“In restoring our common fact base, legacy media organisations (newspapers, television networks, book publishers) have a crucial role to play. Venerable journalistic institutions have extraordinary reporting, research and marketing resources at their disposal, and must redouble their efforts to remain trusted public mediators of what is true.”
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
“After the Fake News thing broke, all of these organisations started announcing that they were setting up fact-checking organisations and I thought to myself, ‘lads, you’re journalists. Surely fact-checking is what you should have been doing for your entire existence?’”
Eoghan MacSweeney, director of education, First Draft Coalition
Trust in the media in Ireland, according to Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
The connection between low trust in traditional media outlets and media consumers’ move towards alternative sources, leaving them vulnerable to Fake News in some cases, has been much commented on. As discussed in Chapter 1, we already know that public trust does seem to be lowering, and that, at least in the US, regarding the press as politically partisan is at an all-time high.
The necessity of winning back trust has been recognised in many circles, but different editors, journalists and commentators have different ideas as to how this should be achieved.
Do readers need a more ethnically and socio-economically diverse pool of journalists, as HuffPost editor Lydia Polgreen would have it, so that they can choose voices they have an innate trust of?
Do readers need more overtly partisan coverage, or less?
First, though, let’s make an important point. Trust, defined by Merriam Webster as an “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something,” is earned, and habitually reinforced. For both media organisations and individual media practitioners, then, the trust the public places in them is, in part, a reflection of their working practice. When large media organisations display an uncomfortably close tie with the state and corporate entities they are claiming to report on with balance and incisiveness, public trust is eroded.
That is the reasoning behind the NUJ’s code of conduct, which to this day provides a well-considered set of guidelines that, when adhered to, both reinforce media trust and indemnify individual journalists against allegations of misconduct.
Journalism has long been a profession with a strong occupational mythology: “as new trainees or employees enter the field, the older members of the occupational field see to it that they are socialised into the occupation by learning the occupational mythologies,” as Karen S. Johnson-Cartee put it.
These mythologies are so strong, and are curated by those whose occupation is essentially in storytelling, that the mythologies of journalism extend out into the public imagination: however poorly the public might understand the actual work of journalists, they are frequently portrayed in books and on film.
It’s common to read comments regarding “the media” or “the mainstream media” that reveal that for many outside the industry, “the media” operates as one discrete organism with a common shared agenda, giving rise to this piece, written, with a seeming lack of irony, by the Washington Post’s Media Correspondent. Yet “the media” are a huge pool of human beings, each with their own set of pressures and biases, prone to errors in judgement and practice.
There have been far too numerous examples of both individual journalists and the media organisations they work for eroding the public trust to provide an extensive list of examples. The chain of events leading up to the Iraq war was a case in point; following the publication of the Chilcot Report last year, it has widely been accepted that the convictions of the public, which led to the Iraq War generating the largest protests in history, were absolutely correct: there were never any weapons of mass destruction, the tenet the Bush and Blair administrations used for pursuing the war.
“The greatest Fake News story of the 21st century so far was Weapons of Mass destruction,” Andre Damon of the World Socialist Web Site says. “And the greatest perpetrators of that Fake News, the news outlets that peddled this falsehood, are now members of the First Draft Coalition.”
“The New York Times published articles by Judith Miller, who reported the allegations of Dick Cheney as fact. Look at the writings of the WSWS on the Iraq War in 2003 – it’s now an established fact that the claims about Weapons of Mass destruction were a lie. We said there was nothing to it and it was a fraud. Compare that to the coverage of the New York Times.”
An uncomfortable alliance to power, a willingness to parrot verbatim a party-political line: this is just one example of poor journalistic practice, one explored in Lois Kapila’s Dublin InQuirer article on whether or not sources should be named.
But there are many others: plagiarism, paying sources, rewriting press releases without so much as a phone call, and other contentious practices.
Incitement to violence? Village magazine‘s ethically dubious February cover.
For example it may be viewed as ironic that Buzzfeed, the new media organisation that first brought the term Fake News into the mainstream, just weeks after it broke the Macedonian Youths story, would publish an “unverified, and possibly unverifiable” dossier claiming that Donald Trump was being supported and assisted by Russia.
The dossier had been previously circulated to other media outlets, who refused to report on it, although CNN reported on Buzzfeed’s publication of it.
“Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government,” the accompanying article stated. This is cynical beyond measure; in 2014, it was already known by Buzzfeed’s analysts that there’s a weak correlation between people sharing content on social media and actually reading beyond the headline.
It’s an occasional frustration but a very observable phenomenon for journalists who share their own work on social media, especially when they don’t write their own headlines; I’ve had strings of comments from people who quite clearly haven’t read the article but who are responding to the photo and headline, neither of which are my work.
