News sources and the epistemic authority to represent reality: How journalism constructs an order of authorized knowers in local television news

Distinguishing two types of epistemic authority, narrative and eyewitness, illuminates their distinct contributions to journalistic authority and reveals how journalism constructs an order of authorized knowers in local television news. Quantitative content analysis of local television news shows how different sources, such as public officials, civil authorities and citizens, are assigned epistemic authority both in terms of how frequently they appear in news and what journalists empower them to say. The basis of sources’ epistemic authority and the type of story they appear in shapes the knowledge about social reality they are discursively permitted to create. Citizens uniquely contribute to journalistic authority by imparting eyewitness authority to news. They take more speaking turns than other sources, but the epistemic authority their eyewitnessing creates is commonly coopted by elite sources whose status-derived narrative authority lets them characterize social reality without claiming to have witnessed it. Citizens appear in few government stories and take relatively few speaking turns in them, although most of their turns characterize social reality. Citizens take more speaking turns than authorities in crime stories, but their relatively even mix of characterizing and witnessing undermines their narrative authority relative to officials who take few witnessing turns. Demographics matter: White women citizens take more witnessing turns than all other citizen race and gender categories combined. Connecting social status with the authority to characterize social reality maintains structures of inequality, and authorities telling average people how to make sense of their experiences can be seen as dismissive of citizens’ judgment.