Introduction
This series (introduced here) is about exploring solutions to disinformation. We face a difficult challenge. It requires multiple, coherent plans mutually reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle. We can “flatten the curve”, but first we need to understand our options.
The first post focused on media literacy. You can check it out here.
The second looked at the role of fact-checking. You can check that out here.
For the third, I wrote about how we bring people back from extreme conspiracy thinking. Check that out here.
This month, I’m looking at the role of mainstream media.
* Because the content is a bit longer than usual, your email provider may cut you off somewhere down below. Get the full post by clicking on the title above.
The failures of our media
I’ve been working as a journalist for over 10 years. The profession is critical in a functioning democracy. It is the fourth estate. We reveal corruption. We uncover the facts. The values of journalism, carefully shaped over the years like a craft, are wonderful.
And yet.
There are so many examples of media exacerbating misinformation, fomenting polarisation, deferentially serving elites. And it’s not always tabloids and cable TV. Practically every major news organisation has, at one time or another, made a big mistake. We are human after all. But sometimes these mistakes are outrageous. Consider this from The New York Post:
Any reader would be forgiven for assuming the death and the vaccine are related. And yet the very first line reads: “A 75-year-old man was lucky enough to get a COVID-19 vaccine in Israel, only to die a few hours later from a heart attack that officials believe is unrelated to the shot.”
Or consider this from the Express, which was originally headlined “Heartbreak as two pensioners die hours after receiving jabs in separate tragic incidents”. The causes of death were a car crash and a choking incident. But once again, the damage was done. Anti-vaccine activists can take screenshots and spread the false message far and wide that vaccines are responsible for causing deaths.
There are countless other examples from the COVID vaccine rollout, but the media has played a role in spreading misinformation for years, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Perhaps the most famous example from the early 21st century was the push for war in Iraq based on false information about weapons of mass destruction. The media was deferential to political and military sources. Another issue is climate change, where journalists have routinely made the mistake of giving a voice to outright falsehoods in the interest of appearing balanced.
I want to be able to say that you should trust mainstream media but the truth is, as we discussed in the media literacy post, you should always exercise judgement. A lot of the time the mainstream media will give you the most accurate information available at the time, but there are times when you should be wary. Sometimes there are errors of judgement, sometimes there are blatant mistakes.
The agents of disinformation use those mistakes to say that you should never trust the mainstream media at all. That suits their agenda, as they try to build new information networks. But they are the ones not to be trusted at all. Anyone who tells you the “MSM” should be avoided at all costs, should probably be avoided at all costs. Because when we get it right, the media helps to propel movements like Me Too, or uncover political corruption, or help us understand what’s happening in our local neighbourhood.
That’s why for people like me, who love the best about journalism, the wrong paths we’ve taken feel like a personal pain. Allow me to double down on this. The values of journalism are inspirational. Fairness. Transparency. Investigation. Serving communities. Too often we don’t live up to these ideals. Before diving into how we can ensure that media outlets regain trust and cease spreading misinformation, let’s first spend a bit of time unpacking the role of the media in all this and then look at why it so often struggles to live up to its own best practices.
Theory of the mainstream media misinformation problem
“Media” is a big, all-encompassing term. It includes newspapers, radio, TV, blogs, websites, podcasts, and so on. There are plenty of examples of great journalists who never amplify misinformation, follow best practices, and are a credit to their craft. But we can’t ignore the role of the media as a whole.
That is the basis of a seminal report by Whitney Phillips for Data & Society called The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online. The report shows how the media can irresponsibly spread, or amplify, disinformation and the people behind it. Some of this is built into the structure of journalism: we want to report on what’s new and interesting, and there are plenty of incentives for doing so.
Sometimes an image helps. First Draft’s Trumpet of Amplification graphic is useful here:
It shows how disinformation often begins in the fringes, in the anonymous web. If it stays there forever it might never become a danger or threat in the real world. The problem is when it moves through to closed or semi-closed networks like Telegram before jumping through various conspiracy communities, wherever they live. From there it becomes mainstream when it gains traction on the big social platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Recommendation algorithms can thrust this disinformation in front of millions and it becomes more dangerous as a result, pushing people down rabbit holes. From there, it gets amplified further when mainstream media writes about it.
