Journalism with the quality of the public knowledge base as core concern

Research indicates that journalism is less about relations than about events and situations (Meditsch 2005; Nielsen 2017) and that reality as it is known in and through the news is missing causal relationships (Svith 2017) or is driven by superficial causes without the structural and systemic macro level causes (Garnier et al 2019). Furthermore, elite source-oriented articles are the norm, and the constant reproduction of elite voices in news content function to naturalize and normalize particular ideologies – to create a sense that there is no alternative to them (Carlson 2017). Some understandings of current issues become dominant and exercise symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991/1977) and as communities vary so do their publicly shared knowledge bases on current issues. Their limitations are not self-evidently, but is generally accepted as a natural feature of the supply and consumption of information on which people without immediate experience and knowledge of issues rely in their deliberation and planning. Deliberation is determined, in part, by the quality of the underlying knowledge. The decision-making processes and human understanding upon which they depend are imperfect in politics as in much of practical life (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 6).
In this context, journalism that purposely increases the diversity of causal explanations in the public knowledge base on current issues is highly relevant, because based on shared values of pluralism and diversity (Karppinen 2018), it raises the quality of the shared foundation for deliberation of present issues.
However, this requires journalism with a systematic causal perspective which adheres to a Carl Bernstein paraphrase: A plurality of explanations is the best obtainable version of the truth. A framework to be elaborated by journalism studies. The substitution of the concept of angle with that of issue frame (Entman 1993), which is seldom in journalism (D’Angelo and Shaw 2018) clears the way for critically monitoring and mapping the causal repertoire of a shared knowledge base. Deliberative journalism intervenes by adding issue frames that diverges from the dominating ones. Stories may be one-sided but are legitimised by their addition to the overall quality of public knowledge base. The rationale of deliberative journalism is that a wide repertoire of issue frames constitutes a better quality knowledge base for arguments and decisions than a narrow representation. Such a focus may place journalism in a unique position because no other profession takes the quality of the shared base of knowledge on current issues as their core concern.