How
technology disrupted the truth
Social
media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of
public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has
their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism
by Katharine Viner
Tuesday 12 July 2016
06.00 BST
One Monday morning
last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime
minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead
pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished
Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous
initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,”
the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford
university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their
source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His
extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private
part of his anatomy into the animal.”
The story, extracted
from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was
gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime
minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the
notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were
trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun:
Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole
country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the
headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations,
and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with
a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a
powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do
with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really
respond to. But who cares? He could take it.
Then, after a full
day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel
Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography
with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and
admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was
even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim,
Oakeshott admitted she had none.
“We couldn’t get
to the bottom of that source’s allegations,” she said on Channel
4 News. “So we merely reported the account that the source gave us
… We don’t say whether we believe it to be true.” In other
words, there was no evidence that the prime minister of the United
Kingdom had once “inserted a private part of his anatomy” into
the mouth of a dead pig – a story reported in dozens of newspapers
and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many
people presumably still believe to be true today.
Oakeshott went even
further to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: “It’s
up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or
not,” she concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that
outlandish claims were published on the basis of flimsy evidence, but
this was an unusually brazen defence. It seemed that journalists were
no longer required to believe their own stories to be true, nor,
apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to
the reader – who does not even know the identity of the source –
to make up their own mind. But based on what? Gut instinct,
intuition, mood?
Does the truth
matter any more?
Nine months after
Britain woke up giggling at Cameron’s hypothetical porcine
intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very
real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at
8am, announcing his own resignation.
“The British
people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be
respected,” Cameron declared. “It was not a decision that was
taken lightly, not least because so many things were said by so many
different organisations about the significance of this decision. So
there can be no doubt about the result.”
But what soon became
clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of a
campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious
that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave
the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign
to victory suddenly crumbled. At 6.31am on Friday 24 June, just over
an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip
leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact
have £350m a week spare to spend on the NHS – a key claim of
Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A
few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan stated that immigration
was not likely to be reduced – another key claim.
It was hardly the
first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised,
but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning
after victory that the promises had been false all along. This was
the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless
remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly
found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.
The remain side’s
worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as “Project Fear”
– and quickly neutralised by opposing “facts”: if 99 experts
said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that
each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a
disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some
report climate change.) Michael Gove declared that “people in this
country have had enough of experts” on Sky News. He also compared
10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to
Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler.
It can become very
difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are
true and 'facts' that are not
For months, the
Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious claim and rubbished every
expert warning, filling the front pages with too many confected
anti-migrant headlines to count – many of them later quietly
corrected in very small print. A week before the vote – on the same
day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory “Breaking Point”
poster, and the Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for
refugees, was shot dead – the cover of the Daily Mail featured a
picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the
headline “We are from Europe – let us in!” The next day, the
Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit
that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.
The brazen disregard
for facts did not stop after the referendum: just this weekend, the
short-lived Conservative leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom, fresh
from a starring role in the leave campaign, demonstrated the waning
power of evidence. After telling the Times that being a mother would
make her a better PM than her rival Theresa May, she cried “gutter
journalism!” and accused the newspaper of misrepresenting her
remarks – even though she said exactly that, clearly and
definitively and on tape. Leadsom is a post-truth politician even
about her own truths.
When a fact begins
to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for
anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts”
that are not. The leave campaign was well aware of this – and took
full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards
Authority has no power to police political claims. A few days after
the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of
the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along
that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style
media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts
don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact,
fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to
connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
It was little
surprise that some people were shocked after the result to discover
that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised
benefits. When “facts don’t work” and voters don’t trust the
media, everyone believes in their own “truth” – and the
results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.
How did we end up
here? And how do we fix it?
Twenty-five years
after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living
through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after
Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page:
knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that
encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Now, we are caught
in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between
truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between
the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the
open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the
gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an
informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to
these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter
– is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This
does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year
has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are,
and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve
it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what
counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true –
and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to
circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the
Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). A dubious story about Cameron
and a pig appears in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has flown
around the world on social media and turned up in trusted news
sources everywhere. This may seem like a small matter, but its
consequences are enormous.
In
the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information,
which is quickly shared and taken to be true
“The Truth”, as
Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter!,
their history of the Sun newspaper, is a “bald statement which
every newspaper prints at its peril”. There are usually several
conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the
printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they
turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at
least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and
we all shared a common set of facts.
This settled “truth”
was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed
in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws:
too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo
and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for
ordinary people to challenge the power of the press. Now, people
distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the
facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own
views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is
not.
