2. A distinct form of institutional testimonial injustice

Let us begin by clarifying the epistemic role of mass media companies in journalism. Mass media companies can be construed as group epistemic agents that generate and disseminate journalistic knowledge (Goldman Reference Goldman1999, Section 6.4). The role of mass media is not to transmit testimonies about distant events and interviews as they are to the public. Rather, they are expected to cover news that pertains to citizens’ lives, including politics, law, economics, education, arts and culture, and foreign affairs worldwide, and disseminate it in a way that can be understood. Even in the age of digital media, such as social networking systems (SNS), the mass media plays a distinct epistemic role in generating and distributing testimonies based on evidence covered by news crews (e.g., Goller, Reich, and Miller Reference Goller, Reich and Miller2020).

However, recent journalism and media studies in Japan have documented that some truth is unduly dismissed, distorted, or underestimated in the process of being publicized by mass media companies. A biased gender norm pervades Japan’s mass media organizations, resulting in the publication of news articles that reflect patriarchal and cisgender values (e.g., Hayashi Reference Hayashi2011; Hayashi and Tanaka Reference Hayashi and Tanaka2023; Kitade Reference Kitade, Kaori and Tanaka2023; Kunihiro and Hanano Reference Kunihiro, Hanano, Hayashi, Shikata and Hanano2022; Tanaka and Morohashi Reference Tanaka and Morohashi1996; WiMN 2020). Coverage that spotlights women’s liberatory movements tends to be averted and marginalized (Shikata Reference Shikata2014; Reference Shikata, Ooi, Tamura and Suzuki2018). In crime reports, female suspects are often condemned for lacking responsibility as mothers by the imposed gender role norm. News articles on sexual crimes tend to be broadcast as if the female victims are at fault (Tanaka and Morohashi Reference Tanaka and Morohashi1996).

When mass media companies ignore, distort, and underestimate a particular truth covered by news crews, they commit testimonial injustice as a group epistemic agent—that is, institutional testimonial injustice—against them. Under what conditions, then, can testimonial injustice be distinctly institutional? I propose four characteristics of institutional testimonial injustice.

1. (I) Failure of Rational Testimonial Belief Formation: An institution fails to rationally form testimonial belief that p only if the (majority of) operative members of an institution are ignorant of p, which ought to be believed in light of available testimonial evidence—specifically, the coverage of p by news crews in mass media companies—and instead accept q as an official position through considerations other than epistemic considerations.

2. (II) Vicious Institutional Ethos as a Collective Cause: The operative members’ decision (to accept q) and non-operative members’ (pressured) conformity to the decision mainly result from a vicious institutional ethos that pervades their corporate culture.

3. (III) Collective Ignorance: An institution commits collective ignorance of p only if (a) the operative members are disbelievingly or suspendingly ignorant of p and accept q as an official position, while (b) non-operative members are complicitly ignorant of p in consonance with the operative members’ decision.

4. (IV) Institutional Testimonial Injustice: Institutional testimonial injustice occurs when the institution commits collective ignorance of p due to vicious institutional ethos, so that some employees who testify about p—such as news crews who conduct coverage of p based on their interviews—are compromised in their capacity as testifiers.

Theses (I), (II), and (III) are distinctive components of institutional testimonial injustice, so I will elucidate (I), (II), and (III) in Section 3, Section 4, and Section 5, respectively.

Before continuing, I wish to make a note about the methodology of this study. I adopted a situated account of case studies in feminist epistemology and critical race theorists (Grasswick and McHugh Reference Grasswick, McHugh, Grasswick and McHugh2021, 4-5). To analyse oppression and injustice, meticulous descriptions of a series of incidents and complicated situations—that is, thickly described case studies—are crucial to revealing the factors that contribute to such oppression and injustice (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012, 22). The specific factors and consequences of testimonial injustice resulting from implicit prejudices, biased social norms, and ideology are difficult to identify. Take the scene in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley offered by Fricker (Reference Fricker2007). When Marge Sherwood attempts to express her thoughts about the disappearance of her boyfriend, Dickie, to his father, Mr. Greenleaf, he dismisses her by saying, ‘There’s female intuition and then there are facts.’ To understand that his blunt words constitute gender-biased testimonial injustice, a great deal of detailed background information is necessary on what Furman (Reference Furman2021) calls ‘support factors’ that contribute to injustices, for instance, the relationships between Greenwood, Marge, and other characters; the flow of their conversations; and the prevalence of a patriarchal social norm in society in those days. Similarly, thickly described case studies are required to elaborate on institutional testimonial injustice. In this study, I build on the case study of mass media companies in Japan that commit institutional testimonial injustice. This thickly described case study will serve as an exemplification of institutional testimonial injustice.

