Abstract
In a contested information environment, the phrase ‘fake news’ represents the existential challenge to journalists dealing with an audience losing its faith in what journalism does. The traditional role of the Fourth Estate and the responsibilities to inform and keep those in power accountable, are now constantly undermined by a determined counter-offensive that purports to show ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ are pliable concepts in the hands of the mainstream media. Journalism educators have to confront this dilemma head-on and affirm within the classroom the priority of the basic tenets of the job – not just reporting accurately and capturing balance, but committing to a process of verification that shows the rigour behind the best kind of journalism. This embrace of traditional journalism’s foundation skills is at the heart of re-establishing the credibility of the job, initially with students, and then, with the community.
Introduction
On the day before the 2016 US presidential election, journalism academic Joshua Benton decided to visit the Facebook page of his hometown mayor. Benton hails from a small town in the US Deep South, a place not necessarily friendly to Democrats and their candidate Hillary Clinton. But even Benton was shocked at what he found on the mayor’s Facebook page, during the 48 hours leading up to polling day. There was a story about Clinton calling for a civil war if she was elected, another (now infamous story) that Pope Francis had endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump and another story that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. None of them were true. What was worse was that the Papal endorsement story had 868,000 Facebook shares but the story debunking it only had 33,000 (Benton, 2016).
This was, arguably, the nadir (or peak, depending on your perspective) of ‘fake news’. And it was not confined just to the US—this was a global phenomenon, which investigative journalists later revealed was partly driven by hard-right agitators who set up fake sites and newsfeeds, in a range of destinations, including Hungary, to peddle the falsehoods that fed in to the Trump narrative and demonized his opponent.
In a rich irony it was Trump, from his new home at the White House, who would decry journalists who reported his fledgling administration’s gaffes, missteps and mistakes as circulating ‘fake news’. But for all the talk from a range of academics, commentators and analysts that ‘fake news’ is not a new phenomenon, this outbreak of contested facts has already reached a new level of bitterness and recrimination.
What makes this period so dangerous for journalists is that it would not have been possible without the mainstream media struggling to survive the breakdown of its commercial model and the sustained decline in the respect for journalists and the credibility of their work. And inevitably, the consequences for all those in journalism teaching are profound and far-reaching.
Inspiring Young Journalists
How do we inspire young journalists in the face of this corrosive breach of community faith in the Fourth Estate? What skills does a journalist need to survive, let alone thrive, in this bitter and segmented information environment? And perhaps, most fundamentally, how do we reassert in the classroom the value of journalism and quality reporting as a tool for good in its legitimate role in keeping government accountable?
Let us consider a number of observations that have already circulated, some of which are intended to give journalists some comfort. Others reflect a sense of pessimism about journalism among its practitioners, who were already feeling a deep gloom at falling circulation and declining revenue. It is worth acknowledging that the US election (and the Brexit debate in the UK) has looked from this side of the world like a science experiment that may or may not be repeated within our region in the next five years. What we can say with more certainty is that trends affecting journalism that led to the US outcome are plainly visible within the Asia-Pacific region.
The answer to fake news is good journalism:
As noble—and admirable—as it might be to keep faith in the basic tenets of good journalism as some kind of prophylactic to falsehoods, the reality is far less reassuring. British commentator Nick Cohen was moved to write of the despair of a New York Times’ editor whose paper had tried to be even-handed in reporting the Clinton e-mail scandal as well as Trump’s flawed personal and business history during their presidential campaign coverage. ‘But its exposes had no effect’, Cohen wrote. ‘[N]ow Facebook algorithms ensured subscribers only received information that confirmed their prejudices’ (Cohen, 2016). Herein lies the real challenge for all those who are serious about journalism’s vital role: quality, balance and rigour are not enough anymore. These have lost their value to many consumers, who have a list of accumulated grievances against journalists over the years—not necessarily from direct experience, but often because a reader’s world view does not match what they read, hear or watch. It is symptomatic of a broader crisis of a creeping distrust and disillusionment with other major institutions. The global Edelman Trust Barometer identified, for the first time in 17 years, a decline in trust across its four key institutions—government, business, NGOs and the media. The survey also found trust in Australian media had fallen to its lowest recorded level (Dawson, 2017a). It is a hard task to convince people you fulfil a vital democratic function when so many doubt what you tell them.
The key to Facebook’s appeal is that its algorithm talks the reader’s language—there is nothing uncomfortable or confronting in that kind of ‘news’ that plays to your world view. As the readers editor at The Observer noted: ‘It’s easier to dismiss something as fake than face hard truths, just as it is easier to reach for “alternative facts” when reality doesn’t fit the agenda’ (Pritchard, 2017).
