These are hard times for journalists. Marginalised by social media, disparaged as elites by populists, sometimes killed for being inconvenient witnesses (at least 42 so far in 2024, though sources vary), and now imitated by AI bots. Rarely have journalists been held in lower esteem, yet they continue to play an essential role in society.
World News Day, on 28 September, aims to refocus public attention on this role. It is an initiative of the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) and a group of journalists led by Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American co-Nobel Peace Prize winner and director of the investigative outlet Rappler, and Branko Brkic, founder and outgoing editor-in-chief of South Africa’s Daily Maverick.
In advance of the event, we are sharing a few of their thoughts on the subject.
This is “a global initiative to draw public attention to the role that journalists play in providing trustworthy news and information that serves citizens and democracy”, explains CJF president Kathy English in an article written for the occasion:
“Facts are complex and truth is not always self-evident. Journalism is not infallible. In a polarised world, too many can’t agree even on what is a fact, and argue that truth is dead. That makes it all the more critical for both responsible journalists and the public to understand what constitutes trustworthy, evidence-based information. It is not simply a matter of delivering and consuming the news; it is about empowering people with the facts they need to navigate their world.”
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“This message could not be more critical or more timely. In a world in which we have increasingly witnessed fiction become fact and misinformation turn mainstream, choosing truth has perhaps never been more important – or more difficult. For the public, this means the need to distinguish between real news and rumours and falsehoods masquerading as fact, a challenge ever more difficult in this era of AI-generated digital content and ‘bad actors’ intent on sowing public discord with malicious disinformation. For journalists, it means doubling down on our core principle to serve the public with truth grounded in thoroughly verified fact. […] As the 2024 2024 Digital News Report (of Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism) tells us, “‘… across the world, most of the public does not trust most of the news most of the time’”.
For his part, Marcelo Rech, president of the Brazilian Newspaper Association, argues that:
The press is not the solution to all the dilemmas of our times, but try to imagine a world without it. Who would debug the difference between facts and rumours? How could you trust something or some institution if there was no certificate of credibility conferred by serious and independent journalistic coverage? Who would report the emergence of a new cyber scam in which people lose their savings? Who would investigate corruption and other crimes when government agencies are slow or negligent? Who would address the ills of Big Tech and the risks that social networks pose to emotional, political and economic stability? Finally, who would expose the power of corrupt autocrats and their threat to democracies?
Producers of independent journalism are not immune to problems, starting with the sustainability of the business itself. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of serious media organisations survive with a business model that suffers from the regulatory asymmetry of technology platforms. Because they are based on trust, no organisation can survive by giving up its ethics or making its conceptions of veracity and responsibility more elastic, as Big Tech allows.
It is only fair, therefore, that these platforms pay a “support fee” to clean the social pollution that threatens the mental health and stability of the planet.
“Everyone’s eyes are riveted on elections and major events”, observes Egyptian journalist Fatemah Farag. For the founder and director of Welad ElBalad Media, democracy is built above all at local level, “thanks to the work of committed journalists who go to work every day to provide information about, and for, their communities”:
This is not an easy job. Building, managing and sustaining local, public-service journalism capable of playing a critical role in supporting communities is often a thankless task. Across the world money has dried up as the business of journalism has been threatened by big tech. Jobs have been shed, quality has been compromised, resources are fragmented and the value of journalism is constantly contested. […]
And it seems that the very people we aim to serve are also increasingly jaded by misinformation/disinformation campaigns. Audience mistrust and wariness are daily realities. [..] We have seen first-hand the danger to democracy posed by losing independent – particularly local – media. We are now confident in the knowledge that the survival of a diverse, proficient media sector is an essential cornerstone in that pursuit of humanity and freedom. […]
The examples of those grasping this moment are out there: journalist-owned media outlets for some, print houses and products for others, community engagement for many – and that is just some of what is being done.
Fabrice Fries, CEO of Agence France-Presse, has a sober analysis:
We are no longer surprised that “fact-based journalism” is stigmatised as a front for complicity with the establishment, or that those who make it their business are sometimes asked to choose sides, to abandon a neutrality which, of course, can only be a sham. […]
Polarisation undermines the legitimacy of such enterprises, and the worst thing is that this process of delegitimisation is already showing definite results.
He holds a number of trends responsible for the decline in trust in the media: understaffed newsrooms; “the transformation, via artificial intelligence, of search engines into response engines that disintermediate the media”; “the pollution of the media ecosystem by AI-generated ‘cheap news'”; “destabilisation campaigns”; “account deletions by the hundreds of thousands by online platforms”; and “disinformation that has become a massive, everyday” thing. None of this surprises Fries. “Where we are surprised, on the other hand, is that it has hardly provoked a response. […] Often, what emerges from the stories of journalists who have been through these ordeals is how alone and helpless they feel.”
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