The disinformation industry is growing at an alarming speed and undermining democracy in an incremental manner. As part of this endeavour, there is a conscious attempt to remove the lustre from some defining terms. For instance, words such as pluralism, inclusiveness, fraternity, equality, and affirmative action are seen as terms defining the politics of a bygone era. The echo chamber of social media further distorts the truth.

Sometimes, readers send me WhatsApp forwards asking why the newspaper did not carry a particular story. They use social media trivia to prove a point that journalism is inherently against the ruling elites. In the present climate where conspiracy theories abound and forced false equivalences reign, readers must know that a news ombudsman has a framework to evaluate complaints and compliments. As the Readers’ Editor, I am committed to rectify any journalistic flaws through a process called ‘visible mending’. I evaluate news and investigative reports based on facts but rarely entertain complaints based on perceptions.

Commitment to inform

Readers must realise that the cyberspace consists of both knowledge and ignorance. However, today its commitment to inform is nearly outweighed by the voices of the apologists for the regime. Credible and trustworthy journalism is often pitted against blatant propagandist drivel. What is happening now is a clash of ideas between one set of professionals committed to knowledge production for public good and another set of partisan groups involved in ignorance production for political longevity. And this is the difference between sensitive journalism and the puffery of propaganda.

Philosophically, the idea of knowledge production has been explored in a systematic manner and the discipline is called epistemology. It would be helpful for the readers to know about a nascent discipline that is gaining ground among academia. It is called ‘agnotology’, which means the study of ignorance. Two professors of history of science at Stanford University, Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, edited an anthology of essays titled Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which looked at the theme of what keeps ignorance alive and what allows it to be used as a political instrument. Scholars of the essays explained how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings, through mechanisms such as deliberate or inadvertent neglect; secrecy and suppression; document destruction; unquestioned tradition; and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturo-political selectivity. Agnotology is “the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten”.

In his introductory chapter, ‘A missing term to describe the cultural production of ignorance and its study’, Mr. Proctor argued: “Ignorance has many interesting surrogates and overlaps in myriad ways with — as it is generated by — secrecy, stupidity, apathy, censorship, disinformation, faith, and forgetfulness, all of which are science-twitched. Ignorance hides in the shadows of philosophy and is frowned upon in sociology, but it also pops up in a great deal of popular rhetoric: it’s no excuse, it’s what can’t hurt you, it’s bliss.” In a forceful manner, he explained how technologies cause the proliferation of ignorance: “The public seems to be awakening to the fact that in the midst of the ‘information’ explosion, there has been an ‘ignorance’ explosion as well.”

In 1984, Thomas Pynchon, in his introduction to his collection of novellas Slow Learner, wrote: “Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know, rules of operation as well.” We need to know the contours of the ignorance that flows from prime-time noise. The ignorance-generating mechanism has a sense of coherence, creates its own set of tortured data, politically vacuous vocabulary, and eliminates the distinction between justice and revenge. It stands testimony to George Orwell’s observation: “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them”.

A cursory reading of the responses to critical voices in the comment section of this newspaper proves that there is an explosion of ignorance. In the short-term, journalists who retain their analytical and interrogative spirit may pay a price for speaking truth to power. But they are performing an irreducible and inalienable democratic duty: confronting a system that produces ignorance.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

The Neiman Reports recently explored the idea of ‘dialogue journalism’ in a piece titled, “Can dialogue journalism engage audiences, foster civil discourse, and increase trust in the media?” In that report, Chuck Todd, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed: “As a journalist, you can’t just sit in the observation tower anymore and report that one side is saying this and the other side is saying that. Listening to community voices and encouraging them to listen to each other is not a new tactic in journalism, it’s just more of a necessity than before.” In polarised times, dialogue helps people listen to each other rather than emphasise their own points in echo chambers. In my experience, The Hindu’s Open House has become a forum for engagement. It is a form of dialogue journalism.

Discussion in the Open House

We invited 40 readers for the last Open House, which was held in Kochi on July 27, for a free and frank exchange of ideas with the senior editorial team led by the Editor. A representative from the management was also present to address non-editorial queries. We provided adequate time to the readers to raise their concerns. It was heartening to note that there were young college students, literary translators, teachers and retired bureaucrats in the audience. The reason for limiting the number to 40 was to ensure that every participant got an opportunity to express his or her opinion.

Louise Diamond of The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy once said: “Dialogue means we sit and talk with each other, especially those with whom we may think we have the greatest differences. However, talking together all too often means debating, discussing with a view to convincing the other, arguing for our point of view, examining pros and cons. In dialogue, the intention is not to advocate but to inquire; not to argue but to explore; not to convince but to discover.”

Instead of being trapped in the binary of digital media and legacy media, readers understood the value of the process of news-gathering and news processing. Two young readers, Anna Kattampally and Chithra S. Nair, both graduate students from St. Teresa’s College, said younger readers now wait for proper journalistic writing to know the truth as social media forwards carry too much misinformation. They told us that there is a dramatic increase in the sharing of sensational, unverified content which is eroding trust in various institutions. They said that the fact that such messages come from known circles give them some form of credence. It is in this context that they have decided to become readers of The Hindu, a newspaper which makes central to its news coverage the act of verification.

A difficult balance

Many readers spoke of a balance of hyperlocal, local, state, national and international news. Diverse opinions indicated that any fixed formula would make someone unhappy, as the interests of each reader are different from another’s. One idea that the Editor approved of was the creation of an edition-centric letters section to deal with local and civic issues. This can be a form of citizen journalism. He has promised to make the local letters section an interactive one: readers will raise issues and the newspaper will seek responses to these issues from the authorities concerned. One reader said that the official responses could become formulaic and wanted the newspaper to examine both the complaints and the responses, so that there is a system of accountability. This new section should be available within a fortnight.

In the era of digitisation, a question that was asked was, shouldn’t news be free? When there are multiple sources of information, why should a publication have a paywall? Some argued that the paywall proposal was an attempt to turn news into a commodity that people are willing to pay for.

The answer is simple: news costs money, and credible news costs more money. It is our own democratic investment to pay a fair price for high-quality journalism. For nearly a century, the revenue model was driven by advertising, which is now getting fragmented across platforms.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in