In the digital age,
it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly
shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency
situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example
among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours
quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre
had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke.
Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours
like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and
sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime
pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods
and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an
“information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment
expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others
think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete,
because they think they have learned something valuable.” This
cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has
unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook,
perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the
know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their post to
others.
Algorithms such as
the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us
more of what they think we want – which means that the version of
the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been
invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli
Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter
bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web –
and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which
means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means
that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges
us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that
disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at
the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure
that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news
that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most
self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the
incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that
Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the
EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and
mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of
the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences
for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
I am actively
searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave
victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into
things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who
is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly
jubilant today* and despite the fact that I’m *actively* looking to
hear what they are saying.
This echo-chamber
problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any
friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social
media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act
on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding
the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies … We’re getting
countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about
the other.
But asking
technology companies to “do something” about the filter bubble
presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather
than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are
designed to give you what you and your friends want to see.
Facebook, which
launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become
the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in
fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to
imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: “Social
media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed
everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems,
personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and
security.”
Bell, the director
of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University –
and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian –
has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. “Our
news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,”
she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.”
The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few,
who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost
control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many
readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are
opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies
have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read –
and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s
work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power
in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”
Publications curated
by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of
information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by
secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where
hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and
decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted
by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some
of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links
at all.
Many people, in
fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on
closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share
messages privately – perhaps because young people, who are most
likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully
protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an
even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or
other social networks.
‘The
centralisation of information is making us all much less powerful’
… Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned for six
years. Photograph: Arash Ashoorinia for the Guardian
As the pioneering
Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for
six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this
year, the “diversity that the world wide web had originally
envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information”
inside a select few social networks – and the end result is “making
us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations”.
Of course, Facebook
does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional
sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news
organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant
source for accessing information, news organisations will often
tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most
visible evidence of Facebook’s influence on journalism is the panic
that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens
to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few
years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from
public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page
views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or
investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve
gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has
been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with
false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are
therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle
applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even
if it wasn’t created to deceive: the new measure of value for too
many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
Of course,
journalists have got things wrong in the past – either by mistake
or prejudice or sometimes by intent. (Freddie Starr probably didn’t
eat a hamster.) So it would be a mistake to think this is a new
phenomenon of the digital age. But what is new and significant is
that today, rumours and lies are read just as widely as
copper-bottomed facts – and often more widely, because they are
wilder than reality and more exciting to share. The cynicism of this
approach was expressed most nakedly by Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly
employed by Gawker as a specialist in high-traffic viral stories.
“Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real,” he said in
2014. “The only thing that really matters is whether people click
on it.” Facts, he suggested, are over; they are a relic from the
age of the printing press, when readers had no choice. He continued:
“If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not
news.”
The increasing
prevalence of this approach suggests that we are in the midst of a
fundamental change in the values of journalism – a consumerist
shift. Instead of strengthening social bonds, or creating an informed
public, or the idea of news as a civic good, a democratic necessity,
it creates gangs, which spread instant falsehoods that fit their
views, reinforcing each other’s beliefs, driving each other deeper
into shared opinions, rather than established facts.
But the trouble is
that the business model of most digital news organisations is based
around clicks. News media around the world has reached a fever-pitch
of frenzied binge-publishing, in order to scrape up digital
advertising’s pennies and cents. (And there’s not much
advertising to be got: in the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of
every new dollar spent in the US on online advertising went to Google
and Facebook. That used to go to news publishers.)
In the news feed on
your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a
credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources
are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous
stories. “Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically print
some of the worst stuff out there, which lends legitimacy to
bullshit,” said Brooke Binkowski, an editor at the debunking
website Snopes, in an interview with the Guardian in April. “Not
all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are.”
We should be careful
not to dismiss anything with an appealing digital headline as
clickbait – appealing headlines are a good thing, if they lead the
reader to quality journalism, both serious and not. My belief is that
what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour:
the journalism that people value the most is that for which they can
tell someone has put in a lot of work – where they can feel the
effort that has been expended on their behalf, over tasks big or
small, important or entertaining. It is the reverse of so-called
“churnalism”, the endless recycling of other people’s stories
for clicks.
The digital
advertising model doesn’t currently discriminate between true or
not true, just big or small. As the American political reporter Dave
Weigel wrote in the wake of a hoax story that became a viral hit all
the way back in 2013: “‘Too good to check’ used to be a warning
to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit stories. Now it’s a
business model.”
