Properties of Journalism as a Manifestation of Regularities

Section: Discussion

The article is a theoretical study of the laws of journalism. It consists of an introduction, four chapters, and conclusions. The purpose of the article is to draw the audience's attention to the aspect of journalism, which gives grounds to relegate it to self-regulating, self-developing social systems and makes it possible to significantly widen the view of the mechanisms of its operation. In the introduction and the first chapter, the authors characterize the properties of self-managed systems that are recognized in theoretical and empirical studies as general systemic qualities and also show how these qualities manifest themselves in journalism, confirming its systemic nature. The second and third chapters consistently consider the manifestations of integrity, structure, functionality, self-regulation and self-development of journalism, which speak about the legitimacy of including it into the class of self-developing social systems. In the fourth chapter, the authors identify new aspects in the considered characteristics of journalism, which allow us to somewhat deepen the existing ideas about the mechanisms of its operation. Attention is focused on the fact that the listed properties of journalism, synthesized by observing their external manifestations, are distinguished by stability, repeatability, and commitment. These features are also inherent in the internal, unobservable essential connections of self-regulating entities, which are displayed in scientific theories as the category "law". The totality of such connections in the system (the totality of laws) is designated in scientific discourse as the category "regularities". This theoretical concept is correlated with the considered properties of journalism: they show the result of the action of its laws. These patterns represent the mechanism of operation and development of journalism. At the same time, they act as laws of broad action, since journalism bears the general characteristics of self-developing systems and, therefore, functions on the basis of general laws. However, the fact that specific properties are also found in journalism suggests that other laws are also involved in the mechanism of its operation. The need to identify them is considered by the authors of the article as an important scientific problem that calls for research, since its solution can open up new opportunities for the development of journalism.

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