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Contested Place and Truth-Work: Investigating News Reception and Diasporic Sense of Place among British Jews

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Journalism, Audiences and Diaspora

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Abstract

This chapter is constructed around two lines of argument. One is that engagement with the truth-status of news, a collection of practices that I call ‘truth-work’, is an act of diasporic place-making and orientation to place. The second is that better attention should be paid to the historical and geographical specificities of diasporic groups, both between and within diasporas. I bring these lines of argument together by showing that truth-work arises and is shaped by the particular characteristics of the group studied here — Jews in the UK. Based on in-depth double interviews and a media diary exercise with 30 British- and Israeli-born secular adults residing in London, this chapter takes a phenomenological approach in which media are considered part of everyday physical and symbolic environments. They are therefore integral to the experience of place and are resources for making sense of spatial positioning. Although not new in media studies, this approach is still outside the mainstream of media research. One of the challenges that it presents is balancing empirical specificity against the abstract and universalist tendencies of philosophy (Couldry and Markham, 2008; Moores, 2006). I therefore discuss some of the specific features of the group studied and how these bring about and shape truth-work. The main section describes some of the practices of truth-work itself.

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Authors
  1. Eyal Lavi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, UK

    Ola Ogunyemi

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© 2015 Eyal Lavi

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Lavi, E. (2015). Contested Place and Truth-Work: Investigating News Reception and Diasporic Sense of Place among British Jews. In: Ogunyemi, O. (eds) Journalism, Audiences and Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457233_12

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