Between facts and news: Journalism, common sense knowledge and public sphere

AFTER the optimism which followed the falling of the Berlin Wall, one has found out that the alternative to Cold War wasn’t the Global Peace. Regional conflicts have grown stronger, becoming more intense than ever. At several levels, some taken-for-granted evidences were shaken by new social, cultural, political and technological phenomena. Risk, contingence, and entropy became major categories of contemporary theoretical approaches. The post-modern society appears now to contemporary thought as a new world shaped by social and cultural fragmentation, and the eruption of new identities. The emergence of a novel public sphere concerned, mainly, with emergent social and political rights of minorities; and the constant flow of people, either immigrants or refugees crossing cultural and geographic spaces, brought to light new and old identities, leading those ancient and secure borders to collapse. Some confluent phenomena such as environmental problems, contemporary hazards associated with nuclear power, chemical pollution, terrorism, changes on cultural attitudes, the “women’s lib” and their subsequent arrival to labour market, the crisis of the old traditional mediation apparatus (Church, Family, Tradition), the decadence of ideologies, emerge as main features of a society where everything that was solid melted on air (Adam, Beck, e van Loom 2000: pp 6-7). Increasing reflexivity in face of answers once taken-for-granted challenged by those enormous changes, and anxiety in face of a changing world makes that concern with security and risk become a major problem of our societies. Insecurity is thus an existential context: we don’t know anymore how to go on the basis of tradition. The implicit validity claims of taken-for-granted values and traditions become problematic and potentially questioned (Adam, Beck e van Loom, 2000:37)Throughout this text, one appeals to a theoretical approach where we can find elements from the phenomenology of Lebenswelt, from the theory of multiple realities, from the theory of social representations and also from the analysis of the didactic and safety functions of journalism. With this approach, we