeli reporters, who recreated a sample of leaked versus non-leaked items (N = 845). Data show that leaking remains a journalistic routine, encompassing one in six items; however, they cease to be the sole game of senior sources, involving substantially more non-seniors. Despite new technologies and the mounting number of channels that enable their exposure, leaks remain an oral practice, exchanged mainly over the telephone. On the journalists’ end, there is little change: leaks are the prerogative of more senior and experienced reporters in print and television news; they are still accompanied by more sources, more cross-checking and more consultation with editors than regular items. These findings concur with theories that perceive the relationship between megaleaks and traditional leaks as co-existing rather than disruptive.

Reliance on evidence is highly desired in disciplines such as science and law. However, the extent to which daily reporters use it to corroborate or refute sources’ say-so is disputed. To explore how evidence is built into stories in ways that are not entirely obvious from the manifest content, we studied the involvement of evidence in a sample of stories, published by leading print and online Israeli news outlets, using reconstruction interviews with the reporters who authored them. Findings indicate that reliance on evidence is an established news reporting routine found in 42 percent of the items. It is used significantly more often under epistemically-challenging circumstances (conflicts over facts, risky publications and unscheduled events) that attract extra reporting efforts (more sources per item, more verifications and longer reporting hours). To systematize reliance on evidence – as other disciplines strive to – news reporting must move further in their evidentiary genealo...

This study uses the case-study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings show that journalists can distinguish source and message credibility. However, in practice they rely on source evaluations as an "autopilot" default mode, shifting gears to observations of source and message credibility in epistemically complex cases. The proportion between both is close to Pareto distribution. This extreme division challenges both inductive and mixed inference theories of epistemic-trust, and suggests revisiting the "typification" doctrine of newswork. Data partially support the hegemony and "epistemic injustice" theory, showing that traditional credibility criteria might trigger the exclusion of nontraditional voices.

Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists' knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-today disagreements-contrary to former studies, which focused on large-scale scientific and political controversies based on content analysis that narrowed their exposure to the epistemic realities of disagreements. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative reconstruction interviews we show that rather than eliciting an 'epistemic paralysis', as widely expected in the literature, disagreements attract significantly greater knowledge-acquisition energy. Findings support the problem-centered approach of epistemology and pragmatics that highlight the complexities of disagreements, rather than the adjudication-centered approach of journalism studies, which push for more journalistic 'bottom lines'. Maximizing adjudication seems too ambitious and unrealistic for the time frame of daily reporting and the mixed epistemic standards seen in this study.

The media’s capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and mal information. To explore the epistemic role of verifications, covering their frequencies, predictors and underlying motivations, procedures, and contribution to reporters’ knowledge, this study combines qualitative and quantitative reconstruction interviews, comparing verified and non-verified items. Findings show that verifications are driven primarily by reporters’ risk and opportunity calculations. The frequency of verifications remains surprisingly stable, yet this steadiness might be misleading, as we found and typified different kinds of verifications: from the shallow efforts to reduce risk and enhance the precision of technical details, to the ambitious but scarce attempts to convey conflict and conduct investigations. In epistemic terms, reporters are anti-reductionists, setting a low epistemic bar, which allows them to rely on sources by default, as long as there are no “defeaters” (=counterbeliefs or counterevidence) inviting verification.

Why digital sourcing has not democratized the news? Based on data collected in three waves of news-item reconstructions (2006, 2011 and 2017), this paper presents for the first-time longitudinal evidence according to which the role of digital news sources is growing dramatically since 2006, when smartphones and social networks started becoming widespread. However, traditional sources still maintain their dominance. The study includes the reconstructions of 1,594 news items, authored by a representative sample of Israeli news reporters from national print and online media, and details regarding each item's sources (n=5,647). Findings show that digital sourcing did not open the gates for alternative and civic voices, in accordance with traditionalist approach. Against expectations, digital sources are verified less than non-digital ones and are mentioned less often in final publications. These findings support more determinist sourcing theories, according to which new mediating technology shapes the voices of news no less that source characteristics. In depth interviews indicate that rather than being blinded by technology's façade of objectivity, reporters explain their use of lower epistemic standard for verifying digital sources in terms that epistemologist would define as reliance without trust. Finally, elite sources do not even need to harness new technologies to maintain their dominance. Reporters themselves continue to adhere to elite's digital output, albeit their efforts to diversify their sources, due to a familiarity paradox we find; the non-familiarity that makes alternative sources theoretically desired to reporters who wish to diversify their sources, is what also makes them undesirable as relying on them involves professional risk.

The growing reliance of journalism on PR following recent years' media crisis is an established fact, however, two related aspects remain understudied. First, the extent to which this growth is boosted by certain reporters that rely on PR more than others. And second, the extent to which heavier reliance on PR involves lower professional and ethical journalistic standards. While Gandy's 'news subsidies' theory provided an instrumental explanation for reporters' dependency in their sources, which was followed by a long tradition of PR-journalists researches, studies segmenting reporters to empirically examine this reliance remain scares, and do not include some of the factors that become highly relevant in light of recent years' technological and economic changes to journalism. The impact of the reliance on PR remains disputed as well, not whether it is accompanied by inferior news making standards, but how unavoidable this deterioration is. While scholars of 'Idealist' approach insist that reliance on PR is necessarily casing deterioration of news process, 'contextual' scholars claim that reliance on their contribution is not problematic by definition, since PR information is bound to gatekeeping processes and newsworthiness judgment. The purpose of the study is to map the heavy users of PR in these times of increasing reliance, while examining the professional and ethical price paid by journalists due to this dependency. In the mapping, we focus on the factors that are becoming highly relevant in light of the current media crisis: experience, beat-load and medium immediacy. For the second part, we examine the correlations between level of reliance