Even the act of debunking false information can unfortunately give a conspiracy or falsehood more attention, which is exactly what those people on the anonymous web, where this all started, are looking for. They will often celebrate how they have got their message through to “normies” when it’s covered by mainstream outlets. Their job is done.
Some of this is really tricky for news organisations. When should they cover a conspiracy? For a long time, many refrained from reporting about QAnon, for example, for fear of amplifying it. At what point does something cross a threshold and require debunking or fact-checking? There’s no hard science to this and there probably can never be. As First Draft noted, “The tipping point differs by country but is measured when content moves out of a niche community, starts moving at velocity on one platform or crosses onto other platforms. The more time you spend monitoring disinformation, the more the tipping point becomes clearer, which is another reason for newsrooms to take disinformation seriously.”
As well as tipping points, Phillips' Oxygen of Amplification suggests journalists consider things like weighing up the social benefit of reporting and the potential harms in doing so.
But sometimes journalists and editors unknowingly spread misinformation, just as those disinformers want, for other reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are operating at warp speed, or they’re trying to beat a competitor, or their standards have dropped. These are all really bad reasons for spreading misinformation, and they happen because of fundamental flaws in today’s media ecosystem. Let’s consider that in more detail now.
The bad news
Why does news get it so badly wrong sometimes? There’s a number of core reasons.
A struggling business model and an existential crisis
For as long as I can remember, journalism has been in an existential crisis. This predates the explosion of the internet. Newspapers didn’t just struggle because of the introduction of Craigslist; they were already struggling with the rise of television and cable news. When Google and Facebook came along and built better products for advertisers, the cash coming to news organisations fell sharply.
An existential crisis for journalism leads to worse journalism. I’m reluctant to blame the platforms here, as many do. The media industry was myopic for too long. Newsrooms didn’t think about how to better serve their audiences and instead continued delivering the same old product for decades with little innovation.
As we all began to live online, scale became the goal for most media organisations. Get millions of eyeballs. Sell their time and attention to advertisers. (Not too different from the platforms’ business model.)
If you were trying to design a system to destroy trust in journalism, this would be it. Clickbait was a deeply depressing outcome of such thinking. By overselling the story through a misleading headline, meda organisations could gain millions of eyeballs, even if those eyeballs only lasted for mere seconds on their site and didn’t really care about the newsroom’s mission or values. From a business perspective, it clearly must have made sense, or no one would have done it. But from a journalism and trust perspective, it was detrimental. It became another way for people to move away from mainstream media. And who can blame them, if they were treated like inert data points for faceless advertisers?
As the business struggled core tenets were revaluated. Many media organisations experimented with native advertising, where advertising content was masked as neutral editorial content. There has always been a separation of church and state, advertising and editorial, within newsrooms. In some places, a blend developed. Editorial independence is under threat and, with it, the possibility of losing more trust with communities.
Platforms aren’t exactly blameless in this. Facebook told publishers to “pivot to video”, and rewarded some with seven figure contracts for doing so. This bet was disastrous for many media organisations, as they invested heavily in video journalism, only to have to fire many of their newly trained staffers when it all fell apart.
The decline of local and the rise of partisan
Across the world, the decline of small, local news providers is a disaster. Those journalists are often the most trusted because they are part of the community’s everyday life. We see “local news deserts” popping up frequently, where vast geographic areas have no newsroom at all. Misinformation loves a vacuum, and without quality local news, there can be devastating consequences.
This was recently reported in detail by Brandy Zadrozny at NBC with her story about how Facebook Groups have taken the role of local publishers. It’s not all bad. The ability for locals to share information with each other through a platform they’re already on anyway can be great. But, as can be expected, gossip and rumours fly around such groups, increasing needless fear and anxiety. As Brandy found, "Local police say that for the umpteenth time the group's Facebook posts needlessly frightened a town and tied up officers who had to combat rumors when they should have been investigating crimes."
On the other side of the spectrum, a small number of broadcasters are paid in the millions to deliver highly partisan information to audiences that demand it. Partisan news is hardly new, but it clearly is a problem when journalistic standards can be put to one side in favour of entertainment, shock value and, often, misinformation that suits a political cause.
