The Role of The Press in the Media Ages
When the internet came up, there was an expectation that it would “free” people from the traditional curatorship of media vehicles. With this, the ordinary citizen would have free access to any and all information in an unintermediate manner. In fact, the advent of the internet and, more recently, of social networks completely changed the scenario of information dissemination. This one, which was once mediated by the press, has ceased to be so. With this, an important role that was previously carried out by investigative journalism, fact-checking, came to occupy a secondary position.
The scenario we see today is one in which information flows in a personalized way, permeated by content filtering. What occurred, in fact, was not exactly disintermediation, but rather that the human gatekeeper shifted to the algorithm gatekeeper, which captures, organizes, and makes the information available in a manner addressed to its target audience. In other words, intermediation never ceased to exist, it just changed owner.
The algorithms of users’ behavior manipulation, created by the computer giants, ended up causing a side effect: the confidence loss in the press. The press has a set of ethical and professional norms that give it credibility. The fracture in the confidence in the press has already footed these standards for corners. This opened a loophole for the diffusion of all sorts of rumors, sensationalist headlines, misinformation, etc.
21st-century journalism needs to rethink its role and win back the trust of its readers. I know it’s hard to compete with sensationalism and confirmation bias. Recently, I published three stories in Medium explaining why social networks tend to put people in bubbles, why people are prone to believe lies, and why the truth about the facts no longer matters to people. 21st-century journalism needs to reinvent itself, swim against the current, break the paradigm of post-truth, make the truth more attractive, return to being a reliable mediator between information and the reader. In this text, I will not present a formula for this. I’m not a communication professional. I’m just an observer of the phenomenon.
The very format of journalism has been completely modified with the popularization of the internet. People are no longer informed through paper printed press (newspapers), nor radios. Even the newscasts are losing their space. Nowadays, people are increasingly informed through news published on websites and shared copiously on social networks.
A survey conducted in 2019 showed that the number of American adults who prefer to receive their news over the internet (37%) is almost equal to those who prefer to do so on television (41%). Only 13% of Americans get information through print newspapers and 8% by radio. In addition to the digital format being the preferred path, nine-in-ten Americans receive at least some news digitally and about four in ten do so frequently. Those who usually receive news specifically on social networks (25%) or on online news sites or mobile apps (26%) are virtually equal in number.
In the case of Brazilians, who elected Jair Bolsonaro president in 2018 in a campaign in which social networks had a much greater prominence than official campaigns and political debates (Bolsonaro didn’t even participate in debates), these numbers are even more alarming. 41% of Brazilians use journalistic vehicles on the internet to read news, 27% prefer TVs and radios, 13% read newspapers and magazines, and 16% are informed through social networks. By “journalistic vehicles on the internet” means all sorts of sites with supposedly journalistic characteristics, some more neutral (later I will discuss this issue of “neutrality” in the press), others with an explicit ideology, on the right or on the left.
According to this same research, the informing way directly affects the person’s perception of political issues. The data revealed that the most critical of the President (who evaluate him as “bad” or “terrible”) prefer to inform themselves through digital information vehicles, as almost half of this group made this statement (49%). Among those who find Bolsonaro’s work “great” or “good”, 22% said that social networks are their main means of information, a percentage higher than the general average.
Journalism had to adapt to this new dissemination format of the news. News that is being widespread, more and more, in real-time. If a terrorist attack occurs on the other side of the world, or if an important or famous figure, as a politician, for example, gives a controversial statement, in a matter of minutes this news is on the internet. Was there time to do fact-checking? The real press should not prioritize the speed of disseminating information over reliability, otherwise it will lose the confidence of its readers. Speed is important, but even more is the accuracy and veracity of information.
Confirming this perception, the same research cited earlier revealed that local TV stations remain the most reliable individual source, despite having little online presence. In addition, the majority of people (64%) who receive news on social networks claim to pay attention to the sources they see on these sites.
Even so, 90% of Americans are informed at least occasionally through friends, neighbors, and family and 17% do so frequently. In large part, this happens by word of mouth (face to face or over the phone), as opposed to email, text, or social media. Overall, the majority of Americans (77%) see the internet as an important way to follow the news, but few consider it critical. In fact, only about a third of them (32%) think to be internet the most important form of information. Only one in ten says that the internet is not important for news, and a similar fraction doesn’t use the internet for news. When it comes to social media specifically, more than half of Americans (54%) describe it as an important way to get news, and 14% say it’s the most important.
An interesting finding is that, in the news coverage, Americans value accuracy, meticulousness, and justice. In a list of the seven central functions of news media, precise reports topped that list, being pointed out by about two-thirds (65%) of the interviewees as one of the two functions that they value most in the media. Next on the list, although far behind, are rigor (35%) and justice (30%).
The internet has enabled any individual to be a content creator. With this, the information is no longer reliable. We receive an avalanche of information every day and, in this tangle, it is difficult to “separate the wheat from the chaff”, that is, the reliable and useful information from that which is completely false or is a half-truth.
Lying and misinformation have always existed in the history of mankind long before the invention of writing. False news was, to mention in passing, the rule long before the advent of mass communication. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, newspapers and tabloids disputed public opinion each with their version of the facts for a certain type of reader. It was difficult to distinguish fact and distortion from the truth. What has changed with the internet is the volume, scale, and speed of its spread, which has no precedent in history.
At that point, it is worth discussing the so-called fake news. It’s important to understand that fake news is not “news”, in the sense of the word. Fake news adopts the same format of news published in newspapers, posing as true news; they present themselves as statements produced by a professional newsroom, that is, they are a falsification of the journalistic report or the opinionated editorial. Because that they are called “fake”. The real news is produced by journalists who work for a press agency with a legal record, a sure-to-know address, and editors who can be prosecuted in court if they lack the truth. This news may even be untrue (and unfortunately this happens quite often), but they are not fake. When the New York Times published the news that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing chemical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this was false news, but it was not fake news.
