In this 300th column, I would like to answer some of our readers’ questions. Many of these questions seem like they are from social media, and this is what happens when Internet search engines replace brick-and-mortar libraries. Readers ask: What is journalism? Who is a journalist? Is journalism a business wedded to the market or is it a public good? What is journalistic truth? Why should journalism claim a higher social value than the information on social media?
Empowering people
I hope to uphold that line that divides a subjective indulgence from the honest introspection about one’s chosen vocation. As this column has repeatedly stressed, the act of verification is what differentiates journalism from all other forms of communication. Media scholars are of the firm opinion that news is that part of communication that keeps us informed of events, issues and personalities in the world. They have argued that though news may be interesting or even entertaining, the foremost value of news is to empower people.
Often, young readers ask whether an active blogger or a social media commenter is a journalist. The straightforward answer is ‘no’. This is because none of them subjects their copy to a multi-tiered process as is the case with journalism. Every report in journalism is vetted by at least two different pairs of eyes before it reaches the public sphere, a due diligent process that is unavailable with virtual world publications. The question of accountability makes the difference obvious to any discerning reader.
Journalism is both a public good and a business. Independent journalism can thrive only when it is economically sustainable. From long form reportage to in-depth investigations, news gathering remains an expensive operation and it would be naïve to not recognise the importance of a revenue model that does not impinge on the values of journalism. A good journalistic organisation balances its public interest obligations and its financial sustainability, where one does not subsume the values of the other.
On the question of journalistic truth, some readers cite a quote that has gone viral on social media: “If someone says it’s raining and the other person is saying it’s dry, it is not your job to quote both of them. Your job is to look out of the window and find out which is true.” This is a reductionist understanding of the role of journalism. Journalists must not only find out whether it is raining or not, but also inform people that some of their leaders did lie. This means reporting divergent claims, so that readers can make up their mind about whom to trust and whom not to. It would be a disservice not to report this. Under-reporting does not respect citizens’ ability to see through propaganda.
An important difference
On the question of comparison between mainstream media and social media, it is worth reading Zadie Smith’s 2010 review of the film The Social Network . She explained the vacuousness of the term ‘connection’ in social media. She wrote: “Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits — none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.” And why should such a shallow connection be valued over an organic relationship between a newspaper and its readers, which is based on trust, credibility and accountability?
Zadie Smith called The Social Network “a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore” and that is largely true of the virtual associations formed in cyberspace. In real space, the quest for information is for transformation, rather than for validation. Hence, journalism, with all its flaws, cannot be equated with the rants on social media. In the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, many valourised social media. The reckless association between platform giants like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica has removed that sheen. It is time for mainstream media to reclaim its due place as the provider of credible information.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
