Confronting Uncertainty: The Contours of an Inferential Community

Abstract

This monograph addresses the question of how journalistic knowledge work, and in particular inferential reasoning, as a process of uncertainty reduction is manifested in news texts. We argue this takes place both in and in-between news media within a community of practice. The main premise is that journalistic texts reveal communal processes of knowledge creation and it is within these texts that we see the contours of what we term an “inferential community.” The backdrop to this, is that the digital (news) landscape, political developments, and global issues produce an environment rife with uncertainty. We focus on three contemporary cases around the current U.S. presidency. We are, however, not arguing that the processes we study are altogether new; journalists have always, alone or together, grappled with uncertainty. Rather, we present here a conceptualization based on the premise that current circumstances offer a window into the more fundamental processes of journalistic knowledge work based on inference.

A Balance of Uncertainties: Renewing Attention to the Socialized Spaces Shaping Digital Journalism Studies

“…yet in both cases, it seems uncertainty is something we actively fight against, and the solutions to uncertainty that we provide become something to rally around. this "fighting" impulse reflects the same effort to be authoritative that we observe among journalists, who anchor their identities as epistemic authorities who seek to establish certainty in uncertain worlds (Anderson 2018;eldridge and Bødker 2019).…”