How technology disrupted the truth

Sébastien Thibault Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

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

Tue 12 Jul 2016 06.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 28 Nov

2017 18.11 GMT

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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.”
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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.

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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?

How technology disrupted the truth – podcast

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.

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The Vote Leave campaign bus, featuring a widely disputed claim about
UK contributions to the EU. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
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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
campaignattempted 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.”

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Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

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.

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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.

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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.

Here is the news – but only if Facebook thinks

you need to know
John Naughton

Read more

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
illustrationof 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.

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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.
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‘The centralisation of information is making us all much less powerful’ …
Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned for six years.
Photograph: Arash Ashoorinia/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”.

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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.
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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.)

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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.”

Anews-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.

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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.

Unreported Britain: without local newspapers,

who is keeping tabs?
Read more

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.
Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies
that lasted decades
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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
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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.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
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