The conditions of professional curiosity

In 1970, the jury of the Pulizer Prize gave the award for international reporting to US journalist Seymour Hersh, who was 33. The year before, he revealed that the US Army had massacred dozens of Vietnamese men, women and children at My Lai.

Ten years later, another young journalist, Robert MĂ©nard (27) launched a free weekly in BĂ©zier, a city of 75,000 at the time. In it, he bitterly covered municipal affairs, among other issues.1

MĂ©nard and Hersh began their careers in vastly different circumstances but both held power to account, be it the US Army or the local elites of BĂ©ziers. Later, both crossed the line away from respectable journalism. MĂ©nard is now the far-right mayor of the town and revels in attacking journalists. Hersh published several stories that were later debunked and bordered on misinformation.2

These two men are far from the only ones who moved from doing journalism to doing something else. Others certainly went in the other direction. While the circumstances are extremely different, someone like Vasily Grossman, who went from propagandist for the Stalinist regime to Soviet dissident, might qualify.

How do people cross the line that separates journalism from misinformation? Where does the limit lie? What conditions push them to move from one side to the other?

A few decades ago, the question would have been “how to ensure the production of good journalism”. Current technical and political conditions, and the accumulation of journalistic experience under these, require a re-think.

In this piece, I attempt to identify the conditions under which someone can research a question and communicate their findings to an audience, an action I call professional curiosity. I am fully aware that this is, at best, a sketch and not a full-fledged argument.

Defining professional curiosity

“Good journalism” was always a contentious term. Today, it is an intellectual burden. Dmitri Borisov, a television anchor at Russia’s Channel One, and Victoria Roshchyna, a freelance investigator for Ukrainska Pravda and Hromadske who died in Russian captivity, are both called journalists. However, joining both of them in the same category is problematic. Both Borisov and Roshchyna interact and interacted with an audience in some way, but so do professional content creators on Instagram and TikTok and they’re not called journalists.

“Journalist”, or even “content creator”, defines a job by what is done. It is about producing or communicating information. This says nothing of the purpose of the information or even its veracity.

I propose the term “professional curiosity” to avoid the pitfalls of having to judge whether a piece of information is good or not. Curiosity in this piece is the action of asking a question, looking for an answer and communicating the results. In some ways, it goes beyond traditional definitions of journalism. It encompasses many people in academia, whose job it is to do research. It also excludes many people labelled journalists who do not partake in these tasks, such as anchors or editors.

Curiosity becomes professional in two ways. Firstly, when it is part of a monetary transaction. Not every person who sets out on an investigation is highly motivated. Sometimes it’s just a job. But more importantly, the idea of professionalism evokes self-selected standards, an ethos. A person can be a professional, or think of themselves as one, even if they do not receive monetary payment for their activity.

Professional curiosity requires methods, first and foremost the intellectual honesty of seeking answers without prejudice. Objectivity is impossible and often irrelevant to the process, but curiosity professionals share a willingness to accept unexpected results.

This curiosity is, in a very succinct way, what sets apart the propagandist from the bona fide journalist and the honest academic from the fraud. Under what conditions professional curiosity can blossom is the focus of the rest of this piece.

(On the surface, professional curiosity is similar to knowledge production. There is a key difference. Producing knowledge implies that a production process exists, that the person seeking knowledge knows that it can be found. Curiosity starts with questions. In the process, the curious person might realize that the knowledge systems at their disposal are not adequate and that new ones must be developed.)

Truth

Bringing an answer to a question requires the concept of truth. Otherwise, any piece of information can work as an answer. The very meaning of the answer becomes irrelevant. Answers are only meaningful if the person researching them and the persons to whom they are communicated to can share a common regime of truth.

When the institution of truth collapses in a society, this condition is not respected. The tactics of “flooding the zone with shit”, as far-right publisher Steve Bannon once said,3 make the concept of truth irrelevant. In such a context, carrying out acts of professional curiosity becomes harder.

Some organizations can act as safe harbours for truth. Universities in particular have a long history of protecting truth, first theological truth and, in the last couple of centuries, factual truth.4 Other organizations, such as press councils (Presserat in Germany) can play this role for journalists.

