When opinions try to displace facts
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
edited by Marco Nurra
🔔 Pleased to announce our first +350 speakers #ijf17. Many more to come. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!
- Human rights activist Nabeel Rajab is facing prison for saying journalists are banned from Bahrain. He has been in custody since June 2016 after writing an article for the New York Times about human rights abuses in his country.
- Swedish journalist goes on trial for helping refugees. Fredrik Önnevall is in court this week facing charges of people smuggling after helping 15-year-old Abed travel to Sweden. “Do I regret it? Not for a second,” he said.
- Six media workers are facing up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine after covering inauguration protests. All six were arraigned in superior court on Saturday and released to await further hearings in February and March, according to court filings
- Fake think tanks fuel fake news. Fake news isn’t just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus “think tanks” raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies’ pull quotes and flashy stats become the “evidence” driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump’s tweets.
- Breitbart News tries to go mainstream. “I’m building The New York Times,” Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle told me. “That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m building a journalistic enterprise that’s designed to replace all of you.”
- When is it appropriate for journalists to say that Donald Trump is lying? “It would be nice if there was general agreement on this question, but there isn’t. Some media companies clearly believe that lies should be called what they are. Others believe just as strongly that using the word ‘lie’ is not appropriate unless we know the speaker’s intent. In other words, they argue that you can only call a statement a lie if you know for a fact that the person who said it knew it was false — and that they did so in a deliberate attempt to deceive or mislead their audience.”
🔔 Mathew Ingram will be a #ijf17 speaker - Citizens must want to be smarter about how to interpret the messages we encounter every day in government, in media, in the workplace, in business and advertising. Here are 15 rules for a saner news experience.
- Swedish comic strip teaches that internet voles are full of fake news. Children’s magazine Bamse, a cartoon bear known since 1966 for his love of “thunder honey”, will next month tackle the issue of knowing when to trust news.
- Media literacy: ideas for teaching and learning about fake news. The New York Times has update its 2015 post with new resources for helping navigate this uneasy landscape. Divided into two sections — The Problems and The Possible Solutions — it offers practical activities and questions throughout.
- How reporters around the world cover leaders hostile to them. The experience of various journalists who have worked in unfriendly media environments underscores both how America differs, and the typical tactics with which leaders hostile to the media can skirt investigation. And here are five lessons from reporting in the former Eastern Bloc.
- The team behind the Panama Papers calls for a similar collaborative investigation of Donald Trump. “We were successful because we collaborated with other journalists. Now it is time for the media to join forces once again — especially given the threat Trump poses.”
- Journalists around the country are joining a Slack channel devoted to FOIA and Trump. As of Thursday, 1,500 people have signed up. Most are journalists, about half from national newsrooms and half from local newsrooms around the country.
- De Correspondent now has 50,000 paying members. “We involve readers in our reporting and give members a voice on our platform. Journalists share their story ideas and setbacks, and readers respond with invaluable insights (based on professional, academic, or personal experience).”
🔔 Ernst-Jan Pfauth will be a #ijf17 speaker
One more thing…
Welcome to dystopia — Reality vs ‘alternative facts’
Last Sunday, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Meet the Press” that the White House press secretary Sean Spicer had been providing “alternative facts” to what the media had reported, making it clear we’ve gone full Orwell*. Here is a selection of articles you must read:
- The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it, Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post
- ‘Alternative facts’ and the costs of Trump-branded reality, Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times
- Don’t let Trump get away with ‘alternative facts’, David Uberti, Columbia Journalism Review
- Send the interns, Jay Rosen, PressThink
- Put on your big-boy pants, Journos, Jack Shafer, Politico
- Don’t ridicule ‘alternative facts.’ Fact-check them, Alexios Mantzarlis, Poynter
- Publisher printing more copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ after spike in demand, Brian Stelter and Frank Pallotta, CNN
- Sean Spicer defends inauguration claim: ‘Sometimes we can disagree with facts’, David Smith, The Guardian
*According to ‘1984’ by George Orwell, “doublethink” is:
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.”
International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia.