In the United States, this is clearly exemplified by Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN. But equally, CNN and others were critical in spreading Trump’s misinformation as they aired his speeches live without fact checks or corrections. Good for ratings, bad for democracy. Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, told investors the influx of advertising dollars for Trump coverage was “phenomenal”, and said “Go Donald! Keep getting out there!” The New York Times reported Trump got billions worth extra free media space compared with his competitors, much of which was used to spread misinformation. Yochai Benkler has argued that mainstream media was more responsible for spreading election misinformation than content on social platforms. It’s hard to assess and rank the impact of either, but the reach and authority of such organisations means the point can’t be discounted.
The authoritarian challenge
There are further problems for independent journalism in the modern age. A rising tide of authoritarian governments around the world threatens a free press, as has always been the case throughout history. We see this personified in the case of Maria Ressa, who continues to face possible imprisonment for fair reporting on Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines.
Even in liberal democracies, we see public service broadcasters like the BBC come under huge pressure from all directions, and increasing limits on their reporting abilities. In Poland and Hungary, governments have deliberately stifled the press.
In India, the biggest democracy in the world, there is a deeply disturbing anti-democratic attack on journalism and freedom of expression enabled by technology. From the article linked in the previous sentence, "A new government committee can now make online news publications change, delete, or issue apologies for stories, podcasts, videos, or social media posts — or shut them down entirely."
Churnalism
The influence of PR companies on harried and pressured journalists is another factor. One recent example was a story about Prince William supposedly being the “world’s sexiest bald man”. As Dan Barker pointed out in a thread on Twitter, this was all down to a PR initiative from a firm who offer hair transplants.
Churnalism is not new. Back in 2008, Guardian journalist Nick Davies wrote Flat Earth News, a book about how declining standards in journalism were an existential crisis to the profession. One of the key issues he highlighted was press releases repackaged by journalists because of ever-expanding expectations of prodigious output. Whereas before a journalist could take the time to deeply research a story, it’s not uncommon to hear stories of journalists being told to write up a number of stories per day, every day. Churnalism is simply a product of such a system.
Bad reporting practices
Sometimes the problem is not about resources. Sometimes the very ideals of journalism are at the heart of our problem.
Consider “bothsidesism”, or false balance. This has been critical in mainstream media spreading climate misinformation. As newsrooms try to appear neutral or unbiased, they give equal air time to a climate scientist and a climate denier whose take is simply not based in fact.
Deference to anonymous sources is another issue. Such sources were the backbone of the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” narrative leading up to the Iraq war, for which many publications in the US and UK were cheerleaders.
Reporting on terrorism and terrorist incidents has often gone badly too. By putting the name and face of the killer everywhere, the media fulfills the terrorist’s death wish. An act of terrorism is an act of spectable, and for that you need the media. However unwittingly, this reporting can often end up immortalising or glorifying extremists.
Mainstream media has serially profiled some of the most extreme white supremacists and neo-Nazis in recent years. As a piece in Current Affairs reflecting on this began, "If you’d like to be the subject of a long, humanizing profile story at a major national magazine or newspaper, the quickest route to free publicity is to start espousing Nazism." No one is arguing that the media simply pretend these people don’t exist, but too often journalists have provided a platform for the airing of the most extreme views without offering any challenge. This has been a big win for the extremists. Some journalists argue that these profiles are necessary so that readers can understand the mindset of the extreme fringe and therefore become better prepared to reject them, or at least make up their own mind. I wonder what such journalists will say if such extremists get into power and clamp down on a free press.
More broadly, there is a “bad news” bias inherent in much of the media too, as exemplified by the old saying ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. Journalism’s DNA is all about telling the audience about the latest terrible event. Sometimes, even often, that is fair and accurate. We need to know the terrible things happening in the world. But this bad news bias is not always giving us an accurate presentation of our changing world. For example, there has been huge progress dealing with global inequality in the last few decades, with an estimated 192,000 people pulled out of extreme poverty every day for the last 20 years. Journalism struggles to tell these nuanced, unfolding, complex stories.
