Introduction
Journalists regularly ask the public what it thinks. They do this in many ways. A reporter approaches people in the street and asks a question. A newsroom commissions a survey. A journalist follows discussions on social media. Researchers conduct interviews or focus groups. Citizens send in stories, comments and reactions. These practices all have value. But they share a limitation that is easy to overlook: the journalist usually decides in advance what the public is being asked to respond to.
This matters because journalism does not merely report reality. It constitutes a perspective on reality. A journalist selects what is relevant, identifies categories, formulates questions, connects events and decides which developments deserve attention. This is unavoidable. Without such selection, journalism could not function.
Nevertheless, this creates an epistemic problem. If the journalist’s perspective is necessarily limited, then the public is only selectively heard. But the public may contain perspectives that expose the limitations of the journalist’s perspectives - and therefore are missed although potentially highly relevant.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to find better ways of asking citizens what they think. It is to find ways of allowing citizens to articulate what journalists did not yet know to ask.
An example: the vox pop
The vox pop is one of journalism’s most familiar ways of bringing the public into a story. A reporter asks several people a question. Their answers provide a sense of atmosphere, illustrate agreement or disagreement, and give a human face to an issue. But the people encountered in a vox pop are not given the opportunity to constitute and develop their own perspective from scratch. They are responding to a question that has already been framed. The structure of the encounter is asymmetrical. The journalist has already determined X as the relevant object and the terms in which the citizen is invited to respond.
Nevertheless, a citizen may have experienced something that does not fit the journalist’s framing. They may connect the issue to something the journalist has not considered relevant. They may even reject the categories implicit in the question. Yet the journalistic process may never encounter this. The citizen is asked for an opinion within the journalist’s ontology.
The problem is not that the citizen’s answer is necessarily wrong. Nor is it that journalists should simply accept whatever citizens say. The problem is that something potentially valuable may never become visible because the encounter began too late: after the question had already been formulated.
What holds good for vox pops holds good for other instruments such as surveys as well: the journalist limits and interprets reality before encountering reality.
Every perspective has a boundary
We are not born with a map of reality installed. From birth, our experiences guide us to perceive concepts and patterns in the relations between these concepts in increasingly differentiated ways. From this process two challenges arise. First, since our experiences are limited, so is our understanding of reality. Second, since we derive our understanding partly from our experiences, we tend to assume that our understanding is “normal”, so that when someone has a different understanding, their understanding must be “not normal”.
This basic process is not the whole story. Our understanding is greatly influenced by those close to us: the groups that we belong to and the individuals we trust. Major parts of our understanding are therefore not directly experience-based. Our understanding is also not fully conscious. The development of patterns and relations is largely a nonconscious process. The result is, among other things, a set of unspoken causal expectations in the form of “if this, then that”. When the “that” does not occur, or occurs in a significantly different form, a problem arises. That problem can be explained away, ignored, lead to minor adjustments, or throw our whole understanding into crisis.
What this means is that every person constitutes their epistemic reality through a particular organization of concepts and relations between these concepts. We need such an organization to orient ourselves and act. But no person’s organization of reality exhausts reality, nor is it “objective”. We cannot know with certainty that we possess all the concepts relevant to a situation, or that we have established all the relations between them correctly.
This applies to us all: journalists, citizens, anybody. The implication is not relativism. It does not follow that every account of reality is equally valid, or that factual standards should be abandoned. It means something more specific: a perspective can be factually responsible and still be incomplete.
Since encountering a “that” that does not follow a “this” does not always lead to an adequate correction from within ourselves, sometimes access to understandings beyond our own may be required. This is where others come in. For those who are professionally engaged in the provision of information and meaning, such a check should be considered a default.
The public as a source of epistemic correction
Journalism treats people as sources of information. This paper claims that people should also be sources of epistemic correction. The distinction is important.
Rather than introducing people to the journalistic process after a frame already has been established by a journalist, they should be asked about their own framing. People should be given a structured opportunity to constitute and articulate their own perspectives before those perspectives are reduced to the journalist’s categories and relations between these categories. Rather than being asked whether they agree or disagree with the journalist’s frame, they should first have an opportunity to formulate what they themselves see as relevant. This is to enable an epistemic link between the journalist and their audiences.
Interdemocracy
Interdemocracy is a method and format for gathering “wisdom of crowds” while enhancing participants’ democratic societal resilience. In the context of journalism, however, its relevance goes beyond gathering dispersed knowledge: it creates conditions in which participants can independently formulate perspectives that may expose what a journalist’s existing perspective does not make visible. It can therefore enable an epistemic link between journalists and their audiences. Interdemocracy is currently being implemented within the frame of the Horizon-funded European project Saufex.
The core characteristics of Interdemocracy are that individuals formulate their perspectives independently, without consultation with others, that no one is allowed to express an immediate reaction to these perspectives, and that perspective formulation and expression occur in clearly separate phases. During the first phase a cognitive, evidence-informed short introduction is provided; in the second phase an open question is asked with a request for explanation; in the third phase an individual answers, first in handwriting, then digitally through a communicator, and thirdly by reading the digital version of the answer aloud while being recorded. In case more individuals are present, the phases up to the reading aloud are valid for the individuals simultaneously; the reading out aloud occurs subsequently, in random order.
Leeway and ma
The purpose of these procedures is not simply to collect answers. They create leeway: an interval in which participants can constitute and articulate their own perspectives before having to respond to the perspectives of others. This matters because immediate reaction tends to bring a perspective back into the organization one already has. We classify it, agree or disagree with it, defend our own position, or try to persuade the other. In doing so, what is unfamiliar can quickly become familiar again. By postponing reaction, Interdemocracy creates an opportunity for something that does not fit the existing organization of reality to remain visible long enough to be encountered.
This can create the conditions for what Japanese philosophy labels „ma”: an interval in which another organization of concepts and relations can be encountered without being immediately assimilated into one’s own. Interdemocracy cannot create ma, nor can it guarantee that another person’s perspective will produce epistemic correction. It can, however, structure the conditions under which such an encounter becomes more likely. For journalism, this means creating a possibility to encounter not merely another answer to an existing question, but another way of seeing what the relevant question might be.
Conclusion
Journalism cannot avoid framing reality. It cannot ask every question, follow every connection, or incorporate every perspective. The problem is therefore not that journalists have perspectives. The problem arises when those perspectives become the only structures through which the public is heard.
The public should contribute more than answers to questions that journalists have already formulated. It should also expose assumptions, relations and questions that the journalist’s perspective does not make visible. This requires more than asking more people for their opinions. It requires creating conditions in which people can constitute and articulate their own perspectives before those perspectives are immediately absorbed into an existing frame.
This is the potential contribution of Interdemocracy to journalism. It does not replace reporting, verification, or professional judgment, and it does not assume that citizens are necessarily right. Rather, it creates a structured opportunity for journalists to encounter perspectives that may reveal the limits of their own. Its value is therefore not simply that it can gather the “wisdom of crowds”, but that it can make that wisdom available as a source of epistemic correction.
For journalism, the shift is from asking the public only to answer questions to creating opportunities for the public to reveal questions that journalism has not yet learned to ask. The aim is not to remove the journalist’s perspective, but to make that perspective more capable of encountering what exceeds it and thereby enhance its epistemic relevance to its audiences.