A personal view: Fight “fake news” with ethical news
When the source lies, facts are the best counter argument
By Peter Bale
Each time I have tried to find the right moment to write a commentary on the phenomenon of “fake news,” some fresh outrage erupts and makes my thoughts at that moment instantly out of date.
As I write, the latest outrage is a burst of “fake news” direct from the source: the president of the United States asserting that his predecessor tapped his communications during last year’s election campaign.
Not content with making the claim on his Twitter feed, the president and his spokesman called for a Congressional inquiry, thus escalating a false claim — apparently based on a misreading of a clearly slanted story on the Breitbart “news” site — into a political and potentially judicial action.
President Trump has effectively abused his office with an unprecedented and provably wrong claim about his predecessor. [Even the much-maligned former head of the National Security Agency, James Clapper, has dismissed it.] Yet it is just the latest in an almost daily series of head-spinning challenges to the principles of judgment, facts and experience that typically underlie politics and journalism.
“We’re in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust,” U.S Senator Bob Sasse, a Republican, said in reaction to the latest Trump claims.
Rising to the challenge of the great faker
Professional journalists — ethical journalists if you will — face great challenges in confronting the phenomenon of the “leader of the free world” who is himself a stranger to the truth and yet seeks to denigrate those who would try to report the facts as spreaders of “fake news”.
I see several key factors at work in this crisis of truth, at least as far as the professional news media go.
First is the disintermediation of the mass media that the Trump campaign achieved and that has persisted since he entered the Oval Office. A single Tweet or Facebook post can set the agenda for the moment, the day and the week ahead, and get a Trump perspective — no matter how bogus — into widespread circulation before traditional media outlets have even drawn breath, as we know from the told saw that a lie travels around the world before the truth has its boots on. [Attributed variously to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and many others in.]
Or, perhaps this quote from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is spookily relevant: “The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.” [Given reports he has the book, it may fit.]
The danger of the disintermediation is not just that it puts professional media entities on the defensive — forcing them to express doubt, fact check and risk sounding shrill and hyper-critical; it is that the unquestioned and often untrue message is out and in the heads of millions with no intermediation by anyone with a sense of responsibility for the facts, be it an honest press officer, a government official with direct knowledge, or a journalist.
If you’re not worried about Trump’s direct-to-consumer media style, you should be: @realDonaldTrump on Twitter has more than 26 million followers, and the nearly-as-barking @POTUS now has 15 million. On Facebook, his two official accounts together have more than 26 million followers.
A scan of the comments and likes show he hits the target for many who prefer to believe him over the media.
Second is the deliberate framing of the media as the enemy. It is a classic tactic of fascists down the years to accuse journalists of lies or bias, to repeat it often enough to unsettle them and sow doubt in the mind of the public — the ‘Lügenpresse,’ of the Nazi era revived at Trump rallies. I could scarcely believe even Trump could, as president, tweet: “The FAKE NEWS media…is the enemy of the American people”. Yet it is a pattern: sow doubt, cast slurs, create a slogan, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Third is the impact of the roar of the crowd, the cacophony of social media of legitimate sources clashing with the illegitimate. The noise that surrounds everything in a deafening, unfiltered waterfall of fact mixed with opinion mixed with nonsense mixed with abuse. It’s hard for the media — the ethical media — to stand aside from that fray.
I don’t believe we are cognitively ready for all that white noise. Richard Evans, a British historian whose testimony condemning the Holocaust denier David Irving in a trial that was depicted in the recent movie Denial, believes we are in a new era of turbo-charged public vilification. There are few restraints on what would once have been angry letters to one now shared with millions.
“The level of verbal abuse that you find now in the public discourse is just astonishing,” Evans said in a recent interview with Slate.
“Our public discourse has been poisoned, and that’s very true of the kind of extremism, the lies, the insults, distortions you get in public discourse in Germany in the Weimar Republic.” [I recommend reading the piece.]
Fight fake facts with facts
So, how can a journalist, a media organisation or even a concerned individual cope and respond to this dizzying shift in which black is rendered white and facts become “alternative facts”?
Part of it is going back to the basics: facts, sources, proof and fairness.
As a vocation, we have to also look at our own culpability in the widespread mistrust of news which now makes it hard to call out the lies of the Trump administration and defend “real news” against “fake”.
In my opinion, half-baked commentary and often shrill opinion have taken precedence over hard and fair reporting. That’s not a new phenomenon but it exacerbates the “us versus them” tone of the clashes with the president, but more importantly with his supporters and the failure to recognise them.