A news-publishing
industry desperately chasing down every cheap click doesn’t sound
like an industry in a position of strength, and indeed, news
publishing as a business is in trouble. The shift to digital
publishing has been a thrilling development for journalism – as I
said in my 2013 AN Smith lecture at the University of Melbourne, “The
Rise of the Reader”, it has induced “a fundamental redrawing of
journalists’ relationship with our audience, how we think about our
readers, our perception of our role in society, our status”. It has
meant we have found new ways to get stories – from our audience,
from data, from social media. It has given us new ways to tell
stories – with interactive technologies and now with virtual
reality. It has given us new ways to distribute our journalism, to
find new readers in surprising places; and it has given us new ways
to engage with our audiences, opening ourselves up to challenge and
debate.
But while the
possibilities for journalism have been strengthened by the digital
developments of the last few years, the business model is under grave
threat, because no matter how many clicks you get, it will never be
enough. And if you charge readers to access your journalism you have
a big challenge to persuade the digital consumer who is used to
getting information for free to part with their cash.
News publishers
everywhere are seeing profits and revenue drop dramatically. If you
want a stark illustration of the new realities of digital media,
consider the first-quarter financial results announced by the New
York Times and Facebook within a week of one another earlier this
year. The New York Times announced that its operating profits had
fallen by 13%, to $51.5m – healthier than most of the rest of the
publishing industry, but quite a drop. Facebook, meanwhile, revealed
that its net income had tripled in the same period – to a quite
staggering $1.51bn.
Many journalists
have lost their jobs in the past decade. The number of journalists in
the UK shrank by up to one-third between 2001 and 2010; US newsrooms
declined by a similar amount between 2006 and 2013. In Australia,
there was a 20% cut in the journalistic workforce between 2012 and
2014 alone. Earlier this year, at the Guardian we announced that we
would need to lose 100 journalistic positions. In March, the
Independent ceased existing as a print newspaper. Since 2005,
according to research by Press Gazette, the number of local
newspapers in the UK has fallen by 181 – again, not because of a
problem with journalism, but because of a problem with funding it.
But journalists
losing their jobs is not simply a problem for journalists: it has a
damaging impact on the entire culture. As the German philosopher
Jürgen Habermas warned, back in 2007: “When reorganisation and
cost-cutting in this core area jeopardise accustomed journalistic
standards, it hits at the very heart of the political public sphere.
Because, without the flow of information gained through extensive
research, and without the stimulation of arguments based on an
expertise that doesn’t come cheap, public communication loses its
discursive vitality. The public media would then cease to resist
populist tendencies, and could no longer fulfil the function it
should in the context of a democratic constitutional state.”
Perhaps, then, the
focus of the news industry needs to turn to commercial innovation:
how to rescue the funding of journalism, which is what is under
threat. Journalism has seen dramatic innovation in the last two
digital decades, but business models have not. In the words of my
colleague Mary Hamilton, the Guardian’s executive editor for
audience: “We’ve transformed everything about our journalism and
not enough about our businesses.”
The impact on
journalism of the crisis in the business model is that, in chasing
down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity, news
organisations undermine the very reason they exist: to find things
out and tell readers the truth – to report, report, report.
Many newsrooms are
in danger of losing what matters most about journalism: the valuable,
civic, pounding-the-streets, sifting-the-database,
asking-challenging-questions hard graft of uncovering things that
someone doesn’t want you to know. Serious, public-interest
journalism is demanding, and there is more of a need for it than
ever. It helps keep the powerful honest; it helps people make sense
of the world and their place in it. Facts and reliable information
are essential for the functioning of democracy – and the digital
era has made that even more obvious.
But we must not
allow the chaos of the present to cast the past in a rosy light –
as can be seen from the recent resolution to a tragedy that became
one of the darkest moments in the history of British journalism. At
the end of April, a two-year-long inquest ruled that the 96 people
who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 had been unlawfully
killed and had not contributed to the dangerous situation at the
football ground. The verdict was the culmination of an indefatigable
27-year-campaign by the victims’ families, whose case was reported
for two decades with great detail and sensitivity by Guardian
journalist David Conn. His journalism helped uncover the real truth
about what happened at Hillsborough, and the subsequent cover-up by
the police – a classic example of a reporter holding the powerful
to account on behalf of the less powerful.