Many journalists are generalists. They cover one beat for a while before moving to another. That’s not always ideal, and the resultant issues that crop up enrage the experts in a field. This is perhaps best exemplified in scientific journalism. Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote about how a scientific study was misunderstood by reporters and fueled unnecessary panic.
Sometimes bad reporting practices and standards leads to the spread of misinformation, as described in The Oxygen of Amplification. Whether through headlines that will be used by anti-vaccine activists, or unintentionally spreading a message of hate by giving it the attention it does not deserve, sadly, the mainstream media has regularly played a big role in the dissemination of untrue information.
The end of the bad news
We have to be careful about nostalgia for the “good old days”. The success of newspapers decades ago was partly to do with the scarcity of competition and viewpoints. They were monopolies. There was little diversity. The “good old days” in journalism were primarily managed by old white men.
We also have to be careful about believing that our present is better than our past. Yes, we can access almost anything we want now, but we have a gargantuan oversupply of publications. If for most of human history our key problem was lack of information, our contemporary problem is a significant overabundance of information.
Venture capital found its way into digital journalism, and many such investors have ruthlessly cut costs to find profitability. Even so, these businesses still struggle. Selloffs, mergers, consolidation, poor wages for journalists at most levels except for the top brass: all are contributing to an ongoing existential crisis for a profession that is essential to holding the powerful to account. (The Journalism Crisis Project is documenting much of that ongoing struggle.)
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are signs of light, and I have optimism that journalism can reclaim trust with large swathes of the population. We’ll come to that more hopeful perspective now.
The good news
Rather than focus on how we can make journalism profitable, we should be asking a far more important question: how do we regain trust? Focus on that, and everything else will flow. The good news is there are options. A range of solutions are available and, in truth, we are only limited by our imagination here. Some of it will have to be experimental, but so long as we are guided by the values of journalism and seeking to serve our communities, we’ll be on the right path.
Experiments in new structures and funding sources
Just as internet economics can be our downfall, the possibilities enabled by the internet are hopeful. Do we really need to save old-fashioned, local newsrooms owned by large hedge funds? I’d rather see support directly for the journalists themselves, and there have been some exciting developments within community journalism in recent years. This allows journalists to get closer to their audience and properly serve them.
The Dublin Inquirer is one such example. Margins may be tight and it may never be a billion euro business, but a lot of locals are deeply appreciative of the work uncovered by this new newsroom.
Another growing movement is slow journalism, exemplified by Tortoise but also a host of other newsrooms. This movement is all about questioning the role of journalism from the basics and figuring out ways to reinvigorate it. The journalists at Tortoise are not beholden to the latest breaking stories. They take their time and publish much less frequently. To get closer to their audience, they hold “ThinkIns”, where they engage directly with their readers in real life (well, pre-COVID).
Even in the bigger newsrooms, we’ve seen more and more anecdotes that publishing less stories is leading to more engagement with audiences, a hopeful sign that slow and right - and of course exceptionally insightful and worth the time spent - has a chance against fast, faster and fastest.
Within this burgeoning field of experimentation is, of course, subscriptions. The New York Times leads the way in developing this critical new revenue stream. It’s great to finally see readers pay for the creation of news, and it’s not just limited to the biggest paper in the world. We see it with newsletter subscriptions and Patreon. This is wonderful and can help reinvigorate media and ensure quality journalism can thrive.
However, I’m worried about a world where the best quality information is hidden behind a paywall. What’s left is the trash and disinformation, free to fly wildly around the internet with no one stopping it. That is a pretty dystopian future, and it’s already here in many cases. Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, begins his book Breaking News with an anecdote about immigrants to Sweden being accused of a mass rape, which was untrue. To find the truth, however, he had to pay for subscriptions to Swedish papers for which he’d never have any other use. The vast majority of people will never go to such lengths. And so other false claims like this will circulate and be believed.
There are other problems with subscription models. It’s possible that newsrooms will simply cater to the partisan perspectives of their readers and deliver more of the same. If a newsroom publishes a story critical of Trump and gets a bump in subscribers, the tendency will be to continue in that vein. This can lead to a narrowed viewpoint and the publication of questionable content, but so long as it suits the perspective of the buyer, there may be an inclination to let it slide.