Journalism classrooms are full of students who consume news from a Facebook feed: six out of 10 US ‘millennials’ received their political news from Facebook in any given week (Mitchell, Gottfried & Matsa, 2015). Some of that is probably from legitimate sources but not entirely. And here is the rub—those students who do consume mainstream media on a regular basis will find themselves potentially shackled to an institution that is becoming increasingly divorced from its readers. Just how out of touch the US media was with voters was revealed in the survey of print media that showed 229 daily papers and 131 weekly publications endorsed Clinton for the presidency. Only nine dailies and four weeklies endorsed Trump, a differential of 27:1 (Boczkowski, 2016). It is a shattering picture of not just how badly the media read the potential outcome but arguably more importantly, how little influence the print media’s view had on voter behaviour. Increasingly, journalism looks not only out of touch but also from a different generation.
In the midst of the critical backlash about ‘fake news’, Facebook was identified as the key culprit. In the aftermath of the US presidential result, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that ‘99 per cent’ of his site’s information was real. But even that came under scrutiny. How could he—or anyone—know that for certain? Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman was categorical: ‘It would be impossible to fully quantify the amount of fake news on Facebook’, he said (Mantzarlis, 2016).
Zuckerberg’s subsequent remarks about establishing a fact checking regime to eliminate some of the potential for fake news failed to impress some of legacy media’s more sceptical players. Verification it seems is an activity best left to those who start from a position of truthful storytelling. Guardian editor Katherine Viner could not withhold her suspicion about Zuckerberg’s motives. ‘To him it’s just about content. It’s not about good, factual content, true content . . .’, she told a Sydney audience (Dawson, 2017b). Indeed, it is hard to find a legacy media representative with a good word to say about Facebook from a commercial or content perspective. Facebook and Google have become the titans of the twenty-first-century media, leveraging consumer engagement and gobbling up advertising dollars to the tune of 99 cents of every new dollar of advertising in the USA (ibid.). If history teaches us anything, it is how untrammelled commercial power and dominance of a media landscape can have a negative impact on public debate. Just five years ago, Google and Facebook were research tools for young journalists: now they represent something far more challenging to mainstream media.
These developments would not have occurred without the erosion of journalism’s credibility that has been assailed from every aspect of the job. The print media, in particular, is no longer the gatekeeper: the gate, the fences and everything else between the street and the business front door have been torn down by a massive array of free niche information providers, born and evolving on the web, and gleefully multiplying into areas of interests that legacy media can only dream of reaching. It is a great pity that at what is probably the job’s most vulnerable point, journalists are caught in a terrible dilemma: the commercial hunt for (digital) eyeballs with ephemeral stories that are often light on context and heavy on speculation and commentary. All of these conspire against the traditional values of measured, verifiable and (aspirationally) objective reporting.
That kind of reporting takes time. News websites are often about instant coverage, configured to fleeting attention spans and busy people. Content might be king but it is a feckless and unpredictable ruler. And consumers cannot be guaranteed to understand what they read. The US research found that two in three people thought that fabricated news caused a great deal of confusion about what were actually the facts. If that not was not confronting enough, 80 per cent of younger consumers—those on the cusp of making their university course choices—were not able to distinguish between ‘sponsored content’ and real news.
Not only that, but high school students did not verify photos they saw. Many college (or university) students failed to identify possible bias in a tweet from an activist group. Stanford University researchers who undertook the study were shocked at what they found. ‘Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite’ (Domonoske, 2016).
The confronting question for journalism academics at the heart of that research is that the social media generation may not be equipped—or sufficiently interested—to actually understand what news is, and how it differs from other kinds of information. What their parents’ generation absorbed—a ‘news literacy’—is missing from their children’s cultural DNA.
Other social media—While much has been said about Facebook’s role in the current climate, some other social media platforms cannot escape scrutiny. President Trump’s strategy to supposedly bypass legacy media by trying to communicate with voters through frequent use of Twitter is arguably less effective in reaching the electorate than it is annoying the media. As English commentator Lynsey Hanley put it: ‘Because those who work in the media and politics use Twitter relentlessly to communicate with each other, they assume that everyone else uses Twitter, and therefore fails to appreciate that reporting someone’s tweets is not necessarily news’ (Hanley, 2017).
Herein lies the compounding problem around the fake news debate: the prevalence of communication confined to just 140 characters represents a perfect opportunity to exclude context and meaning, while spreading a message that can be misleading at best and downright false at worst. And the media’s propensity to see some of this as ‘news’ legitimizes that communication, extends its shelf life and confers an element of authenticity to its content, and therefore its author.
Trump has more than 25 million followers on Twitter but it is unlikely that the majority of them are actually the people who put him in the White House—79 per cent of Twitter users live outside the US. The reality is that Twitter is more of an elite tool than Facebook—what makes Twitter work for those such as Trump is that mainstream media report the tweets through conventional means, which is the way the messages reach a wider audience. It is also far more difficult for Trump’s abbreviated message to be filtered or misrepresented in a missive as short as a tweet.
The job distribution dilemma
One of the most obvious effects of the decline in legacy media is the loss of journalism jobs. This is true around the world. It is a simple formula: advertising declines, newspapers shrink because there are fewer ads, there’s less space and therefore, there is not a need for journalists to fill the columns. The broad anecdotal global pattern is that regional and smaller newspapers are hurt the most in these economically straightened circumstances.