3. Failure of rational testimonial belief formation

To substantiate Thesis (I), I first clarify institutions as group epistemic agents. Institutions differ from mere collectives in that they have common goals and internal systems. Each of them has the specific objective of providing valuable journalist knowledge to the public and is separated into divisions where different tasks and procedures are assigned to employees. General managers, deputy general managers, editor-in-chiefs, senior editors, news crews, and others contribute to the achievement of the companies’ objectives. Some employees are executive board members who decide what news to include and how to report it. An institution must have the capacity for deliberation and reasoning to qualify as a group epistemic agent independent of its individual members’ corresponding capacity. Consider again the case of a university’s decision to make its campus smoke free. To qualify as a group epistemic agent, the university must justify the decision with evidence. In addition, it must be capable of evaluating its beliefs in light of epistemic kind of evidence. If the university merely wants to receive government subsidies for the smoke-free campus, it forms a belief based on practical evidence about profits and political advantages, not epistemic evaluation.

This raises the question of what it means for an institution to have a justifying capacity for its beliefs. I do not make a metaphysical claim of a collective entity in itself here but argue that an institution has such a justifying capability when the ‘operative members’ (Tuomela Reference Tuomela1992: 295-6) of the institutions are in a position to engage in decision making about group policies on behalf of all employees. In the university’s case, the executive board members serve as operative members who decide to make the campus smoke free, while other staff and faculty members accept this policy. Thus, the concept of a group epistemic agent can be explained as follows:

If some operative members have opposing beliefs based on different evidence, the members will deliberate about the weight of such evidence for or against their ultimate belief. Thus, the institution’s belief formation as a whole is identified with the operative members’ belief formation.

The advantage of this idea is that it enables the distinction between group belief and group (joint) acceptance. Acceptance is an agents’ doxastic attitude, in which it counts a proposition or theory as true, at least temporarily, for a specific purpose. To illustrate, in a criminal court, the defendant’s attorney may accept the defendant’s testimony of innocence for the defence of the case, even though the attorney regards it as doubtful in light of the circumstantial evidence at hand. According to the joint acceptance account of group belief, group belief amounts to operative members’ joint acceptance of a proposition in question (e.g., Gilbert Reference Gilbert1989; Reference Gibert2002).

However, the joint acceptance account fails to distinguish between group belief formed through epistemic considerations and group acceptance for reasons other than epistemic considerations (Lackey Reference Lackey2021: 41–42). While epistemic agents form beliefs based on epistemic evidence and thus cannot arbitrarily choose whether to believe or not, they are in a position to voluntarily accept a proposition for considerations of interests other than epistemic considerations. Recall the earlier case of the university that decided to make its campus smoke-free. If its decision is based on pragmatic reasons—for instance, a smoke-free campus will result in increased government subsidies for the university— the university might accept content that is contrary to the beliefs that ought to be formed based on epistemic evidence—for instance, the subsidies may be insufficient to cover the cost of the campus maintenance, so the university may halt a smoke-free campus policy despite their students’ intense need for it. Whereas acceptance of the group decision may be grounded in various considerations, group belief must be formed through epistemic considerations, which is beyond the group’s voluntary control.