Another model is memberships. The Guardian is perhaps the best example of this, wherein readers are asked to pay but the content remains free for all. Hopefully, the theory goes, a loyal audience will pay for the newsroom’s work, not for their own exclusive benefit, but out of civic duty and desire to see the brand they love get better. This model has been successful for the Guardian, and is also being used by Wikipedia and others. However, not everyone has a brand name like these titans of the internet. That’s where services like Substack and Memberful can come in handy for independent writers to try and build reader revenue with help from technology.
The rise of Substack in particular over the last year is noteworthy. Some of the biggest names in journalism are there to deliberately avoid the style and tone of social media. Many of these names are making a lot more money now than when they were working with mainstream media companies. And there are burgeoning new experiments within Substack too. For example, Sidechannel sees eight Substack writers come together in a Discord server to engage directly with their paying subscribers. It remains to be seen whether this will be a success but it’s clear we’re in new territory which can lead to a more sustainable future for good journalism.
Another option is crowdfunding. Perhaps the most famous example of this was De Correspondent’s drive to create an English language version, which raised $2.6 million. What happened next was a bit of a disaster, but it shows again the potential for such models. Part of the learning from this debacle was that when you are asking for money from your audience, you are in the trust business. Transparency is more critical than ever before, as well as clear communication. Whether you’re sympathetic or not to The Correspondent, many of their subscribers ultimately felt betrayed, and that was the end of that.
It doesn’t have to end like that. Spanish online newspaper El Español raised quite a bit more than The Correspondent, $3.9 million, and appears to be still going strong.
There is a whole new world developing with non-profits and co-ops. Local news in the US, particularly, has pivoted heavily toward the development of non-profits, which brings tax benefits. The Knight Foundation called 2020 the “Year of Nonprofit Local News”. They reasonably argue that being a non-profit doesn’t mean that you can give up on building revenue, but being non-profit means that, perhaps, readers trust you more that you aren’t seeking to make a fortune from the product, making them more likely to donate or subscribe. The Institute for Nonprofit News found that, pre-COVID, the sector was enjoying "steady finances, growing ranks, and an evolving relationship with its audience that may strengthen public engagement even in times of crisis".
Much of the non-profit sector has some reliance on philanthropy. This money can come from billionaires and corporations and, if done right, should be welcome. But it’s hardly a long-term strategy to secure a healthy information environment. For example, The Compass Experiment was funded by Google to launch local news outlets in news deserts. Unfortunately, the future of the experiment is uncertain as Google reconsiders.
Newsrooms may also need to question whether becoming reliant on philanthropy from, for example, Facebook or Google, will sub-consciously harm their chances of reporting accurately on the company itself.
That’s why I’m fascinated by the idea of co-ops. The Devil Strip is one such example, where readers and workers of Akron, Ohio, own the company. Readers become shareholders and the newsroom is accountable to them. The hope is the community will have a vested interest in the future of the newsroom and, in a virtuous cycle, the newsroom will deliver better coverage knowing that the community has its back. The Bristol Cable, another experiment in co-ops for news, has an apt motto: “You buy in, so we can’t sell out.”
Rosalie Murphy, editor-in-chief of The Devil Strip, wrote an inspirational manifesto about the inclusion of the community in the process of journalism through this co-op model. Compared with what Brandy Zadrozny described in the piece mentioned earlier, this seems like a much more hopeful forum for context to thrive and the elimination of rumours and gossip.
Another possibility for funding journalism is through public subsidies. Through the COVID crisis, some smart governments provided emergency funding to support journalism. Post-COVID, there could be ongoing support for such funds through taxation, or levies applied to large social platforms, who stand to benefit from an improved information ecosystem.
Aside from state broadcasters, like the BBC and RTÉ here in Ireland, journalists have generally wanted to avoid such involvement from the State. The fear of potentially losing editorial independence, even subconsciously as newsrooms report on the very governments to which they require funding, has been a large obstacle. But the environment is so bad now that many journalists have become more open to the idea in recent years.
Many in the UK might disagree, but having strong public service media like the BBC can be helpful in combating misinformation and the excess of partisan media. In America, PBS is still one of the most trusted sources of news, and there’s also similarly high ratings for the BBC, even as it is attacked from all sides.
