Steve Coll, a staff writer with The New Yorker and the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and NDTV consulting editor Barkha Dutt spoke at the American Center here on Thursday about the challenges facing the media as well as its role. The theme of the discussion was ‘public interest journalism in the digital age’, and people from various walks of life participated in it.
‘A dangerous time’
Referring to US President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference on Wednesday where he attacked certain news organisations, Ms. Dutt started off the discussion by saying that though it was a “challenging and dangerous time to be a journalist”, journalism’s contribution was “ever more relevant”.
“While we are talking about public interest journalism in the digital world, it isn’t just journalism that the digital world has changed. It has changed the nature of politics and power,” said Ms. Dutt.
Just as Mr. Modi reached out to the public through social media during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections campaign, Ms. Dutt pointed out, the President-elect of the U.S. too took to Twitter and Facebook to directly communicate with reporters. While this was changing politics, Mr. Coll said that that this was not the first time that the U.S. saw such an approach. He was referring to former U.S. President Ronald Reagen’s use of television to reach out to people.
Reagenesque moment
“What Trump represents in the social media age is a Reagenesque moment of re-setting how a President communicates with the public,” said Mr. Coll. He added that reporting on the incoming Trump administration would be difficult, but journalism has a role to play.
“This is a moment for old-fashioned reporting, to hold power accountable,” said Mr. Coll. On “fake news” being manufactured and shared online, Mr. Coll termed it a “new and dangerous phenomenon”. He said that there was a need to define what fake news is, and to hold social media companies responsible for the spread of such content. This comes after several fake stories, including one claiming that the Pope had endorsed Mr. Trump in the U.S. elections, were found to be shared millions of times on social media in the run-up to the November 2016 polls.
