How is a 'critical journalism' possible?

Journalism is usually, and I believe accurately, associated with the uncovering and reporting of “facts”. Investigative journalism, especially, involves the (sometimes difficult, even dangerous) ferreting out of “facts” that are not generally known, and often deliberately hidden or covered up, especially by those in power. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for example, will be remembered for their investigative reporting on the illicit break-ins at the Watergate buildings in Washington, DC, which eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president of the US.

Because of the crucial role of so-called “facts” in cases like these, most people regard such “facts” as unquestionable and as necessarily leading to action of some kind. And certainly, if sufficient scrutiny is brought to bear on them, they deserve such status. But — and this is a big BUT — only if there is agreement about the accessibility of the context within which facts function as facts, in the first place, and secondly, if the community of interested parties share a common set of values.

If this seems confusing, consider the following: In a book titled 50 Facts that Should Change the World, journalist and BBC television producer (and, in my view, activist) Jessica Williams lists these 50 “facts”, together with about five pages in each case to explain what they entail, and (at least implicitly) suggest why they “should change the world”, (obviously, by igniting action on the part of people worldwide that would presumably result in these facts changing, that is, in the conditions that they reflect, improving).

I cannot reproduce all of these here — just listing them would take up a lot of space — but here are some of them that illustrate what I said earlier after the “BUT”:
– China has 44 million missing women.
– Ninety-four percent of the world’s executions in 2005 took place in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US.
– In more than 70 countries, same-sex relationships are illegal. In nine countries, the penalty is death.
– More than 12 000 women are killed each year in Russia as a result of domestic violence.
– In 2006, 16 million Americans had some form of plastic surgery.
– Landmines kill or maim at least one person every hour.
– There are 44 million child labourers in India.
– People in industrialised countries eat between six and seven kilograms of food additives every year.
– Cars kill two people every minute.
– Global warming already kills 150 000 people every year.
– In Kenya, bribery payments make up a third of the average household budget.
– The world’s trade in illegal drugs is estimated to be worth around $400 billion (about the same as the world’s legal pharmaceutical industry).
– A quarter of the world’s armed conflicts of recent years have involved a struggle for natural resources.
– A third of the world’s population is at war.
– More people die each year from suicide than in all the world’s armed conflicts.
– There are 27 million slaves in the world today.
– The US owes the United Nations more than $1 billion in unpaid dues.
– Two million girls and women are subjected to female genital mutilation each year.
– Every week, an average of 54 children are expelled from American schools for bringing a gun to class.
– A third of Americans believe that aliens have landed on earth.
– Ten languages die out every year.
What do these facts have in common? First — and obviously, otherwise they are unlikely to appear in the second edition of a book with such a title — they represent states of affairs that can be verified by anyone using the same kind of resources that Williams has used (as a journalist and television producer for a reputable national news company she is likely to have access to more such resources than any average Joe, of course).

The second thing they have in common is this: they represent states of affairs that are undesirable; hence their description as “facts that should change the world”. What Williams really means, implicitly, is that, once sufficient numbers of people know about these facts, they should set out by various means of action to change the world by addressing these facts and removing them — in the sense of replacing them with states of affairs that represent an improvement on what they represent.

And this brings me to the titular question, above, regarding the possibility of a critical (investigative) journalism: unless one can assume a shared set of values underpinning the uncovering and reporting of “facts” of this nature, there is hardly any sense to it. In other words, Williams (or Bob Woodward, for that matter) would hardly go to the trouble of adducing facts such as these, unless she implicitly assumes that her readers would be as outraged by the conditions reflected by them as she is — and moreover, set out to change them for the better. (An interesting corollary question is whether she is right in this assumption.)

And this brings me to an important upshot of a practice worthy of the name “critical investigative journalism”: it cannot exist ONLY in the uncovering of “facts”. Unless it tacitly or explicitly acknowledges the existence of presumably (universally) shared values — values that would impel people to act in ways that may be anticipated — there would be no sense to it as a practice. Or, to put it more bluntly: the hunt for facts on the part of investigative journalists presupposes something strangely un-factual, namely human values.

If you don’t believe me, you can put my claim to the test in relation to the 21 “facts”, listed above, from Williams’s book. There are, of course, cases where, arguably, commonly shared human values, presupposed by Williams, come up against culture-specific values underpinning the perpetuation of the state of affairs in question — such as the one about female genital mutilation (which probably happens in specific cultures), or the one about school kids in America bringing guns to school in relatively large numbers (which reflects the American love of firearms, arguably affecting many other cultures through American films and television shows). But even in these cases, Williams is intimating that human beings can legitimately be supposed to adhere to values that would be inimical to the “facts” here listed.

(Philosophers will no doubt here be reminded of the debate between members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, on the one hand, and positivists, on the other, regarding the status of “facts”, which is not quite the same thing as that which concerns me here.)