Australia’s “link tax” is one way to divert money from the huge tech companies back into journalism, but there's a lot of reasons why people in the media are actually against this particular endeavour. Part of the problem here is that links are the very bedrock of the internet, and so the idea that Google and Facebook should pay a news publisher every time they link to them is a terrible precedent only they could afford. Also, there’s no guarantee this money would actually go to fund journalism, as opposed to lining the coffers of an executive who’s already doing well for himself.
There are other ways governments can help. They could help pay for training and technology investment. They could reduce VAT for media companies and reduce the cost of Freedom of Information requests. In Ireland, we have strict rules around defamation that have a chilling impact on the ability of journalists to report things they know to be true, but for which they could still get sued. Loosening laws like these will allow journalists to publish important stories and regain trust with the public.
Finally, it’s worth noting that advertising hasn’t gone away. It’s still a viable part of any media company’s revenue strategy. The only problem is the duopoly, Facebook and Google, are eating up most of those dollars.
Setting standards for misinformation reporting
Bad reporting practices, as mentioned already, can bring misinformation to the masses. Aside from fixing the trust, business and existential crises, we have to constantly set higher standards for journalism. Particularly when it comes to reporting on or about misinformation. The good news is, again, there are a range of solutions already at work.
One part of this is increased training for journalists. One of the leaders in this is First Draft, a non-profit which not only trains journalists but also provides useful research in the field of misinformation. Their advice is critical reading for any journalist reporting on misinformation. The aforementioned Oxygen of Amplification report also provides useful tips.
Take, for example, vaccine hesitancy. There are real, honest people who have questions, and the media should be listening for this and providing the most accurate information back to them in an entertaining way. Journalists need to address the concerns people are having to ensure that when those people encounter false information they are already equipped with their own understanding of the true situation. This clearly touches on our media literacy post once again.
Journalists have to be careful about emphasising the rare cases of adverse reactions to vaccines. They need to find a way to ensure they are parsing the huge reams of data coming from the vaccine rollout and helping people understand the context. Adverse reactions happen, for sure, but for every one that gets headlines on a news site, there are millions of shots administered where there are no issues, and those millions build immunity to COVID. It’s journalism’s job to make that story fascinating and there are tools to help: graphics, interviews with the makers, vox pops with the vaccinated; all can help tell the large story of what’s happening so that audiences have the true picture and full context when they hear about adverse events.
As mentioned earlier, journalists have to be wary about reporting on something too soon and thereby bringing that viewpoint to a much larger audience. This is the Oxygen of Amplification once again. But equally, journalists need to consider the problem of data voids, whereby people have heard a rumour and are searching for it, but there’s no good information to compete with the bad, and misinformation flourishes.
Then there are initiatives such as The Trust Project, Newsguard and the Journalism Trust Initiative, which are trying to ensure that newsrooms adhere to certain criteria and standards. Their reward is essentially a green “thumbs up” which the public can then use to ensure they are getting information from a source that is historically reliable. This data can also be used by platforms when considering what to promote within their algorithms.
New expectations from readers and journalists
So many people are fed up with clickbait and the overwhelming overabundance of information. They are demanding new experiences with publishers and pushing for experimentation. The slow news movement is an example of that meeting of the minds. Tortoise, to highlight them again, were clearly inspired by the idea of slow news, but so were their audience, who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds backing them in crowdfunding.
Social media has given a voice to everyone. For all of the terrible outcomes with hate speech, incitement to violence, and disinformation we’ve seen as a result of that, let’s not forget how wonderful it is that the rest of us get to have a voice. We are no longer passive consumers of information; we can take part and be involved in the process of journalism. Engaged journalism is a growing field where audiences and journalists come together. Once again, De Correspondent in the Netherlands is a good example of that, where experts in the audience have direct interactions with the writers.
Another example I’ve recently been excited by here in Ireland is The Good Information Project from TheJournal.ie. Each month, they take a new big question facing the country and actively engage with the public and experts to figure out where we are and where we need to go. “We want to create a space in which Irish news consumers can learn how to identify good information about issues which majorly impact them, understand where to seek it out and become equipped to pass on those skills to others in their networks.”