In the past two years, the biggest Australian print organizations—Fairfax and News Corp—have both made significant reductions in regional and local publications. More than 100 jobs in Fairfax regional editorial operations went in 2014–2015, and in 2016, News closed seven of its 33 newspapers in the Leader stable in Victoria. Aside from the loss of journalistic talent, there is an accompanying narrowing of local news coverage. It is equally true in the UK and the USA. When local papers close, there are even less opportunities for local organizations and the community to ventilate important issues. Fake news can slide its way in to such information breaches.
Journalism has always been a difficult profession in which to find a start: only the very best students will be able to secure a job with a main media player, and these days, that is often hinged on an internship where the student finds themselves doing hard reporting because the paid staff actually are too thin on the ground to cover some news. But what makes this current situation more challenging is that the flatter newsroom hierarchies mitigate against young journalists finding opportunities to progress within an organization. While it is almost a cliché now that Generation Y will have far more jobs in their career than their parents, it is not necessarily true that young journalists will want to move on after only a few years with their employer. But the demands of work, combined with fewer advancement opportunities, may well turn them away from staying in an industry that demands energy and drive. Now more than ever, it is a profound challenge to prepare a journalism student for such a complex set of circumstances.
Solutions and potential strategies
Putting aside the clichés of management-speak that configure the current challenges as a series of opportunities for those with the right attitude, there has rarely been a more compelling time for journalism educators to return to the primacy of the basic purpose of journalism. The cavalier approach to facts, the determination to see the world through the prism of self-interest and prejudice, and the angry disregard for the journalist’s role in democracy is the antithesis of what J-schools teach. But for several decades the urgency to reinforce the journalist’s role has been missing—it was, in many ways, considered self-evident that journalism mattered: Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, most famously in the US, but plenty of similar local examples, from thalidomide, to corruption in Queensland and rorting in Canberra, were revealed by journalists doing their job. These were powerful emblems of what journalists can achieve in a robust democracy. As those journalism noteables Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel put it: ‘The news media serve as a watchdog, push people beyond complacency, and offer a voice to the forgotten’ (2003, p. 18).
These have always been admirable goals but they now appear to matter less to many news consumers. Journalism educators have to reaffirm the centrality of these tasks, to ensure graduates know they have a vital role to play in their community. Put simply, we cannot allow the jaundiced view that permeates some sections of local communities to compromise young journalists’ passion for wanting to make a difference to the society they serve.
This might once have been a noble, even esoteric expression of ambition. Now, it has to be central to the education and guidance of journalism students. But it will only have some value if they are actually taught the skills that enhance that job description. The mainstream media has known for several years that it is more important than ever to present verifiable material to its readers. The industry has, in some instances, taken the lead: the French newspaper Le Monde has established its own fact-checking unit to eliminate online fake news. The Washington Post fact-checks President Trump’s tweets and a British charity, Full Fact, is working on an app for journalists to be able to check statistics on the spot, and challenge them at press conferences (Pritchard, 2017).
The media knows that the cost of mistakes is not always financial, but arguably more damaging to reputations and credibility. The steady drip of media scandal, mistakes and beat-ups has eroded so much of the community belief in journalism. Sadly, it has also obscured so much of the good that journalism has done. The media’s basic commercial need to be read, watched and interacted with has driven a focus on ensuring material is correct. The old journo slogan for digital news—‘We might be wrong, but not for long’—has been universally discredited. Most reputable news websites will not rush to be first on line just for the sake of it—they will hold back the information until they can be sure they are right or have a definitive version. This determination to ensure information is trustworthy is more vital now with social media so firmly within the media’s focus as sources for news.
US journalism educators have been trying to establish a stronger focus on fact-checking and verification. Charles Glasser, of The Arthur Carter Center for Journalism at New York University’s Graduate School, takes a simple approach to the issue. ‘I teach reporters that “you can’t publish what you can’t prove,” . . . Where most media law classes teach “here’s how to get away with it,” I prefer to teach that good journalism is the best defense,’ he said (Stearns, 2016).
It is a laudatory and simple message that every journalism educator can appropriate. Tenacious journalism—civic-minded, social change, life-affirming reporting—is historically built on being able to know that the information being passed on to readers is verifiable. Faith has to be placed in facts. They are the cornerstones of the pact between journalists and readers. The word ‘fact’ only entered common usage about 350 years ago but it took on a power that was the reporter’s shield through generations of worn-out shoe leather. ‘Facts’ may be under assault but it is worth remembering their intrinsic power. ‘[T]hey trump authority: President Trump saying that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest ever, cannot make it true,’ historian David Wootton argues (Wootton, 2017).
Conclusion
The challenge for journalism educators is to make the discovery, preservation and dissemination of those facts—no matter how uncomfortable they may be—the key focus for every journalism student. The Internet is awash with opinions—personal views about everything from fingernail varnish to the Palestinian problem—but facts are a different matter. They have an objective value; it is time to go back to the basics of recognizing the centrality of facts to the job of journalism. Only then can we start to rebuild the trust with the community of news consumers.