It is important to study the role of journalism and the media in some difficult situations, for example, during election campaigns or reaching political consensus in societies. Such studies will help create a legislative framework that regulates the actions of journalists in order to reduce the negative effects of their activities, but at the same time maintain their socially significant functions.
Theories of communication and psychology are the most popular applied research among political and business structures in the framework of journalism as a science. Such studies are mostly devoted to studying how the audience perceives and processes information, but practically does not concern the issues of motivating journalists and editorial staff. Proponents of this approach examine psychological factors that affect the way people perceive information in one way or another. Scientists are exploring ways to interact between journalists and their audience to identify the most effective ways of presenting information to achieve any goals. Such an approach contributes to a deeper understanding of the hidden interaction of the audience and journalists. But at the same time, these theories can contribute to the multiplication of ways to manipulate the audience and distort information.
Moreover, the excessive use of such methods leads to a change in priorities in journalism as a science and as a practical activity: the search for internal problems of society can be replaced by mechanisms of sophisticated methods of manipulation and influence. These trends can produce a long-term negative effect, which, in turn, can lead to an increase and deepening of social, economic and political problems in society, as well as to the degradation of journalism as a social institution.
It should be noted that the authors of the article did not set out to give a description of all approaches to journalism as a science. But even from this rather brief description, we can conclude that the problem of building a scientific journalism system is a rather complicated task that requires the joint work of many researchers in various fields. Of course, the structural framework for this system has already been created by modern theories of sociology, management, communication, and information technology. But researchers must fill this framework with a huge amount of research and work, often contradictory and inconsistent with each other, which must be combined into a single whole.
The need to develop a systematic approach. Journalism turned out to be one of the most controversial humanitarian disciplines, primarily because of the lack of a common understanding of its meaning and the inability to clearly define its subject. Undoubtedly, journalism researchers heard and followed the call to create a unified system of scientific knowledge with a clear definition of the subject of research, a complex hierarchy of various approaches and a structured methodology. Moreover, scientists are constantly developing new models and are trying to introduce most of them existing theories. But, unfortunately, even the most successful attempts have so far only partially achieved their goal.
The main reason for this situation lies in the very nature of journalism. The main goal of this discipline is to reflect reality, to cover and interpret modern events in order to somehow understand and classify the world around us, to divide reality into separate fragments, themes and meanings, in order to facilitate the audience the process of searching and processing information. In this sense, journalists play a significant role in the evolution of society, politics and economics.
Journalism as a practical discipline, in terms of its principles and functions, largely copies science — it is also aimed at studying, researching and analyzing an event, and within its framework there are also a huge number of possibilities to interpret reality in different ways.
Bibliography:
- . Философский словарь / редкол. : Л. Ф. Ильичев (гл. ред.) [и др.]. – М. : Сов. энцикл., 1983.
- Belyakova L. P. Analytical Journalism of Print Periodicals. – Minsk: BSU, 2012.
