Journalism’s epistemic authority as a truth-teller has been in flux with a growing number of professional journalists reporting distance from the traditional ideal of objectivity and embracing more opinion-oriented journalistic roles. However, current empirical scholarship on journalists’ epistemological beliefs is highly limited in the assessment of the objectivity norm, overlooking the diverse conceptions pertaining to journalism’s fundamental—and contested—concept of truth. This study extends this line of scholarship by studying and comparing the epistemological beliefs of 33 Finnish beat journalists. The study finds that professional journalists covering business/economic, cultural, editorial, political and sports beats still consider truth to be a viable concept for their profession, but there are perceptible differences in claims to truth between different news beats. The findings reveal that journalists covering business/economic and sports beats are more likely to argue for journalism's ontological realist core. Moreover, they demarcate their beats from others by dismissing the role of interpretation in journalistic practices and by deploying epistemological realist claims characterised by absolute views on the correspondence ideal. Such claims for correspondence impose untenable normative expectations for journalistic practice and eventually degrade the institution’s epistemic authority when failing to deliver corresponding accounts of external reality.
Viljami Vaarala (Sat,) studied this question.