One of the difficult tasks I am forced to address, in varied forms, is the question of trust in mainstream media. Digital disruption has not only eroded the financial stability of the media business but also cast a shadow on its core competence and its public role as a trusted source for credible information. During a recent conference of news ombudsmen in Chennai, Rasmus Nielsen, the University of Oxford’s first professor of political communication and the director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, focussed on this. He shared a question posed by one of the respondents to his research that captures the catch-22 situation facing almost everyone today: “There’s that thing about reputation, isn’t it? It takes forever to build and a second to lose.” He spoke about the growing “generalised scepticism” where people conflate their lack of trust in politicians with the news organisations that report politicians.
Decline in trust
Media scholars Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan have come out with a study that looks closely at our reverse metamorphosis from information order to disinformation reality. Ms. Wardle is the Executive Director of First Draft, which is dedicated to finding solutions to the challenges associated with trust and truth in the digital age and is hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School. Mr. Derakhshan’s research is focussed on the theory and socio-political implications of digital and social media. They see a difference in the impact of rumours and fabricated information in earlier times and now.
They describe what is happening in the age of social technology: “information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers”. Their major concern is about the long-term implications of disinformation campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions. They rightly draw attention to the fact that trust in various public institutions is declining and hence to read it as a media problem will not resolve the crisis.
Ms. Wardle and Mr. Derakhshan cite another scholar’s work on the slow decline in trust: “Addressing the current state of mistrust in journalism will require addressing the broader crisis of trust in institutions. Given the timeline of this crisis, which is unfolding over decades, it is unlikely that digital technologies are the primary actor responsible for the surprises of the past year. While digital technologies may help us address issues, like a disappearing sense of common ground, the underlying issues of mistrust likely require close examination of the changing nature of civics and public attitudes to democracy.”
Understanding the terms
One issue contemporary scholars are unanimous on is that we cannot come up with restrictive legislation that would undermine free speech to counter the menace of disinformation. “The topics of mis-, mal- and disinformation are too important to start legislating and regulating around until we have a shared understanding of what we mean by these terms,” write Ms. Wardle and Mr. Derakhshan. They use a telling cartoon to explain the potential pitfall: while media and independent arbiters are fighting over who can determine what is fake, the politicians declare that they will decide what is useful to them.
Some of the suggestions that are emerging are also fraught with problems, as they tend to change the rules that govern good reporting. For instance, Jeff Jarvis, Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, asks journalists to cover the manipulators’ methods but not their messages. “We should not assume that all our tried-and-true tools — articles, explainers, fact-checking — can counteract manipulators’ propaganda. We must experiment and learn what does and does not persuade people to favo[u]r facts and rationality,” he writes.
Recognising the complexities involved in addressing the issue, Ms. Wardle and Mr. Derakhshan have come up with 34 recommendations, targeted at technology companies, national governments, media organisations, civil society, education ministries and funding bodies. Not all recommendations may apply to us in India, but they have given us a grid to rebuild trust and insulate ourselves from the information disorder. Readers do have a huge role in this urgent task.
