What the media do and what researchers do are not that different. Both of them relate to empirical reality and are interested in getting data – only that the media are particularly concerned with highly contemporary data, data from today, new data called news; researchers may also be satisfied with “olds”. Both are concerned with theories, efforts to understand the data, to interpret them – usually put into the commentary in the newspapers, such as editorials and in the theory section of a scientific article or book. And both of them are actually concerned with values, only that the media are usually more honest, making the values very explicit – researchers have a tendency to hide their values even to themselves, pretending that they are “value-free”, objective – uninfluenced by anything but data and the effort to interpret them.
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