The truth is out there,somewhere

In a previous Journalism special I argued that journalism was not becoming extinct, but evolving (McNair, 2009). This at a time when multiple crises of traditional print and broadcast news media business models were generating widespread anxiety amongst producers, practitioners and scholars of journalism. Newspaper circulations were in decline in most developed markets. Advertising revenues were falling as a consequence, and broadcast news and current affairs formats were under growing pressure as ratings shrunk and commercial logics prevailed. The view that something called ‘quality’ journalism was in danger of dying out altogether informed public commentary and academic research.

More than a decade later the perceived state of journalism is very different, with crises of another type.

On one hand, leading global news brands such as the Guardian, New York Times, the (UK) Times, CNN and the BBC remain in positions of pre-eminence, their managements having weathered the storms of the Noughties and learnt to use or monetise the Internet to their advantage. Some of these brands, like the Murdoch-owned titles in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have implemented subscription-only business models which, if not entirely making up for the loss of print sales, have provided financial cushions for Internet experimentation. Others, such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the BBC, remain free at the point of use, relying on their global reputations as journalism providers to attract advertising revenue, user donations and other sources of income sufficient to remain financially viable. The Guardian in particular has been a leading provider of globally agenda-setting investigative journalism, working at various times with WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism and other entities to make significant interventions in public debates about such issues as US foreign and military policy, international financial crime and the abuse of online surveillance tools by the US National Security Agency. ‘Old media’ have, in many cases become successful new media, with ongoing commitments to normative journalistic values such as editorial independence and objectivity.

In addition, the flowering of the Internet has generated myriad new sources of journalism, online only, but with recognisably similar ethos to the established brands of the analogue era. Slate, Politico, Huffington Post and Buzzfeed are among the most used of these providers, often breaking stories and sharing global news agendas. In late 2016, just after the US presidential election, Buzzfeed famously published the ‘Steele dossier’ detailing alleged links between Donald Trump, his campaign organisation and Russia. The publication was attacked by some ‘old media’ brands for violating commonly held journalistic standards of objectivity – the Steele dossier was not corroborated, although it was viewed as sufficiently credible to be the subject of CIA briefings to both then-President Obama and president-elect Trump (as of this writing, and much to the displeasure of Donald Trump, the matter of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump and Russian state and non-state actors was the subject of Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation).

In short, and while there have been casualties of the transition from analogue to digital technologies amongst news media organisations, it is reasonable to assert that the provision of journalism has increased, not fallen, as a consequence of the Internet. New providers such as Slate have writers just as eloquent and honest as those of the hallowed analogue age, and the range of editorial viewpoints expressed across the globalised public sphere is just as, if not more diverse than at any time in journalistic history (media scholars, we recall, used to complain relentlessly about right-wing bias in journalism).

And most of these titles are free online, making their money from advertising, book sales and other commercial spin offs. Moreover, by the globalised nature of the Internet, they are uniquely accessible and shareable to and between populations in countries hitherto denied independent, argumentative, elite-challenging journalism of the type taken for granted by a Guardian or New York Times reader. State censorship exists, of course, in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, but then it always has, and Internet-savvy people in these regimes find ways of working around the firewalls and bans that were never possible in the analogue era of centralised, top-down media systems. The Arab Spring, for all that it failed to deliver meaningful democratic advances in all but one or two countries in the Middle East, was fuelled and supported by the communicative power of the Internet (and social media in particular). Those revolutionary impulses may seem dormant for now, but they have not gone away. The role of online journalism in these movements, whether produced locally or accessed from overseas, should not be underestimated.

All of this, one might say, is the good news about journalism’s place in the globalised public sphere of the early 21st century: more news and journalism, available to more people in more places than ever before. The traditional newsroom has declined, yes, and many journalists in those newsroom roles have lost their jobs, but startups such as Slate and Buzzfeed, Huff Post and Mamamia have gone some way to filling the employment gaps. Organisations from banks to football clubs have online services delivering news to their customers, providing opportunities for journalism and public relations graduates that go some way towards compensating for the reduction in journalism jobs as traditionally conceived.

Alas, no silver lining comes without a cloud in its midst. The rise of the Internet, if it has not destroyed quality journalism as was once feared, has had negative consequences for the quality of public discourse.

The debate around ‘fake news’ which accompanied the rise to presidential power of Donald Trump (McNair, 2018) is shorthand for a phenomenon which few predicted and, to this day, most commentators and scholars struggle to combat or contest. The networked nature of the Internet, its speed, connectedness and relative uncensorability, combined with the ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (both barely more than a decade in existence), have generated an environment in which the concept of Truth in journalism has been seriously compromised.

As I observe in Fake News (McNair, 2018), journalistic hoaxes, fabrications and untruths have been around for as long as newspapers have been printed and sold, frequently exposed and punished by organisations as esteemed as the New Republic (Stephen Glass), New York Times (Jayson Blair) and the BBC (Vanessa). These organisations had gatekeepers which, if they sometimes missed a transgressor, acted accordingly when the crime was uncovered, and for good reason. Their reputations as journalistic providers were dependent on their being seen to restore normative values of truthfulness and objectivity.

In the Internet age, however, and when a billion or more people use Facebook on any given day, there are fewer gatekeepers, while unverified information moves faster and further than ever before. True or false, stories spread, go viral, become part of the public and become political conversation. Internet-savvy political actors such as Donald Trump have learnt this, to the extent that he publicly praised conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (whose Infowars site claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren and teachers was an Obama-inspired hoax). For every Slate or Politico there has emerged a Breitbart, mixing alt-right, mysognistic, racist nationalism with gleeful dissemination of hoaxes such as the Clinton-paedophile story of 2016 (Hilary was associated with a paedophile ring centred on a pizza restaurant – ‘pizzagate’ – a story shared on Twitter by Trump’s son, Donald Jr., as well as disgraced former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn).

While engaging in the dissemination of patently mythical news, these sites have accused mainstream journalistic media (MNM) of being ‘fake news’, often with the vocal endorsement of the president himself. The Murdoch-owned Fox News has become a key source of this propaganda, promoting all manner of conspiracy theories and lies. Just as this essay was being written, for example, the controversialist Anne Coulter described, weeping children at the Mexican border, separated from their parents under Trump’s policy of ‘zero tolerance’ for illegal migrants and asylum seekers, as ‘child actors’.

And then, lest we forget, is the influence of Russian cyber-warfare on Western democratic processes (and that of other states, no doubt, but Putin’s government is recognised as the main perpetrator to date). As confirmed by US security agencies and independent researchers (Pomerantsev and Weiss, 2014; Solodatov and Borogan, 2015), Russian ‘troll’ factories flood social media platforms with fake news stories designed to influence elections and political processes in ways favourable to the Putin regime in Moscow: the Brexit, and Scottish independence referenda, the 2016 US election, the 2017 French presidential election – all have been targeted by Russian cyber-warriors, and while it is difficult to prove the direct impacts of these efforts, few will doubt that they have shaped debate. When Wikileaks colluded with Russian hackers to release Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 – vocally supported by then-candidate Trump – the result was hugely damaging for the Democrats.