What the families
had been campaigning against for nearly three decades was a lie put
into circulation by the Sun. The tabloid’s aggressive rightwing
editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, blamed the fans for the disaster,
suggesting they had forced their way into the ground without tickets
– a claim later revealed to be false. According to Horrie and
Chippindale’s history of The Sun, MacKenzie overruled his own
reporter and put the words “THE TRUTH” on the front page,
alleging that Liverpool fans were drunk, that they picked the pockets
of victims, that they punched, kicked and urinated on police
officers, that they shouted that they wanted sex with a dead female
victim. The fans, said a “high-ranking police officer”, were
“acting like animals”. The story, as Chippindale and Horrie
write, is a “classic smear”, free of any attributable evidence
and “precisely fitting MacKenzie’s formula by publicising the
half-baked ignorant prejudice being voiced all over the country”.
It is hard to
imagine that Hillsborough could happen now: if 96 people were crushed
to death in front of 53,000 smartphones, with photographs and
eyewitness accounts all posted to social media, would it have taken
so long for the truth to come out? Today, the police – or Kelvin
MacKenzie – would not have been able to lie so blatantly and for so
long.
The truth is a
struggle. It takes hard graft. But the struggle is worth it:
traditional news values are important and they matter and they are
worth defending. The digital revolution has meant that journalists –
rightly, in my view – are more accountable to their audience. And
as the Hillsborough story shows, the old media were certainly capable
of perpetrating appalling falsehoods, which could take years to
unravel. Some of the old hierarchies have been decisively undermined,
which has led to a more open debate and a more substantial challenge
to the old elites whose interests often dominated the media. But the
age of relentless and instant information – and uncertain truths –
can be overwhelming. We careen from outrage to outrage, but forget
each one very quickly: it’s doomsday every afternoon.
The challenge for
journalism today is to establish what role journalistic organisations
still play in public discourse
At the same time,
the levelling of the information landscape has unleashed new torrents
of racism and sexism and new means of shaming and harassment,
suggesting a world in which the loudest and crudest arguments will
prevail. It is an atmosphere that has proved particularly hostile to
women and people of colour, revealing that the inequalities of the
physical world are reproduced all too easily in online spaces. The
Guardian is not immune – which is why one of my first initiatives
as editor-in-chief was to launch the Web We Want project, in order to
combat a general culture of online abuse and ask how we as an
institution can foster better and more civil conversations on the
web.
Above all, the
challenge for journalism today is not simply technological innovation
or the creation of new business models. It is to establish what role
journalistic organisations still play in a public discourse that has
become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised. The stunning
political developments of the past year – including the vote for
Brexit and the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate
for the US presidency – are not simply the byproducts of a
resurgent populism or the revolt of those left behind by global
capitalism.
The rise of Donald
Trump is ‘a symptom of the mass media’s growing weakness’,
according to academic Zeynep Tufekci. Photograph: Jim Cole/AP
As the academic
Zeynep Tufekci argued in an essay earlier this year, the rise of
Trump “is actually a symptom of the mass media’s growing
weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is
acceptable to say”. (A similar case could be made for the Brexit
campaign.) “For decades, journalists at major media organisations
acted as gatekeepers who passed judgment on what ideas could be
publicly discussed, and what was considered too radical,” Tufekci
wrote. The weakening of these gatekeepers is both positive and
negative; there are opportunities and there are dangers.
As we can see from
the past, the old gatekeepers were also capable of great harm, and
they were often imperious in refusing space to arguments they deemed
outside the mainstream political consensus. But without some form of
consensus, it is hard for any truth to take hold. The decline of the
gatekeepers has given Trump space to raise formerly taboo subjects,
such as the cost of a global free-trade regime that benefits
corporations rather than workers, an issue that American elites and
much of the media had long dismissed – as well as, more obviously,
allowing his outrageous lies to flourish.
When the prevailing
mood is anti-elite and anti-authority, trust in big institutions,
including the media, begins to crumble.
I believe that a
strong journalistic culture is worth fighting for. So is a business
model that serves and rewards media organisations that put the search
for truth at the heart of everything – building an informed, active
public that scrutinises the powerful, not an ill-informed,
reactionary gang that attacks the vulnerable. Traditional news values
must be embraced and celebrated: reporting, verifying, gathering
together eyewitness statements, making a serious attempt to discover
what really happened.
We are privileged to
live in an era when we can use many new technologies – and the help
of our audience – to do that. But we must also grapple with the
issues underpinning digital culture, and realise that the shift from
print to digital media was never just about technology. We must also
address the new power dynamics that these changes have created.
Technology and media do not exist in isolation – they help shape
society, just as they are shaped by it in turn. That means engaging
with people as civic actors, citizens, equals. It is about holding
power to account, fighting for a public space, and taking
responsibility for creating the kind of world we want to live in.
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