Another important aspect to understand is that not every lie is fake news. As already said, fake news is news that goes by true, although it’s not. Lying is another concept. Not every lie is conveyed in the form of fake news. There are countless other ways to tell a lie.
In summary, fake news is not news, false news is not necessarily fake news, not all fake news is a lie (although the overwhelming majority represents, at most, half-truths), and not every lie is fake news.
Another important feature of fake news is that they come from an unknown source, that is, its origin is untraceable. Its authorship is almost always forged and, as a rule, decontextualizes the arguments to produce false understandings. They have always the purpose of deceiving the reader, leading him to adopt different decisions of those he would make if he knew the truth of the facts. Fake news fundamentally relies on digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and microtagging algorithms.
Fake or false news provokes much more emotional appeal than true news. A study published in the Science journal pointed out that false news was 70% more likely to be shared by people than real ones. The study looked at 126,000 posts containing rumors and false news, which were shared by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. The top 1% of false news cascades spread to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, while the truth rarely spread to more than 1,000 people.
Contrary to common sense, the human mind is not specially designed to behave rationally. We are spontaneously driven to all kinds of logical fallacies of thought: mistaken conclusions, belief in authority argument, confirmation bias, etc. If we believe in something, our mind works by valuing the information that confirms that belief and invalidating those that contradict it. For Joel Pinheiro, Brazilian economist and philosopher: “A journalism that serves to confirm the beliefs and feelings of its readers have already given up its mission of informing.”.
Fact-checking work has always existed in the traditional press. There was, and still is, the figure of the checker, which checks the statements and information and does not miss errors and inaccuracies to the message recipient (content consumer). The journalistic investigation aims to inform the reader/spectator/listener only proved and verifiable facts. Jonathan Foster, professor of journalism at Sherffield University, once said: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”.
In addition to fact-checking, there is also debunking (checking memes, tampered photos, and videos, etc.) and verification (checking the veracity of contents from unofficial and automated-produced sources).
Here, too, it is worth distinguishing the fact itself (and here I refer to natural, historical, political facts, etc., that is, any kind of fact) from the opinion about the fact. Issue opinion regarding a fact, as long as this is true, is absolutely normal. There’s no problem with that. Not even in the press! It’s more and more common in the press that journalists do not limit themselves to just giving the news. They go further, commenting on it. Interestingly, the above-mentioned research revealed that the majority (61%) of U.S. citizens think journalists should not share their personal opinions about the news they broadcast, and only 36% think they should.
Press has never been and will never be impartial. There is always an ideology permeating the transmission of the news. What the press cannot do is falsify the facts. But this doesn’t mean we can’t expect an ideological bias behind the news. This will always be! Even for those vehicles considered “neutral” or “plural”. Ask Noam Chomsky about it!
The Middle Ages were also known as the Dark Ages (which is a bit unfair, let’s face it). Today, we live in the Media Ages, which suffers from the opposite problem: excess of light. Never before has information flowed so quickly and accessible to all audiences. However, the same can be said about misinformation, which, as it turns out, is much more exciting and attractive. Paradoxically, misinformation is caused by the abundance of information and people’s preference for sensationalist news, conspiracy theories, and theses that reinforce their initial expectation about the facts narrated, through confirmation bias.
This misinformation brought on by too much information is causing a phenomenon that some call “idiotization” of society. The word “idiot” comes from the ancient Greek ἰδιώτης (idhiótis), which means “a private, individual citizen”, derived from ἴδιος (ídhios), “private”. This word was used disparagingly in ancient Athens to refer to anyone who strayed from public life. The modern idiot is just like that! He lives his private, individual reality. I have already said in another story that the truth has become a personal choice. Each one chooses his version of the truth, according to his personal convictions and his social and political conveniences. However, this “parallel universe” is not that individual. The internet makes it possible for the idiot to share his version of the “truth” with others like him, or who think like him. Hence the concept of the internet bubble. Each bubble has its own version of the truth. You can choose yours! The recipe for producing an idiot is to put all of these ingredients (social media, content targeting algorithms, cognition biases, the abundance of information, etc.) in a cauldron, mix well, and simmer.
But I don’t want to dwell on that. It’s time to finish this story. This subject is so extensive that it would give rise to another story. In addition, there is already a lot of literature available on the topic. In this regard, I recommend that you listen to the song American Idiot, a composition by Billie Joe Armstrong performed by Green Day, and read the texts How America Became an Idiocracy and The Year of the Idiot, by Umair Haque, and, for Spanish readers (you can use the automatic translation of Google Chrome too), La Idiotización de La Sociedad Como Estrategia de Dominación (The Idiotization of Society as a Strategy of Domination), by Fernando Navarro.
While the Middle Ages were characterized by the ignorance of people in general, the Media Ages are characterized by the idiotization of society, which is a different phenomenon. Ignorance is due to the lack of information, whereas idiotization is caused by the abundance of it and the difficulty of people in “separating the wheat from the chaff”, that is, identifying what is true, what is a half-truth, and what is a lie in the information ocean available on the world wide web.
In the past, the press lit up the darkness, shed light on the obscurity of ignorance. Perhaps it’s time to go the other way: cover the light that now blinds us with a little shade. Obviously, I’m not suggesting a return to the Dark Ages. But, as we are seeing, too much light is blinding people. Maybe the best thing is a half-term between total darkness and sunlight, a twilight perhaps. After all, it’s in the dark that we perceived the fireflies.
