How Journalists 'Realize' Facts

The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journalism scholars, have distinguished between practices more and less conducive to the goal of truth. The current paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted in Israel, in which news-gathering practices are directly observed at controversy-laden press conferences. This arena avails a thorough observation of journalist–source exchanges, without breaching the principle of source confidentiality. The practices observed are juxtaposed against the news products, alongside reporters' own comments on their work and reasoning. We suggest that a pragmatic concep...