Ulysses in the newsroom. Evidences, journalism and mass culture

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze journalism as a form of knowledge linked to the deciphering of evidence and the establishment of hypotheses that guide the investigation through the inferential process. The idea is recovered that there is a practical intelligence based on inference and anticipation that the Greeks called metis and that marked both the beginnings of medicine and rhetoric. The connections between these ancient forms of deciphering the signs and the concepts of index and abduction in Peirce's semiotics are also established, analyzing the place that habit, doubt and belief have when guiding inferences. Finally, these concepts are put into action by analyzing journalistic investigations into the sexual abuse of Catholic clergy in Boston, recounted in Tom McCarthy's movie Spotlight.KEY WORDS: indexes, semiosis, metis, inference, abduction, journalism.