Any Thoughts on Integral Journalism or Integral Truth?

Daniel from For the Turnstiles said in his response, “First: I'm suspicious of the concept of integral truth, on the same grounds Nietzsche was dissatisfied with what he polemically referred to as the “Hegelian stench” of Wagner's school. Truths are manufactured… Integrations are in fact contrived, constructed, manufactured, and therefore contingent. Not capital-T truth. Bill O'Reilly is in the capital-T truth business, and in this he has everything in common with Ken Wilber.”

I left the following comment:
I'm intrigued by your skepticism of integral truth and your distinction between “fact contrived, constructed, manufactured, and therefore contingent” and capital-T truth.
Are you distinguishing between relative vs. absolute truth here?
Or is capital-T truth more of a dogmatic, fundamentalist concept of “truthiness” – believing in only one particular aspect of a story, while discrediting all other viewpoints?

I don't think reaching a consensus on any absolute truth would ever be possible in a society.

And so for a journalistic context, then I guess the question then becomes how to take a sample of all of the relative truths in a society, clustering them together by finding the common ground and points of departure between them. Reporting on the critical mass of perceived relative truths, and trying to connect it to trade-offs and decision points that need to be made in public policy.

This is in a sense what journalism is supposed to be doing, but they do it through the proxy of the what the members of the Congressional institution are saying or doing (UR) – rather from what the people themselves are thinking or believing (LL).

And PR spin has gotten us so far from the “truth” of what's really going on, and why politicians are doing what they're doing. So we're pretty bad off right now. How do we make it better? And what would exploring the possibility of “integral truth” have to offer to journalistic practices?

Daniel from For the Turnstiles also said in his reply, “Second: the only real structural flaw in Bye's model as near as I can tell is that it does not adequately account for ownership of the means of production, which means it doesn't account for the will-to-power of those running the show. Rupert Murdoch would love that, because it would allow him to continue making big ass truth claims.”

And I left the following comment in response:

As far as the ownership of production, there are obviously open questions from how to move from where journalism is at now with print, radio, television and online mediums, and how to transition to something resembling my proposed Integral model.

The existing ecosystem of wire services, newspapers, magazines, blogs, radio, television and beyond will probably be around in some shape or another. Even though the viability of print newspapers is on the brink of collapse, and the biggest trend has been dwindling audiences through legacy distribution systems and the movement towards online distribution and advertising revenue. Journalism is already having to reinvent it's business models across the board, and they're still working that out.

In some ways, my integral model could be a meta-level service that aggregates, distills and recontextualizes information from all different types of existing sources. Efforts like Silobreaker.com, Daylife.com and News.Google.Com are already starting to do this in their different ways.

But there could be even more collaboration and information sharing between existing journalism institutions. There could be open standards to facilitate the open exchange and flow of information – an open API that provides access to the commodity stream of facts. The Associated Press and Reuters wire services already provide this backbone for a price that guarantees speed and accuracy. But this function could potentially be distributed across many news organizations and open to citizens, NGOs, think tanks and bloggers. And it could be subsidized by the government through a similar approach as the BBC charter.

The idea is to make the process more decentralized, open, transparent and less likely to be hijacked by a handful of powerful interests who have loud microphones.

Another thought from Daniel originally posted here:
This brings up Bye's second question, on how to reform the media along integral lines. The short answer:… you need regime change first. You can reform the thing, sure, but all you're doing is changing the paint on the bullshit machine.

My thought:
I disagree that “regime change” (i.e. a new executive branch administration) is a prerequisite.

In some ways, the current executive branch has pushed the limits for what they can get away with as far as saying one thing and doing something completely different.

As Dan Hallin has found with his media analysis, there is more of a correlation between diversity of perspectives represented in the media and diversity of perspectives coming from a critical mass of congressional leaders. So when there is groupthink in Congress, there is groupthink in the media. I've found this to be true as well.

And to complicate the matter, the Democrats use a number of PR communication tactics as well. So electing a Democratic president shouldn't be a requirement to redesigning the Fourth Estate.

Whether you're a Bush supporter or a Bush hater, both can agree that the media is doing a horrible job.

The question is what would a healthy and balanced media and integral journalism look like? And what do they need to do to create a shared reality and enough of a common context to faciliate public discourse?

Here is my reponse to five points that Joe Perez made about in this blog post.

** Re: Potential integral voices being outside of the margins, misunderstood and unread.

Good points, and I think you're right with this.
I do agree that a integral voices would be somewhat marginalized at first, but that it would grow as the culture was ready to hear it.


** Re: Should focus on producing a more healthy, “integrally informed” universe of journalists.

I think this is important, but it's not my personal starting point for what I'm exploring with The Echo Chamber Project. My original post was a little bit vague as to what exactly I'm working on, but the essence is trying to tap into and make the “Wisdom of the Crowd” more explicit – to use technology to aggregate insights from the LL quadrant to help inform the post-production phase of documentary editing (This grant proposal better defines the scope).

So apart from having more “integrally informed” journalists, then how could “integral journalism” better explore and integrate the lower left and lower right quadrants?


** Re: Encourage journalists to cover all major angles on a story

I assume that you mean that integral journalists should describe the truth through the lens of each quadrant.

I think a paradigm shift that I'm advocating is to think beyond the limitations of linear storytelling by using the flat mediums of print, radio and television. Maybe the lower quadrants are better explored by utilizing the hypertext-linked medium of the Internet. And if this is true, then what would types of things would be an integral journalist be interested in exploring and showing from the lower quadrants? Think of database-driven visualizations, systems level causal maps, a way to aggregate public opinion through ratings, tags, playlists, etc.


** Re: It'd be unwise to emphasize the notion of merging news and editorial content.

I'm actually not just thinking about working within the existing limitations of existing mainstream journalism. My starting point is trying to collaboratively edit a documentary, and to explore new methodologies for cooperative sense-making.

So I'm trying to envision the ideal of “integral journalism” or “integral truth” so that I have some concept of what would be a worthy goal to move towards.

So what would an “integral journalism” look like if designed from scratch?

In other words, what tools would be in an “integral methodological pluralism” toolkit for journalists?

One problem with journalism is that they're afraid to make political judgments – and yet sometimes an aggregation of facts over time warrants making a judgment that someone is being deceptive or outright lying. There needs to be new ways that journalists can create a paper trail of facts, and feel confident to make bold judgments and “truth” claims.

I do think the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses could be one way to do this – and it is just an application of the scientific method. Facts are objective, and the hypotheses are more subjective. So creating an explicit paper trail that justifies strong political judgments is something that could start to break down the wall of PR immunity that politicians have been building up.


** Re: Communicate what the news means effectively to all the different worldspaces.

Yes, this is also very important. A translation to multiple worldviews. I think there is a lot of untapped potential for effectively doing this. If you've seen any real life best practices for anyone that is doing this, then let me know.

I know Adam Leonard's Integral Communications thesis has a case study, and a proposed message construction for different worldviews. But it'd be interesting to see other examples of successful implementations of this.