Constructive or solutions journalism is another area where I’m seeing hope for a new invigoration between a more demanding audience and a more listening and empathic journalism. The appropriately titled Solutions Journalism Network is perhaps the best example of that, and there are other approaches like Positive News and Good News, which tries to help people understand all the more hopeful things that are happening in our world every day.
There are initiatives like Ground.news, which helps audiences explore different perspectives on the news and see the same story from varying angles. Something like this would have been considered wild 50 years ago, but now it shows how diverse our media is, and how audiences are becoming more discerning and questioning.
Audiences are also demanding that newsrooms look more like them. We are still very slow in responding to this so it’s critical that we increase newsroom diversity in the coming years. Women and people of colour should become more prominent. The socioeconomic background of journalists is another area where we must change. For too long, journalism has been dominated by a small sector of middle-class society. As Splice pointed out, “that loss of empathy and connection to blue collar communities shows in our reporting. Stories go unreported, underreported or superficially reported simply because we stop seeing them happening.”
Public editors have a huge role to play in this too. They hold newsrooms accountable and build a direct relationship with readers and viewers. They report the concerns of audiences to the newsroom, and the best of them will not hold back on a newsroom’s failures. The more the public sees this kind of honest reporting from within, the more they will regain the trust we have lost.
The role of advertisers
Margaret Sullivan, former public editor for The New York Times, recently wrote that the only way to get an operation like Fox News to take all this seriously is to hit them where it hurts. "The only answer is to speak the language that the bigwigs at Fox will understand: Ratings. Advertising dollars. Profit. Corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away, and citizens who care about the truth should demand that they do so (in addition to trying to steer their friends and relatives away from the network)."
The work of Sleeping Giants, Check My Ads and Stop Funding Hate are all notable here. Each runs campaigns to help advertisers understand when their content is running alongside hate speech or disinformation. Sleeping Giants started off by warning advertisers about their content appearing on Breitbart, for example, and built up huge traction in doing so.
These campaigns can certainly have an impact. Advertisers have left some of the more extreme sites. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle.
Lawsuits
After the 2020 US election, much of the MAGA movement spread misinformation about companies involved in the voting infrastructure, Dominion and Smartmatic. The biggest cheerleaders for this - Fox - are being sued in the order of billions. Could this be part of the solution?
We’ve still a long way to go with these lawsuits, but it’s possible heavy financial penalties will make such broadcasters think twice about deliberately spreading disinformation again.
However, history would suggest they probably will do this again. Fox News previously promoted the Seth Rich conspiracy and ended up having to pay millions of dollars to his family. Yet they still spread election lies.
Again, Margaret Sullivan’s perspective is noteworthy. There are problems, she argues, with relying on lawsuits as a solution to this problem, beyond the fact that even hefty payouts mightn’t change much of anything. Even the most perfect newsroom with excellent journalists and editors can make mistakes. We have to be careful we don’t set a precedent. Here’s Sullivan’s closing words in that piece:
"If defamation suits, even valid ones, are successful, long-standing First Amendment protections could be weakened; aggrieved subjects of news stories, especially those with deep pockets, may be encouraged to go after media companies of all kinds, not just hyperpartisan ones. And long, expensive court battles could put them out of business. It would be comforting to think that defamation suits won’t ward off good journalism while seeking to punish the spreading of irresponsible lies. Comforting — but far from a sure thing.”
What journalism can and should be
Just like disinformation, the challenges facing responsible media are constantly changing. Nevertheless, the best reporting on these issues shines a light on areas we might otherwise have never learned about. Thank goodness for the reporting of Craig Silverman on the Macedonian teenagers inventing fabricated stories to trick American audiences. Where might we be without the understanding brought to the field by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins? Marianna Spring and the rest of the team at the BBC have brought insights to the problem in the UK. Maria Ressa is literally fighting for her freedom in the Philippines but her own media company, Rappler, continues to report on the disinformation campaigns of the government there. There are countless more examples, and many of the best ones are not big names in the industry. Many of them work on research desks and help make others look good.
