Journalism is context
I’m not in the habit of studying Biblical interpretation or homiletics, but there’s a principle there that applies well to journalism and maybe in general to explanation and argumentation. It says that a text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext (a prooftext being a passage to which a theological appeal is made and argued). I don’t know where it originates; I found it looking for sources on the relationship between texts and their contexts.
Journalists typically do not think about “texts” in the ways that Bible scholars do. Journalists primarily think of themselves as producing texts, which we know better as “stories” or “packages.” But like Bible scholars, they do interpret texts in the course of their work – quotes, statements, press releases, official documents, etc. Until the last 10-15 years, they used this interpretation in the production of larger texts – that is, news stories. They still produce news stories today, but they also produce a new form of small texts: social media posts.
Let’s take an example. Yesterday, Igor Bobic of HuffPost tweeted that Chuck Schumer had responded to Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States by saying, “We do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem.” The tweet made its way to Bluesky via Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass, where it went viral (to the extent anything can on Bluesky):
Responses on the new platform, where political discussion is nearly all on the left, were predictable. Schumer is effectively a Republican. Democrats always drop the ball. Schumer endorses concentration camps and thinks fascists have a point. Democrats are so bad at this!
Missing almost entirely was the question that Schumer was responding to. Eric Michael Garcia of The Independent had asked why Democrats were negotiating with Republicans over immigration at all given Trump’s comments. Bobic later posted the question, to his credit; Cohn did not. The question makes it clear that Schumer was not simply offering a take on Trump’s fascist statement; he was talking about an active legislative issue while deflecting a question about a non-officeholder.
Social media discourse is messy, non-linear, and full of randos saying whatever, which is part of what makes it fertile ground for misunderstanding. But in this case, the root of the reaction was a tweet from a reporter – that is, someone whose entire job is meant to be conveying information to an audience in an understandable way. This tweet fails that objective by excluding context that helps explain what the text means (though that’s not to say that some wouldn’t have reacted the same way to Schumer’s quote in context). It’s hardly unique in that regard, however; social media posts are almost impossible to contextualize the way good journalism should be.
Though not all social platforms restrict the size of posts as Twitter and its clones do, in practice they are usually short, and those character-limited, text-focused platforms are the ones most likely to be used by journalists to provide new information (as opposed to links to stories on the web). The necessity of brevity means posting news as discrete units, maybe connected as a thread or maybe not. Regardless, each unit will be shared on its own, not carrying with it any context that might be provided in other posts – this is true here of both the retweets within the Twitter environment and the screenshots shared to other platforms.
There are two related reasons why the reliance of journalists on this sort of system is so troubling. First, we know that most exposure to news on social platforms does not result in clicking through to read or watch the full story (if there even is one, which there isn’t in the case of Bobic’s tweet). People tend to scan over the post and react to what is there alone – headline, blurb, photo, and the text of the post, which may be from a sharer rather than a journalist. Those reactions include both comments and sharing, both of which promote the visibility of the discrete unit of the post while also separating it from any context that may exist in subsequent posts.
Then, what happens when we encounter units of decontextualized information? Walter Lippmann described the process of understanding issues as forming “pictures in our heads” of them, which are never exactly accurate but can be more or less detailed. We generate these pictures from the information we have encountered about the issue, and then fill in the gaps with “what we can imagine.” That is, our existing attitudes and beliefs provide (false) context when journalists don’t.
I don’t think it’s too strong to say that, fundamentally, journalism is context. Though it’s a common marketing tactic for news organizations to talk about just providing the facts, every journalist knows that’s not possible, nor would it be desirable. Facts have different meanings in different contexts, and the contextual work is the communicative work of journalism. It is why news outlets differ when reporting the same stories, and it’s the root of much journalistic failure. This includes things like failing to report someone’s relevant past statements or acts in a new story, as we have seen repeatedly with coverage of the Trumpist Republican Party. It includes reporting on the aftermath of a policy change in one place without reporting on what happened in places without that change, such as looking at car accidents after legalization of marijuana. And yes, it includes providing the context in which quotes are given.