conflict
& communication online, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2005
www.cco.regener-online.de
ISSN 1618-0747
Wilhelm Kempf
Social constructivism and its implications for critical media studies
While media critics
maintain that war coverage has a strong bias toward promoting conflict
escalation, their opponents claim that the concept of distorted reality
cannot be upheld. What seems to be a media-political dispute results from
an epistemological issue that tangles the very roots of cultural studies
in general: the question of whether the social construction of reality
implies the arbitrariness of opinions.
The present paper discusses this proposition from a constructivist point
of view and shows that it is based on an inadequate and logically incorrect
understanding of truth and reality, and on a lack of differentiation between
facts and meanings, between truth and beliefs and between objective and
subjective realities.
Defining a third path between cultural imperialism and a naïve understanding
of cultural relativism, the paper finally discusses the methodological
basis on which media criticism can build.
On the author:
Wilhelm Kempf, since 1977 Professor for Psychological Methodology and
Head of the Peace Research Group at the University of Konstanz, Germany.
Special areas of interest: nonviolent conflict solutions, the construction
of social reality by the mass media. Recent books: Konflikt und Gewalt
(Münster: agenda, 2000); Los Medios y la Cultura de Paz (with Sonia
Gutiérrez Villalobos, Berlin: regener, 2001); Journalism and the
New World Order. Vol. II. Studying War and the Media (with Heikki Luostarinen,
Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Constructive Conflict Coverage (edited
by the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution: Berlin:
regener, 2003).
Address: Department
of Psychology, University of Konstanz (www.uni-konstanz.de),
D-78457 Konstanz.
Website: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/ag-meth/index.html
eMail: Wilhelm.Kempf@uni-konstanz.de
.