In forming group testimonial beliefs, the operative members may not gather evidence on their own but obtain it by receiving testimonies from credible employees. In the case of a mass media company, the operative members may well receive reports covered by news crews, which can be considered reliable epistemic evidence for several reasons. First, in the local reductionist account of testimony (e.g., Fricker Reference Fricker, Matilal and Chakrabarti1994), as news crews are trustworthy members in terms of being well trained and having the appropriate experience to be reporters, their testimonies count as reliable evidence.Footnote ¹ Second, even in the assurance account of testimony (e.g., Hinchman Reference Hinchman2005), the testimonies are credited to the reporters involved, who are held responsible for their content, so it is likely that these reporters are prepared to make assurances about what is presented in the news. Thus, when reporters cover a fact, their testimony based on that coverage is considered prima facie reliable evidence, with their assurance that the content is true.

To qualify a mass media company to rationally form testimonial belief as a group epistemic agent, the operative members who receive news crews’ coverage are expected to believe it. Given the evidentialist account of epistemic duty, if a testimony based on new crews’ coverage is conveyed to the operative members of the companies, they should form a new testimonial belief accordingly. Of course, if the new belief is clearly inconsistent with other extant beliefs, belief formation may be suspended. Still, unless there is such an issue with the coordination of beliefs, when receiving testimonies based on coverage by the credible news crews, a mass media company is supposed to rationally form a testimonial belief. Thus, a necessary condition of the group’s rational formation of testimonial belief can be explained as follows:

However, mass media companies can fail to form testimonial beliefs even if the testimony is based on reliable coverage by credible news crews. They may intentionally accept convenient testimony based on pragmatic and other kinds of considerations. To illustrate, mass media companies may accept a proposition that is contrary to the testimonial belief that should be formed based on coverage by news crews because it is pragmatically and politically convenient. Consider the real case in which the Japanese mass media of those days reported the sexual assault committed by the late Johnny Kitagawa. The Tokyo High Court issued its decision that he was guilty of sexual assault, and this decision was finally determined on February 24, 2004 (Hayashi, Asukai, and Saito Reference Hayashi, Asukai and Saito2023: 32-33). Japan’s mass media companies fully recognized the coverage of the court’s final ruling of the sexual assault by Kitagawa as evidence of the decision and should have formed a testimonial belief accordingly. Nonetheless, they actually kept silent about this incident until Mobeen Azhar, a BBC journalist, aired a documentary entitled ‘The Shadow of a Predator.’ Japan’s mass media companies may have formed testimonial beliefs about the sexual assault yet accept the news about this incident as trivial for a pragmatic reason—that is, its content may have been inconvenient for Johnny’s office, which had a dominant power over Japan’s mass media.

Such acceptance can even facilitate institutions’ disbelieving testimony that ought to be believed through epistemic considerations and their making official decisions that do not conform to them. For instance, mass media companies may prohibit crews from covering a story when they recognize that its content has the potential risk of criticizing advertising agencies. Thus, the institution’s failure of rational testimonial belief formation can be formulated:

4. Institutional vicious ethos as a collective cause

If operative members of a mass media company disbelieve a testimony that they should believe in light of available evidence, the company perpetrates the epistemic wrong of testimonial injustice. It not only fails to meet an evidentialist duty to believe news crews’ testimony based on their coverage as reliable evidence but also unduly impedes them (and interviewees) from transmitting their testimonial truth. This epistemic wrong lies in the undue hinderance of news crews’ warranted testimonial truth. Moreover, the company also commits the moral wrong of testimonial injustice in the deontological sense. It unfairly undermines news crews’ capacity and sincerity as individual epistemic agents to collect truths that pertain to citizens’ lives and tailor it in a way that can be well understood by them. I thus propose a working definition of institutional testimonial injustice as follows.

However, this does not suffice to capture the distinct features of institutional testimonial injustice, as its primary cause remains unsettled. I suggest that the vicious ethos built into institutions is a primary factor that makes testimonial injustice institutional more than individual or procedural. In the rest of this section, I articulate vicious institutional ethos by drawing on Fricker’s (2010) account of ethos and applying it to the biased gender ethos that permeates the work atmosphere in Japanese mass media companies.