However, the existence of a shared truth, embodied in powerful institutions such as universities, can also constrain curiosity. Some fields of inquiry, can be deemed unworthy of interest by these arbiters of truth. Under these circumstances, it is their weakness that allows for some strands of professional curiosity to emerge. This is not a theoretical issue. Gender studies and more recently disability studies have long been blocked by academics. It might not be a coincidence that they gained the right of entry in faculties precisely at the time when social science lost its appeal among the powerful.

More fundamentally still, some investigations cannot be evaluated against any regime of truth. Any question asked about one’s self or perceptions cannot – by definition – be explored by anyone but the person doing the investigation.5 Such methods can be discarded as unprofessional. After all, by virtue of not being falsifiable, the results fall afoul of the scientific method, according to Karl Popper. But being able to question the regime of truth itself is part of what it means to be curious.

Freedom

From a very practical point of view, the less freedom one has, the harder it is to be curious. Intellectual pursuits require food, time, equipment and means of communication. Professional curiosity is probably less likely to emerge in a prison or under siege conditions than in an affluent and peaceful place.

However, I’m not entirely sure that – the many methodological pitfalls notwithstanding – we would find a positive correlation between freedom and actions of professional curiosity. Before she was killed, Victoria Roshchyna worked under very unfree conditions. The almost 200 journalists killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023 show that many people continue to report and investigate even in the most challenging environments. For some of them, it might even be the anger at being unfree that motivates their curiosity.

Conversely, Hersh and MĂ©nard turned their back on professional curiosity even though they were among humanity’s most free persons: wealthy white males protected by solid institutions.

Misinformation spreads among free people as it does among the unfree. It is easier for the former than for the latter to identify it, but freedom is not wholly necessary for professional curiosity, nor is it a sufficient condition for its blossoming.

Usefulness

Usefulness is another practical criterion. If people find one’s work useful, they are more likely to pay for it. Professional curiosity is easier to conduct when it is financially rewarded.

Professional curiosity can be fostered by the powerful when it serves their interests. Billionaires and governments have financed newspapers, universities and other organizations that employ the professionally curious since the beginning of the modern period. While some of these are propaganda outlets where curiosity is prohibited, other produce excellent research (think of Le Monde, BBC World). The powerful can benefit from the reputation of their media operations. These, in turn, also shield them from unwanted attention. Le Monde journalists will probably not investigate their billionaire patrons and neither will BBC World’s investigate the Foreign Office too thoroughly.

The expected knowledge produced by the professionally curious can lead the most unfree regimes to offer small bubbles of freedom for research. In 1943, as the Nazi government felt that the war was not going its way, it reinstated some academic freedom for researchers in critical areas, even for those who had been previously considered politically unreliable.6

There is no doubt that professional curiosity is easier to carry out when the powerful feel that the results could back up rather than threaten their power. Social sciences were supported by governments in the first half of the 20th century in large part because they were seen as necessary to conduct the affairs of the state. The rise of STEM since then also matches a shift in the thinking of these elites, who now consider computer science and physics to be more valuable.

However, usefulness is not a necessary or a sufficient condition for professional curiosity. The thousands of researchers in fields that have been declared frivolous or even dangerous by many governments, or the investigative journalists who keep asking questions despite being branded traitors demonstrate that it is possible to remain curious even when few consider it useful. For many of the professionally curious, carrying on with research is simply the right thing to do.

A moral and social issue

The existence of a shared regime of truth, freedom (in all its meanings) and usefulness certainly facilitate professional curiosity but cannot be considered conditions for its existence. In some cases, when curiosity requires a different regime of truth, when it is spurred by unfreedom or when it goes against the interests of the powerful, these factors can even dampen it. Conversely, misinformation can thrive in free environments, as the last two decades amply demonstrate.

To a certain extent, professional curiosity is an action that some people decide to do. Environmental factors play a role of course (financial consideration, risk to life etc.) but fail to offer a reliable framework that could explain why someone engages in professional curiosity. A large part of the motivation probably lies in the moral values held by the curious person, who considers it morally right to begin the investigation.

Does that help understand why Hersh and MĂ©nard left the ranks of the professionally curious? Did they, at some point, decided to stop investigating honestly the questions that came to their minds? This is unlikely.