In essence, people share on the basis of headlines. And a headline that screams:
“These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia”
plus a veritable shower of snide jokes relating to water-sports on twitter, is potentially damaging enough even (and in the case of this particular document) if the majority of sharers haven’t actually read it.
Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti has claimed the resulting lawsuit filed by Alfa Bank, a Russian bank named in the “dossier,” constitutes an “outrageous attempt to try to silence the American media.” Yet Buzzfeed refuses to let its journalists unionise and has been accused of plagiaristic practices.
Like many new media businesses, then, Buzzfeed adopts a pick-and-mix approach, invoking the sanctity of press freedom when it suits while skirting attempts at regulation.
In Ireland, the plagiaristic practices of TheLiberal.ie saw owner Leo Sherlock lose a court battle against court reporting service CCC Nuacht, and against The Irish Independent, for plagiarism. Mr Sherlock’s website has repeatedly found to plagiarise the work of journalists, as well as running fake competitions on Facebook to boost its following. In fact, it’s probably the closest thing to a classic Fake News site that Ireland has.
Plagiarism is a particular issue for “New Media” companies, it seems; perhaps this is partly a generational issue as digital natives brought up in a copy-paste culture seem to have a difficult time understanding the idea of copyright, or have a tech or multi-media background rather than a journalistic one.
Given my definition of Fake News in chapter one, these companies, as well as legacy print titles and broadcasters, are not immune from publishing Fake News, if they haven’t adhered to best practice within their work.
RTÉ’s blunder in accidentally putting up the link to an unedited interview with Leo Varadkar’s parents, in which a member of the Taoiseach’s staff can be heard directing Varadkar’s mother Miriam to change her comments relating to her son’s relationship with the press, while not in itself Fake News, exposed an uncomfortable level of closeness between the state broadcaster and governmental power.
If anything, it seems well enough observed a phenomenon at this stage to state that there is a causal relationship between plummeting ad revenues for print and broadcast and the lowering of standards in practice. For example, in Ireland’s first survey of Journalists’ social media adoption and usage, Only 12% of the journalists surveyed said they were “fairly confident” that social media is a trustworthy news source, despite 99% of respondents saying they use social media professionally. Most respondents said it was a time-saving device.
Journalist and media educator Rachel Andrews thinks the link is clear:
Eoghan MacSweeney, director of education with First Draft coalition, believes that the shrinking revenues and associated changes to practice that Andrews refers to has another important effect: it narrows the scope for on-the-job mentorship by editors and senior reporters.
“The mainstream media is under so much financial pressure that they are falling into the lowest common denominator, and the easiest way to make a few bucks,” he says. “The answer partly lies in training, but trying to get news outlets to take responsibility for that now is tough because they tell you they don’t have the resources. But you can’t afford not to, because it’s turning journalism into trash.”
“In Storyful, I very consciously did a lot of mentoring behind the scenes, and it felt like a vocation. You could see the kind of habits young journalists were falling into and I’d think, ‘I really don’t want them to go out into the big world of media with these habits thinking that this is how you do this stuff.’”
“There’s so much in the production of news that’s unique to every day you work. There are instincts you develop and things you’ll only pick up by working alongside other good experienced journalists. No matter how much education you have, you also have to have the time and space to continue to develop in the job and with the way media jobs are dropping left right and centre, that’s suffering massively: If you don’t even have time to copy-edit an article, how will you have time for on-the-job training?”
Then it seems clear; there are concrete reasons for a drop-off in adherence to ethical journalistic practice, and the result is an erosion of confidence and trust. So how can journalists and media organisations work to rebuild that trust? Here’s Lois Kapila, co-founder and editor of The Dublin InQuirer, a community-focused online paper with a monthly print edition:
Many of Kapila’s recommendations – such as reporters being present in the community, naming sources, and printing corrections – are very much a return to basics for traditional media, yet translated into the digital era and adapted to make use of the unique attribute of an online platform, such as interacting with readers through social media.
The Guardian is a publication that has made very good use of their online platform to add to the transparency of their practice; they have a clear complaints procedure and their own review panel for assessing complaints. They also have a full index of their authors and journalists can be searched by name and a full archive of their work accessed. On top of this, they footnote each article to reflect if amendments or changes were made to it.
In all my interviews with media workers, the recurring theme was that pre-existing journalistic cornerstones of practice need to be reinforced. But if media consumers can’t tell poor work from good work and are willing to share articles from dubious sources simply because of a catchy headline or a heart-string tugging level of human interest, then ad revenue will continue to be driven towards sites that prioritise engagement above all.
The answer to this problem lies in education.