Three possible factors that cause institutional testimonial injustice can be distinguished: (individual cause) the operative members’ individual prejudicial judgment; (procedural cause) the institution’s biased rules and systems, such as protocols and procedures; and (collective cause) the vicious institutional ethos built into a work atmosphere that induces not only operative members but also non-operative employees to commit misconduct (cf. Fricker Reference Fricker, Gendler and Hawthorne2010). Suppose that Company B commits fraud in the form of padding claims for car insurance. The fraud in Company B might be attributed to the wrongful decisions and actions of executives who unreasonably reprimand employees who are incapable of doing their jobs and demote them unwarrantedly (individual cause). Alternatively, Company B’s management might adopt a fraudulent system, such as harsh work quotas (procedural cause), or Company B’s employeesmight comply with a vicious work ethos, such as profit-driven management policies, so that the majority of employees as well as operative members have been induced to commit fraud (collective cause). It is the last case—the case of an institution’s ethos as a primary cause of their frauds—in which the wrongdoer is neither the vicious individual executives nor the pernicious system, but Company B as a group agent that systematically commits misconduct.

As a collective cause of Company B, a company’s vicious ethos was created in which the values of harsh work quotas and profit-first policies trumped the values of justice and fairness in the provision of customer services. To define such a vicious institutional ethos, I draw on Fricker’s account of ethos. In her view, ethos is the source of values and commitment to those values that induce the majority of members in an institution to make a similar collective judgment and take collective action (Fricker Reference Fricker2013: 1327; Reference Fricker, Kidd, Battaly and Cassam2021: 90). As Fricker observed, ‘The ethos of a group or institutional body is something that binds its members because it consists of value commitments in the robust sense of commitments that are temporally and counter-factually stable, or at least meant to be temporally and counter-factually stable’ (95). This does not merely mean that the majority of members happen to make unanimous judgments—based on different reasons or without any reason—but that they do so because they are unanimously committed to the value of the institution. Moreover, such collective judgments, aligned with the companies’ ethos, must surpass their satisfaction of the minimum obligations imposed on their unanimous judgments and actions (Ziv Reference Ziv2012) and can thus be counted as praiseworthy or blameworthy. In Company B’s case, both the operative members who exerted undue power and the employees were strongly induced to unanimously engage in collective misconduct due to the collective cause of the institutional vicious value, including morally bad actions or passive allowance of such wrongdoing. From this perspective, institutional ethos can be formulated as follows:

This can apply to the case of a vicious institutional ethos as a collective cause of institutional testimonial injustice. In the case of media companies, a gender-biased ethos induces the operative members’ decision to accept a proposition that is contrary to the testimonial belief that ought to be believed in light of epistemic considerations, and this generates other employees’ (pressured) conformity to the decision. For the rest of this section, I will focus on the influences of such an ethos on operative members’ collective decision making.Footnote ²

A biased gender ethos that pervades mass media companies in Japan tends to be generated in alignment with gender-biased procedures. It has been reported that male managers have continued to dominate managerial positions in Japan’s large mass media companies, while female employees in these companies constitute only 20.9% in private commercial broadcasting companies, 15.2% in the Japan Broadcast Corporation (NHK), and 15.8% in newspapers, news agencies and other media, with an even lower percentage of women in upper managerial positions such as news managers, editors-in-chief and executive editors (Shikata Reference Shikata, Ooi, Tamura and Suzuki2018: 129). Moreover, long working hours and irregular working patterns have made it difficult for women to continue pursuing their careers while doing housework and raising children. Because of this, male employees are more likely to be assigned to the sales department, which can improve their career prospects, while female employees are often assigned to administrative departments or human resource departments. Even if they are responsible for the news, they tend to be assigned to articles about local news and culture (Shikata Reference Shikata2014). Consequently, female employees often lack experience in politics, the economy, and government coverage, which can prevent them from being promoted to upper managerial positions. Thus, male executives are in charge of almost all management work, including final decisions related to news selection, with fewer role models for promoted female workers (Shikata Reference Shikata, Ooi, Tamura and Suzuki2018: 108, 130).