We’ve also sacrificed basic journalistic principles in some areas of coverage. From show business to celebrity culture, sensation, shock and shame have replaced judgment, perspective and fairness. That’s tarnished the reputations of publications and journalists. The impact is most notable in the UK, where a judicial inquiry into media conduct exposed abuse, leading to demands for regulation in a country without the defences inherent in the U.S. First Amendment.
Wikipedia recently declared its news team would no longer regard The Daily Mail and mailonline.co.uk as a reliable primary source. It’s a highly questionable decision given the site uses Russia Today, for example, but also understandable given the Mail’s fluid approach to facts and stridency, for example in attacking judges in a Brexit case as “enemies of the people”. In a typical piece of vicious overkill, the Mail savaged Wikipedia without a trace of introspection, describing the person behind the decision as “one twisted oddball”.
There’s also an increasing amount of truth to the depiction of the media by Steve Bannon — formerly head of Breitbart and now a heartbeat from the president — as the opposition. In lieu of political opposition it may have to be.
“The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” Bannon told the New York Times two weeks into the Trump presidency.
To be clear, I’m not using this commentary to look at the industry of bogus news which came to the surface during the election campaign from “fake news” factories in Macedonia or to look at opportunists like a Maryland would-be political analyst who fabricated an entire site and story about ballot-rigging by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
I’m keener right now to look at how the real media — the ethical media — handles this “post truth” environment where the president of the United States undermines almost daily some of the foundations of the US constitution and post-World War Two order with dangerous consequences.
When George W makes sense
“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy, that we need an independent media to hold people like me to account,” President George W. Bush said in a recent interview. “It’s kind of hard to tell others to have an independent, free press and we’re not willing to have one ourselves.”
As if to emphasise the implications of a U.S president calling the press the “enemy of the people” and locking CNN, the New York Times and others out of a White House briefing, Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Sen defended his government’s own increasingly restrictive stance on local media, noting: “In the United Sates itself, CNN and some others could not get into the White House because Donald Trump sees them as causing anarchy.”
Reuters news agency editor-in-chief Stephen Adler recently told his staff and readers that his team had managed for years to work in some of the most difficult environments in the world for journalists — from Turkey to Yemen and Russia — and would apply those same lessons to the new White House: “This is our mission, in the U.S. and everywhere. We make a difference in the world because we practice professional journalism that is both intrepid and unbiased.” His declaration was of old fashioned journalism values that are as valuable now as ever in my opinion as an old Reuters reporter.
I had the same reaction recently when another former Reuters colleague, now University of Indiana journalism professor Elaine Monaghan, used an online seminar by News Decoder to suggest that instead of “Mainstream News” — spanning a vast range of corporate and other outlets — we opt instead for a simpler definition: “ethical news”. For me it works like “fair trade” coffee or “ethically sourced” goods.
It’s about provenance: the care that goes into the product. Now, more than ever, we have to go back to some of those essential ingredients of respect for facts, accurate sourcing and fairness: even in the most trying of climates.
Thank you.
To read more on this subject:
It’s worth noting these resources to highlight or deal with the fake news debate and the loss of trust in media.
- The Trust Project, of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, a large scale attempt to promote best practice in sourcing, attribution and fact-checking
- Historian and freedom of speech academic Timothy Garton-Ash writing on the need for fact-checking in the post-truth age. [FT.com paywall]
- Guardian report on the BBC setting up a “Reality Check” team
- Channel 4 (UK) video on how to spot “fake news”
- CJR report of a Harvard study on the impact of right wing media in setting the agenda of the overall media in 2016. Out now.
About Peter Bale
Peter Bale is the President of the Global Editors Network. Until recently he was the CEO of the Washington investigative journalism non-profit, The Center for Public Integrity. He has also worked at CNN, MSN, Reuters and FT.com. This commentary is his personal view. In an earlier Medium piece he looked at the effectiveness of the Trump campaign’s use of social media.
Marty Baron—The Washington Post
“To use language that says we’re scum, that we’re garbage — You know, at one point, [Trump] said we’re the lowest form of humanity. That wasn’t enough, so he said we’re the lowest form of life itself. So I don’t know where we go from there. That’s apparently where we are.” (Recode, 14 February 2017)
Jill Abramson—The New York Times
“Most people believe there is truth and there are lies. ‘Alternative facts’ are lies. When you’ve spent your career being scrupulous about facts, it’s hard to adjust to life in Trump’s post-truth America.” (The Guardian, 23 February 2017)
Craig Silverman—Buzzfeed
“When I use it in stories, I cringe little bit because the term’s been so misused, it’s meaningless. So I try to use ‘hoax’ or ‘propaganda.’ If you write a story and use ‘fake news’ in the headline, you might be able to get more attention for it. But I worry about adding to the confusion.” (Digiday, 20 February 2017)