The same actions take different meanings in a changed environment – this holds true for research. The work of eugenists was hailed as good science in the early 20th century and is condemned as pseudo-science today. One can argue with the methods used at the time and take satisfaction in the self-correcting power of science. But a more convincing explanation is that moral standards shifted and what was considered acceptable ceased to be. This moving border between legitimate pursuits and quackery is very visible in gender or postcolonial studies, which are still denigrated by swathes of academia.

Karl Popper provided a great framework for factual truth when he argued that factuality was that that was falsifiable and had withstood tests aimed at demonstrating its falseness. How many tests? Popper agrees that, at some point, one has to stop or we’d still be trying to falsify fact number one. Where do we stop? He doesn’t say.7

In other words, facts can only arise when a group of people agree on the correct amount of doubt necessary for their validation. It is, indeed, a common technique for nihilists to move this limit so far that no facts can emerge (Russia Today’s slogan was “question more”, an invitation to never agree on any fact).

Professional curiosity is thus only possible among a social group of similarly-minded people. It is a social endeavour and can never be done in isolation.

Hersh and MĂ©nard are cases in point. The men themselves probably did not change much between the 1970s and the 2010s. What did is our understanding of unprejudiced investigation. Using loose journalistic methods to go against the US government (for Hersh) or against local communists (for MĂ©nard) could be considered good journalism at the time. Doing the same thing in the 2010s, as old and powerful men, cannot. It is not they who left the community of the professionally curious, it is the community that left them.

Practical implications

This line of argument ends in a paradox: Professionally curious people need to take incurious people seriously while knowing that it is impossible to demonstrate the superiority of one own’s curiosity. How do we know that we are being curious in the correct way? Maybe the people whom we call conspiracy theorists are more correct? Maybe they are not wrong to call us “LĂŒgenpresse” and “fake news”? According to the arguments exposed above, there is no way to definitely answer these questions because truth is contingent to the social group in which one lives. Why, then, keep going? It would, after all, be easier to simply discard all intellectual challenges as “fake news” or engage in fraud (and, indeed, not few people do just that).

The only way to surpass this paradox is faith. Being professionally curious requires believing that one’s endeavour is good in itself. This is the conclusion reached by playwright VĂĄclav Havel, who put faith at the centre of his philosophy. Not faith in a religious dogma, but faith in the goodness of one’s work.8

Some of the people peddling misinformation and conspiracy theories certainly think that they are doing good work, too. It doesn’t matter. We need to keep believing that our work is better.

The conditions for professional curiosity might be, to some extent, material. More importantly, they are moral. Curiosity can only be pursued when the professionally curious have the faith necessary to oppose the much stronger forces of the incurious. The faith required to agonize for days before writing a sentence when an LLM can spew text on demand. The faith to not fake the results of an experiment, even knowing that the likelihood to be caught will be very low. The faith that the amount of doubt applied to one’s own work is the right amount.

Curiosity is a personal struggle. At the same time, it is a struggle that cannot be done in isolation, for part of the struggle is to find who, in the audience, is curious as well.

Cover image: Natuurkundig experiment, by Nicolaas van Frankendaal, 1759.

Notes

1. Emmanuelle Boillot, Quand le journaliste Robert Ménard se frottait à la municipalité de Béziers, Midi Libre, 9 Jun. 2015.

2. MarĂ­a Antonia SĂĄnchez-Vallejo, Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh under fire for his reporting on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, El Pais, 28 Feb. 2023.

3. Michael Lewis, Has Anyone Seen the President?, Bloomberg, 9 Feb. 2018.

4. In Truth and Politics (1967), Hanna Arendt stresses how academia was a refuge for the truth.

5. Perry Zurn, Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2021.

6. Michael GrĂŒttner. Talar und Hakenkreuz: Die UniversitĂ€ten im Dritten Reich, C.H. Beck, 2024.

7. Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Rev. ed. Hutchinson, 1968. pp. 46-48. Popper is not the only philosopher arguing in this way. Kant did, too, when he wrote that objectivity meant that someone can achieve the same result by reason – by which he meant someone who shared his way of reasoning.

8. Havel, Václav. Disturbing the Peace, Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. p. 181.