The gender-biased ethos produced through these procedures induces male executives—as the majority of operative members—to make a collective judgement to accept news content and styles that reflect patriarchal and cisgender values and interests (collective causes of institutional testimonial injustice). For instance, their collective judgment about what news to include and how to report it is subject to a gender-biased ethos, resulting in their discrediting of particular, albeit reliable, testimony by news crews—for example, testimonies about the women’s liberation movement. Alternatively, the majority of the operative members may unreasonably contest the veracity of such reliable testimonies or only accept them temporarily but manipulate the content later in a way that is tailored to meet their gender biased values and practical interests. Moreover, operative members tend to misjudge the credibility of coverage by female reporters because they lack sensitivity to gender-biased ethos that pervades the corporate atmosphere.

Given group belief formation, as clarified in Section 2, this can lead mass media companies to disbelieve testimony about gendered events and testimony based on female news crews and accept different content even if such testimonies are considered reliable.

Based on the above clarifications on biased gender ethos, I conclude that the atmosphere at mass media companies being aligned with biased gender ethos is a primary factor that makes testimonial injustice distinctly institutional.

5. Collective ignorance

Institutional testimonial injustice is attributed not solely to operative members but to the institution as a whole. Even if operative members fail to form testimonial beliefs based on reliable coverage by credible news crews, some non-operative employees may be aware of such coverage and even form true beliefs aligned with the coverage. In this section, I articulate collective ignorance due to a vicious institutional ethos that can be committed by not only operative members but also non-operative members, which constitutes Condition (III) of institutional testimonial injustice.

To articulate collective ignorance, I will introduce the distinction between ignorance that involves an agent’s doxastic attitude and ignorance that does not (Peels Reference Peels2023, Chapter 3). When an agent has any kind of doxastic attitude toward a proposition—they disbelieve it or suspend their judgment about it—the agent takes an ignorant attitude toward it. Imagine a situation in which a restaurant manager is ignorant of the fact that a staff member has a bad attitude toward other part-time employees. Suppose that the manager has received complaints from the part-time employees about the staff member’s attitude, but he still disbelieves it. In this case, the manager can be described as disbelievingly ignorant of the fact because he ignores it, even though he is in a position to believe it. Now imagine that the manager has received complaints about the staff member’s bad attitude but neither believes nor disbelieves it. In this case, the manager can be described as suspendingly ignorant of the fact because he has withheld his judgment about whether to believe it.

These types of ignorance are generated only when someone is aware of a proposition toward which they take such a doxastic attitude. Thus, this type of ignorance can be generated willfully—one ignores the proposition of which one is aware. Conversely, ignorance can be generated even when one has no doxastic attitude. This ignorance occurs when a person is unaware of a proposition or has never thought about it. Take the example of what Peels called ‘unconsidered ignorance,’ in which a subject is ignorant of a true proposition only when they have never considered it, although they would believe it if they had an opportunity to consider it. Consider the restaurant manager again. Suppose this time that the manager has never received any complaints from part-time employees about the staff member’s bad attitude, and that the manager has never considered the proposition that they are behaving badly because the staff member has a bad attitude only when the manager is away. In this case, the manager does not believe, disbelieve, or withhold any attitude about the person’s bad attitude. If the manager became aware of the fact, he would form an affirmative belief about it. In this case, the manager commits unconsidered ignorance of the staff member’s bad attitude.Footnote ³

The above different types of ignorance help us articulate collective ignorance by mass media companies. Recall Group’s Rational Formation of Testimonial Belief, which holds that institutional testimonial belief is the belief that the operative members rationally form by receiving reliable testimony—in the case of mass media companies, credible testimonies based on a news crew’s elaborate coverage—only if the operative members believe reliable testimony. As long as mass media companies are counted as group epistemic agents, the operative members are supposed to believe coverages by news crews because they are justified because of the high credibility of crew members.

However, when the operative members disbelieve or suspend testimonies from such trustworthy news crews, they are disbelievingly and suspendingly ignorant of particular facts, which is considered part of collective ignorance. As clarified in Section 4, Japan’s mass media companies tend to take on biased gender ethos built into corporate atmospheres, so operative members may disbelieve the content of testimonies about gendered events, or may prohibit news crews from covering gendered events and conducting interviews with particular people. Collective ignorance can also arise when an institution commits ignorance that involves no agent’s doxastic attitude by pre-emptively hindering the chances of receiving unfavourable or adverse testimonies. For instance, due to a gender-biased ethos in the companies, the (majority of) operative members may, on receiving coverage of a women’s liberation movement, hinder news crews from covering such content or interviewing relevant activists.