So, while the media industry is guilty of a wide range of flaws, we should also be grateful for the best of it. Remember, the mainstream media making mistakes is no new thing. The aforementioned Craig Silverman’s book Regret the Error is testament to that. But studies show that countries with diverse and robust independent news media seem more resilient to disinformation.
I’m still inspired by the values of this profession, and believe we constantly need to strive toward the vision of what it can be. As humans, we are always going to fall short of our ideal, but those failures shouldn’t stop us from continuing to strive.
This vision, or at least the one I identify with, is not about some self-indulgent streak declaring the Supreme Importance of the Craft because We Are the Fourth Estate and People Should Trust Us. We need to earn that trust. We need to help people understand the answers to questions they face in their everyday lives. We need to serve our communities by helping them understand who, what, where, when and, perhaps most importantly, why. We can facilitate that through for-profit enterprises, non-profits, co-ops, subscription businesses, memberships, advertising or, in all likelihood, some mix of all the above.
We constantly need to reimagine and reinvigorate the meaning of our profession to stay relevant in people’s lives. We are living in a time when increased transparency is not only expected, but demanded by audiences. I hope the media, for the most part, can rise to the challenge posed by disinformation, take on the lessons from reports like The Oxygen of Amplification, help people understand the ever-changing world around them, and do it sustainably all while being as transparent as possible to regain trust.
The strengths of a responsible media in tackling disinformation
When journalism gets it right, it can expose the agents of disinformation: their motives and tactics and just how much they lie and want to harass minorities.
As outlined in the fact-checking post, journalists are often ahead of everyone else when conducting this research. They provide a valuable public service in doing so. The growing emergence of solid reporting on disinformation, as well as groups like First Draft, shows that we can make improvements, reach higher standards, and become a better service for the public.
As journalism lives through an ongoing existential crisis, new experiments in the structure of the business - like co-ops, subscriptions, membership - offer hopeful ways to rebuild trust with the audiences journalists are supposed to serve.
The weaknesses of a responsible media in tackling disinformation
Business model pressures are severe and while there is hope in new models, we are probably never returning to any kind of glory days within the media industry. This could lead to an even fiercer fight for the eyeballs of large audiences. That can lead in turn to more articles which sell misinformation for outrage, cheap clicks or other venal venditions.
The trust business is tough. Years of trust-building can be undone relatively quickly. As many established newsrooms try to build subscription businesses, they will face greater calls for transparency and accuracy in reporting. One danger is that the tiniest slip up will destroy hard-won trust and threaten the organisation’s existence. Another danger is that the newsroom just gives the paying audience what it wants without challenging them. We end up developing a narrow view of the world.
The challenges facing independent media under authoritarian governments are not going away any time soon. That problem will live with us for as long as there are demagogues.
What’s next
Imagine a world without responsible media. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode but, for a brief moment in time, we could actually see what that looked like. As Australia and Facebook argued over the “link tax” earlier this year, the platform simply shut down access to mainstream news sites. What happened next was a frightening insight to the future if we don’t find a way for sustainable journalism.
As the BBC reported, misinformation ran rife. Against an army of deliberate disinformers and the accidental misinformation sharers, there was no bulwark of credible news reporting. This is a future we don’t want. We have to do everything we can, both inside the industry - through finding sustainable business models, better reporting practices on misinformation, and constant experiments in innovation - and outside the industry - whether that’s governments figuring out how they can help protect the free press, individuals finding ways to support their local media, or platforms considering more elevation in newsfeeds for trustworthy credible information.
Just like every other post in this series, this one area alone is not enough to solve our disinformation challenge. But it’s going to be a critical part of it.
We’ve focused a few times in this post on the role of government. Equally, there’s been a lot of talk about some form of platform regulation as we tackle these issues. But it’s not a simple and shut case that anything governments can do will help here - they often lag years behind innovations at the forefront of technology. Aside from that, any intervention could make things worse. The next post will dive into this world in more detail.
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Other solutions I’ll be considering in upcoming months are technology, research and partnerships, moderation, business models, experiments in new digital public squares, and deradicalisation.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What have I missed here in relation to the role of the media? Are there other solutions not mentioned above that you think should be part of this? Do you have any research or reading material you’d like to share?
Thanks for taking part.