Return to trust
The rise of misinformation could revive the business model of eyewitness reporting.
Once upon a time it was impossible to know what was truly happening in much of the world. Elites could send letters, and later on hub cities would have a telegram, but in both cases access was limited to a small number of people who would invariably spin things their way with no threat of being contradicted.
Beyond the city walls the picture was fuzzier still. Information would filter in with traders and travellers, all with their own story to tell. Events would be exaggerated or tinged with the mystical, particularly in oral cultures.
The printing press, pamphlets and eventually newspapers began to change this, but their gifts were unevenly distributed. By the end of the 17th century, a politician or businessman in Europe would have a decent picture of what was happening in his own country and a rough outline of the rest of the continent. The world beyond remained a mystery.
Since then successive technologies have pierced the shroud. Both the number of people able to access information, and the areas that are reliably covered, have steadily increased. With a few caveats[1], that’s a good thing for humanity. So it’s troubling that this trend is going into reverse.
The rise of misinformation, amplified by powerful AI tools to convincingly generate fake news, is well documented. While some people may fall victim to false narratives, the greater risk is of a majority of people becoming overly sceptical of true sources of information, since distinguishing fact from propaganda is becoming more difficult.
In other words, we are returning to a world where nobody can be sure of anything.
The harms are already apparent. Polarisation runs rampant in a low-information environment, since it is easy – and morally comforting – to believe the worst falsehoods about the other side. Demagogues thrive; Europe’s past is full of crusades, pogroms and witch-hunts.
All hope is not lost. Today’s fake narratives are not so different to the fey creatures and godly miracles conjured up by our ancestors. Many societies found a way collectively to throw off these superstitions and enter the modern era. The question now is how to repeat the trick.
Loss of trust
The news media played a key role in the establishment of a unitary truth, but were only able to do so because they enjoyed a high degree of trust from the public. Someone reading a newspaper in the 19th or 20th century might disagree with its editorial slant, but he or she would most likely believe that the underlying reporting was true. That’s no longer the case today.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has done a great deal of research on the progressive loss of trust in the media. Last year, it found that just 40% of people across 47 markets trusted the news, with the proportion being lower among younger people.
The Institute also asked people what specifically was likely to make them trust a given news outlet. Transparency, standards and fairness ranked at the top, whereas having a long history had less of an effect.
That suggests that the mission of rebuilding trust in the media is open to new entrants, and that legacy brands must work just as hard on their standards rather than taking trust for granted.
It also suggests that many of the fact-checking initiatives rolled out by the old media are misplaced, since these work on the assumption that that platform is itself trusted – which, in general, they aren’t. Legacy media should earn back public trust in their own reporting before trying to mark others’ homework.
A large proportion of the public now sees establishment media as biased, which is a difficult problem to solve[2]. But the Reuters Institute’s survey suggests that transparency and standards are more important than this. If standards are fixed, the impression of bias might fall away.
There is an institutional arrogance in the way some legacy media communicate their reporting, which evolved during a more deferential era in which a large newspaper or public broadcaster was almost universally trusted.
Take the phrase “it’s understood that”, beloved of establishment media. In ages past, most readers would have accepted that someone in authority had told a journalist something off the record, and both parties were to be trusted. Now people mistrust authority figures and journalists alike, and the phrase therefore raises suspicion; a higher evidentiary bar must be met if readers are to be convinced.
Boots on the ground
A way forward may lie with an innovation almost as old as the newspaper: the news agency. Eyewitness reporting is at the core of what they do, and their standards are second to none. As such, they should be well placed to rebuild public trust – or at least to serve as an instruction manual for how new media can do so.
My own journalism career began at Reuters, whose excellent training program continued to inform my approach to standards even after I became a regional editor elsewhere. The questions I learned to ask – How do we know this? Who said so? Why won’t they go on record? – need to be much more prominent in editors’ thinking if they want the public to trust their reporting.
In recent years agencies have been squeezed at both ends. On the demand side, many of the local and emerging-market newspapers that reliably bought their stories have shut down or reduced their budgets; and the agencies have not generally succeeded in reaching consumers directly, particularly for paying subscriptions.
In terms of supply, the most disruptive competitor was Twitter. Reuters and others used to generate huge value simply by having a trusted person on the ground in far-flung parts of the world where information was otherwise unreliable. But this network was expensive, and by the mid-2010s could be replicated much more cheaply by triangulating images, videos and written accounts uploaded for free by thousands of locals.
Now the wheel has turned again. The days when a savvy social media user could reliably distinguish truth from misinformation appear to be coming to an end. If the triangulation method no longer works, then the reporter on the ground regains their value – so long as they and their employer are themselves trusted.
That might mean a new lease of life for news agencies, or it might mean an opportunity for nimble new entrants. The business model isn’t obvious; the perennial problem of how to get people to pay for news looms large. But with the truth becoming ever harder to distinguish, a model based on trusted reportage may yet be viable once more.
[1] I have written about the mental health implications of receiving constant, detailed reports of distant human suffering here.
[2] This is in large part due to a misunderstanding of what impartiality means in a fast-changing political landscape, as I have argued here.