An essay on the hermeneutical manifestations of the news accuracy-truth relationship: A research on the interpretation process of the news

Academic studies focusing on professional journalism practices have led to the pre acceptance that professional journalism practices determine the accuracy and truth of the news. Those who interpreted the news were not sufficiently investigated and they have been ignored. However, the accuracy and truth of the news is built in the sight of individuals, through interpretation, at least as much as in professional journalism practices. The porpuse of this dissertation is to reveal the place of the news in the meaning world of individuals within the framework of the hermeneutical tradition and thus to reveal the hermeneutical elements that determine the relationship between the accuracy / truth of the news. The study suggests that there are some common aspects in understanding and interpreting the news, not an epistemological method that will ensure the correct interpretation of the news. Study has been planned in two phases in accordance with the aforementioned purpose. In the first phase, the nature of accurancy and how accurancy relates with truth was treated within the framework of "truth theories", then the relationship between accurancy/truth and "understanding" was dealt with on the basis of hermeneutical thought. Finally, how the relationship between news accuracy and truth is evaluated in terms of communication theories has been discussed within the framework of the hermeneutic tradition. The second phase exposes how the news accuracy and truth relationship is constructed through interpretation with a phenomenological field research. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with 46 participants, who were determined using "maximum diversity", "stratified purposeful" and "snowball" sampling methods. The raw data collected from the field research that lasted for 48 days were analyzed with MAXQUDA 20 qualitative analysis program and the opinions of the participants were classified under 5 main themes, 14 themes and 17 sub-themes. The field research revealed that the participants determined the accuracy/truth of the news on the basis of comparison, source, value and experience. The conclusion part of the dissertation has been written on the basis of the inferences obtained from the theoretical and practical parts of the study. Accordingly, it was determined that a total of 9 hermeneutical elements were influential on understanding the news and on the news accuracy/truth relationship. 5 of these hermeneutical elements are individual origin: "Using experiece based knowledge to understand the news", "being familiar with the grammatical structure of the concepts used in the news", "taking quick judgement to understand the news", "having courage to risk the truth", "questioning the news" and 4 of them are of community origin: "being familiar with the objective spirit of the writer of the news", "being aware of the dominant coherent propositions which are dominating the objective spirit", "having passed enough time to approach the true meaning" and "accessing news sources".