Journalism 2017 and the long way home

I am grateful to the philosopher Simon Longstaff for suggesting the thing I’ve spent the past 30 years doing may be at risk of losing its legitimacy, its social license to operate. What I am talking about is journalism; what he’s arguing is the very idea of journalists as servants of truth is under question.

If Longstaff is right, it is going to be one hell of a year or four. Having a leader of the free world who prefers to play golf rather than talk to the press corps may soon become the least of journalism’s worries.

This isn’t just about fake news, though the very fact that so many smart people are using ‘fake’ and ‘news’ together is of itself a worrying development especially when ‘lies’ and ‘propaganda’ have long served as more accurate descriptors.

This isn’t necessarily about post truth, though it’s clear that journalism’s servitude to the truth (or a concept of it) has become an openly contested and in some quarters an openly derided ideal. Hence, Longstaff’s concerns.

Post truth isn’t a brand new idea. But as with its co-conspirator, fake news, it’s not to be ignored either. Both ideas present journalism with challenges and opportunities.

My responses to what Stephen Colbert years ago coined as ‘truthiness’ — mixing facts and lies to create a semblance of truth — were to set-up a fact-checking website (currently defunct, crying out for a re-boot) and more recently to think long and hard about trust in journalism.

That thinking is taking many forms: automated fact-checking, informed sharing and a way of boosting trust in individual journalists. There is much to be done.

But Longstaff, Executive Director of the The Ethics Centre in Sydney, argues that while exploring new ways to enhance or perhaps recapture trust may well be a part of a jigsaw puzzle, it is not the all-important outline of the sky. If the legitimacy of journalism is at stake, journalists might need a new puzzle.

A great many words could and should be written about such a provocation. Some already have. But for brevity’s sake, let’s boil it down to one: home.

Journalism needs to find a way back home.

Most journalists would agree (if they had time to think about it between filing updates for the web) that ‘home’ is where their journalism is at its most powerful: as an informative, fact-based, truth-seeking service inside the most intimate, safest space of most people’s lives.

It is where they want to ‘see’ their journalism, as an essential part of the everyday fabric of domestic life. But the truth is journalism is being banished from home, literally and figuratively.

News-by-appointment delivered at set times (the morning paper, the evening bulletin) is being replaced by news-on-demand in the contested rush of the day. But the problem isn’t about delivery. It is about value.

Journalism once aided a sense of communal experience because it sought to contain the news in widely understood and valued artifacts, such as the daily paper. Now, it struggles to stay ahead of and feed the personal preferences of a fickle audience — in any way possible.

Now, it has to fight for relevance and attention against a torrent of information and ‘facts’ delivered by a plethora of non-journalists. Now, it has to find new ways to ascribe a monetary value to what it does because the traditional advertising business model is under dire threat.

I am not yearning for a lost era. Far from it: what needs to happen is an examination of how journalism regains its place in the idea of ‘home’.

Longstaff, warming to the image, offers an important distinction between ‘trust’ and ‘home’. “The person of low trust can still come inside, under certain conditions. However, the person who loses legitimacy is locked out, not to be admitted under any circumstances. This is because ‘legitimacy’ is more than mere functionality.”

Having a disposition to truth is more than a “mere commodity or instrumental value”. Journalists seeking truth on behalf of others require legitimacy — require permission to enter home.

Trump and his supporters seek to deny that legitimacy. Meantime, Facebook and other social networks have become an extremely fast and efficient way of distributing lies, pandering to individual prejudice and making money from journalism, real or otherwise.

I am not blaming Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms for a crisis in journalism. Today’s digital ecosystem will evolve and in doing so, present new threats and opportunities.

Besides, journalism can’t expect to be ‘saved’ by Facebook or any other platform. Sure, it’s good to have friends in high-tech places but it must save itself, must find its own way back home. It must become more of a service enriching people’s lives rather than content simply clogging up inboxes.

Journalism is at its heart a progressive concept. It seeks to inform citizens — so they can make better-informed decisions — and expose wrong doings in the name of social good. These ideals are neither solely pursuits of the political Left or an elitist clique. They are vital to informed public debate and democracy.

The question of whether Trump and his followers can use the existing low trust in journalists to de-legitimize journalism will haunt the media profession for at least the next four years if not longer.

But it will also give journalists all over the world multiple opportunities to listen to their audiences and engage with them in the what, why and how of journalism.

There are many ways home. This is the year to find them. Let’s keep each other posted.