Although it is operative members who commit ignorance by disbelieving or suspending the testimony based on coverage by news crews or pre-emptively avoiding receiving such testimony, the ascription of collective ignorance caused by vicious institutional ethos is not limited to such operative members. In mass media companies, many non-operative employees become ‘passengers’ who indiscriminately go along with the operative members’ decision aligned with a vicious gender-biased ethos (Fricker Reference Fricker, Gendler and Hawthorne2010, Section 2), as shown in Vicious Institutional Ethos as a Collective Cause. Some of such employees who are in close relationships with news crews may be in a position to recognize that the company receives reliable testimonies from news crews because they have personally heard about the testimony. Nevertheless, when a biased gender ethos predominates in the companies, they may be pressured to conform to the operative members’ decisions and ignore the opposing testimony. Similarly, even if some employees recognize the gender-biased institutional ethos, they tend not to criticize it during their employment because they have strong loyalty to their companies (Kitade Reference Kitade, Kaori and Tanaka2023: 121; Naka Reference Naka, Ooi, Tamura and Suzuki2018). They may be so numbed by the biased institutional ethos that they let operative members’ decisions stand, irrespective of the truth.

Such non-operative members tend to conform to operative members’ decisions aligned with a vicious institutional ethos and thus complicitly maintain the institution’s collective ignorance. This means that collective ignorance that pervades an institution is comprised of ignorance committed by not only operative members but also non-operative members. Thus, the definition of collective ignorance that causes institutional testimonial injustice can be explained as follows:

Hence, Thesis Institutional Testimonial Injustice (2), shown in Section 4, should be revised based on the clarifications of collective ignorance. Due to gender-biased corporate culture, mass media companies commit collective ignorance that unjustly undermines the ability of their interviewees and news teams to offer truth. In analogy with individual cases of testimonial injustice, the ability of news crews as epistemic agents and interviewees is compromised, which constitutes testimonial injustice perpetrated by mass media companies. Institutional testimonial injustice can thus be explained as follows:

Institutional testimonial injustice committed by mass media companies is likely to cause a distributive form of testimonial injustice against citizens by spreading gender-imbalanced news. As clarified in Section 2, mass media receives a citizen’s normative expectation and reputation for their role of generating and disseminating journalistic knowledge based on news crews’ reliable coverage. They are normatively expected to be good group informants from citizens (e.g., Fricker Reference Fricker2012). Nonetheless, when mass media companies commit testimonial injustice by unfairly ignoring, distorting, or underestimating particular testimonies, they can distribute biased information to citizens and keep them ignorant of particular truths. Remember that newspaper articles about the women’s liberation movement tend to be shunned; in crime reporting, female suspects are accused of lacking a sense of responsibility as mothers by having gender role norms forcibly imposed on them; and in sex crimes, expressions tend to be used that imply the female victim was at some fault. If such coverage is repeated, it can misinform the public’s judgment about gender issues.

It can also make audiences and readers numb to the biased gender norms embedded in the mass media’s narrative testimonies. Mills (Reference Mills, Sullivan and Tuana2007) and Medina (Reference Medina2013) argued that discriminatory social norms tend to distort citizens’ social perceptions and thus make them epistemically vicious. Mass media tend to produce and spread biased or ideological narratives, such as those about white people’s intellectual achievements and black people’s violent crimes, which can shape the biased social perceptions and collective memories of citizens. This may also hold for the influence of mass media companies’ production of gender-biased narratives in Japan. By committing distributive testimonial injustice about gender-biased narratives, mass media companies in Japan, as authorized informants of the news, can contribute to the biased cultivation of an informed audience’s and readers’ social perceptions and sensitivity. Thus, as authorized informants, mass media companies have a responsibility to consider not only their internal issue of gendered testimonial injustice against some reporters but also their circulation of gender-biased news.