Christian is a Philosopher that comes from Belgium. What identifies him the most and above all is simplicity, for everything is better with “vanilla flavour.” Perhaps, for this reason, his intellectual passion is criticism and irony, in the sense of trying to reveal what “hides behind the mask,” and give birth to the true. For him, ignorance and knowledge never “cross paths.” What he likes the most in his leisure time, is to go for a walk with his wife.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Responsibility, obligations, rights, privileges, and reciprocity inter-relate as a common core of ethics reflective of different sides of a pentahedron for a frame morality – a golden pentagon operating as a prism on a general Golden Rule ethic. If one has rights and privileges, and if one takes the Golden Rule as an ethic implicative of an order of reciprocity among relevant operators, e.g., human beings of sufficient emotional maturity and intelligence, and if one takes into account the ideas on the opposite side of the ledger of responsibilities and obligations, then reciprocity functions as a fulcrum between rights and privileges, on the one hand, and responsibilities and obligations, on the other hand. You do not view intellectuals as having a responsibility, necessarily. Thus, if a journalist identifies as a public intellectual, then they do not by necessity have a responsibility as a category of intellectual, while a journalist. What are some obvious ethic breaches by journalists in their profession within the consideration of this gold pentahedron? When do they lose sight of providing a reality sense to the public, thus deteriorating a democratic state via a reduction in a sense of reality testing amongst the population?
Dr. Christian Sorensen: I think that the gaps that affect journalism, always affect the public’s sense of reality, nevertheless not all of them are ethically reprehensible, since they are constitutive of journalistic reality, and therefore because they do not have any answer as such, neither they represent any type of problem. In this sense, I consider that indeed there is a gap, that actually is not of journalism, but rather it is journalistic, and that has its primary cause in what I denominate the impasse of the real, which is a breaking line that due to the fact that only through the phenomenon is partialy reachable, I think that does not make impossible to know reality, though does make access to it impossible. In turn although it is describable, needs to be completed by a narrative that constructs sense through a history, therefore due to its interpretive essence, takes an inescapably relative connotation. The last is what represents, in my opinion the material substrate that journalism intends to communicate publicly. Consequently, it could be asserted that journalism, more than working with reality as an independent and available entity with its own patterns, what it actually does is to go in to chop the concrete of something from an angle and sight, on which places an eye but remains subordinated to the circumstances that govern the inner world of the observer. Therefore strictly speaking, I think that the criterion of sense of reality, lacks all sense, because there is no bodily sense that fulfills this function, nor does there exist any one alike in terms of adequacy between two things. The foregoing is determinant from my point of view, in relation to what the journalistic gap is, because it implies a communicational break in terms of inherent discrepancy regarding its natural speech. In consequence the aforementioned, since leaves the choice of options opened, carries an ethical connotational charge, and therefore properly speaking it could be said that it is a gap of which journalism must take over, insofar as it holds a debt of loyalty with an imaginary third party, with respect to whom has sealed a sort of social contract when the third entrusted its demand from disinformation. I do not believe that in the case of journalism, there is an ethical reciprocity between rights and responsibilities since the burden of proof is on one side only, to the extent that journalism socially speaking, I think that it only sustains responsibilities and not rights, while the public feels only with rights in relation to which it demands absolute fidelity that borders in utopia. In this unequal context, however I believe that there is a journalistic ideal, in the sense of an ethical must, where there’s a compromise with the search and communication of the truth no matter what consequences this might imply, which ultimately means, that the journalist must create a meaning in a linguistic framework, by combining simultaneously the signifier that represents the real phenomenon, with the rhetoric semantics of its writing, in order to give birth at the same time a response in the other symbolic register of truth, and an anewer to the demand put into play by the third, which lastly is for achieving a sort of outcome, that I will define as to be something that should makes sense, and that for me is the core gap regarding what journalism must be prepared to overcome ethically.
Jacobsen: What would be poor art of a journalist?
Sorensen: I think that the feeling of complacency for serving globalized liberalism, and the feeling that I will denominate as equidistantial which is the search for the right middle between two extremes, as the ultimate ethical goal, that in turn is a hypocritical way of using the art to disguise the truth with fallacious arguments, since by doing so the systemic rejection is avoided, insofar as it is a symptomatic mechanism that with relative success manages to deny the entropy that leads to the nihilism of meaningful communication.
Jacobsen: What would be great art of a journalist, making a great journalist?
Sorensen: The art of a journalism, that I would title as the journalism in search of meaning for man.
Jacobsen: What could be a prophylactic to this journalistic prostitution endowed with acquired exhibitionism?
Sorensen: Taking advantage of the fact that journalism is a masculine noun, I would say that it is because happens something similar to what occurs when a man who is having sex, asks his partner if she feels, and she replies that yes, that she feels the smell of burning rubber.
Jacobsen: Why is independent journalism focused on human rights the most successful journalism now?
Sorensen: Because everyone deep down knows what I say, regarding the apodiptic reality, that man never must be treated as a means, and currently what occurs in the global panorama, is quite the opposite, which represents an evident tragedy, that as such and in relation to its explanatory causes does not withstand further analysis, therefore the fact of denouncing and confronting the aforementioned, converts this type of journalism into an anonymous hero.
Jacobsen: How does journalism provide the singular junction point between an informed citizenry for an informed democracy and a misinformed population for an endured autocracy awash in lies?
Sorensen: I think that the key is mass quality education, since that is the clue for citizens to take control of themselves and their environment, to the extent that a state of conscience not sedated and reactive to any kind of ideological devices of metaphysical or populist demagogic nature, would allow them to claim their right to be duly and democratically informed.
Jacobsen: Why admire Raymond Aron and Laurent Joffrin?
Sorensen: Regarding Raymond Aron because its reformist and skeptical position seems to me remarkable, in the respective sense of considering that true progress must be contingent, partial and imperfect, and that freedom and reason are the most efficient defenses against totalitarianism and fundamentalism. In relation to Laurent Joffrin or Laurent Mouchard, it is since I find interesting that he occupies a pseudonym as a way to deny his nationalist paternal origin, and that later dedicates himself to communications.
Jacobsen: Why is Iceland so gosh darn democratic?
Sorensen: Because I suppose that being a relatively isolated ice-covered island, in the vicinity of the North Pole allows them to keep human stupidity frozen, and drink plenty of whiskey on the rocks, which produces a evident vasodilation of the cerebral sensitive homunculus, which contributes significantly to improving proprioception in order to dimensionate and promote successfully the democratic values.
Jacobsen: Thank you, Christian, pleasure!
Sorensen: You are welcome Scott!