The Hindu believes it is the first newspaper in the history of Indian journalism to appoint a Readers' Editor. The Readers' Editor will be the independent, full-time internal ombudsman of The Hindu .
The key objectives of this appointment are to institutionalise the practice of self-regulation, accountability, and transparency; to create a new visible framework to improve accuracy, verification, and standards in the newspaper; and to strengthen bonds between the newspaper and its millions of print platform and online readers.
Trust in the age of misinformation
Every year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford publishes a report on the media. This year’s study, Journalism, Media, and Technology: Trends and Predictions 2020, documents the changing contours of the news business and how the industry is coping with the challenges posed by technology. It points out that at a time of economic and political uncertainty, news organisations may have to face more challenges to their sustainability. It says broken business models and platform companies are exacerbating the crisis.
Factors affecting journalism
The study also records a number of factors that are affecting journalism. It deals extensively with the impact of post-truth politics on journalism and has suggestions for news organisations on how to deal with this new reality. The study focusses mainly on the U.K. elections and the narratives surrounding Brexit. The findings are not encouraging: politicians have played with facts, avoided journalistic scrutiny, and succeeded in denigrating the media. The report cites the U.K.’s independent fact-checking organisation, Full Fact, which says that the six-week campaign saw “inappropriate and misleading campaign tactics that we hadn’t seen before”. The devious methods it saw included “an official Conservative Party Twitter account impersonating a fact-checking organisation and editing footage of a Labour politician to make it look as if he couldn’t answer a question about the party’s Brexit policy.”
The report says the reach of misinformation forced many news organisations to integrate fact-checking into their coverage and scrutinise politicians wherever possible. However, these special programmes did not get many views. The report points out that politicians are increasingly trying to bypass the media and convey messages directly via social media. Leaders across the world have become more belligerent than ever before, says the report, and cites the examples of Boris Johnson refusing to giving an interview to journalist Andrew Neil, the regular threats given to review the broadcast licenses handed out to media organisations such as Channel 4, and the funding arrangements for public media like the BBC.
Impact of fact-checking
While 85% of those surveyed said that the media should call out lies and half-truths, readership figures and audience engagement numbers indicate that growing indifference adds a new dilemma to news organisations. What is the impact of fact-checking? There is some indication that rigourous and relentless journalism sometimes leads to disengagement; people simply avoid reading the news. Can journalism effectively engage readers in the light of growing cynicism and negativity? Mary Hockaday, Controller, BBC World Service English, has come up with a possible answer: “We certainly need to offer fact checks and reality checks. But we also need content which explores good faith politics, what might be working, how policy develops and makes a difference. Otherwise we will push our audiences to disengage and distrust politics even more.”
These issues resonate with an Indian news ombudsman because this country is in constant election mode and political leaders here too use digital platforms for propaganda. It is not just Mr. Johnson who has refused to give an interview; Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in his second term and is yet to hold a single press conference. He also reaches his audience through his radio programme ‘Mann Ki Baat’, or Twitter, or soundbites to select news agencies which are not questioned. In a sense, we citizens get a series of monologues from our leaders.
Some of the best fact-check exercises in India happened following the brutal attack on the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. But they did not deter the peddlers of fake news from regurgitating the same old lies. What can a news organisation do in the present environment?
Journalists should bear in mind what Reuters Fellow Richard Fletcher says about the status of trust. He says the trust factor will get worse before it gets better. Explainers, contextual essays, increased space for data journalism, long-from reportage and analysis of difficult policy decisions are some of the journalistic means to confront the scourge of misinformation. Are these measures enough to stop the erosion of trust?
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
Making hope possible, not despair convincing
Is it possible to retain hope when charlatans dictate our terms of engagement with the world of the arts and ideas? This was the question I had to encounter during a documentary film festival in Chennai where I paraphrased the Welsh writer and academic Raymond Williams and said that the mission of journalism and documentaries “is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”.
The participants of the film festival were concerned about many things, but they were particularly agitated about the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur’s decision to form a panel to examine whether the poem, “Hum Dekhenge”, by the celebrated poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was indeed communal and hurt sentiments. This panel was formed after a temporary faculty member, Vashimant Sharma, and 16 others complained against the students for reciting the poem in support of the students of Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. If an exemplary artist of the stature of Faiz can be shoehorned into a narrow communal jacket, many tend to believe that despair is the reality of the moment.
However, when the media highlighted the absurdity of the complaint, the management was forced to retract its original position. Talking to this newspaper, the IIT’s Deputy Director, Manindra Agrawal, said that the panel is not going to determine whether sentiments were hurt or not, but would only investigate if there was any “deliberate mischief”. This climbdown in the present environment of impunity is a testimony to the power of journalism as a site of hope rather than as a megaphone of despair.
The power of Urdu
My linguistic skills are restricted to just two languages, English and Tamil. I have no knowledge of Urdu. But I was moved by the power of Urdu verses not once but twice in 2005. I was based in Kathmandu when Nepal was going through its worst political crisis, the royal coup. I watched as King Gyanendra dismissed the government and restored an absolute monarchy. He suspended the fundamental rights of Nepali citizens, including the freedom of opinion and expression, the freedom of the press and publications, the right to information, the right to constitutional remedy, and the right to property. Similar to what is happening in Kashmir now, a communication blackout was imposed across the country.
‘Speak’
This did not deter senior journalists in Nepal from assembling at the Yalamaya Kendra in Patan to formulate ways and means to keep the public informed of what was happening despite the draconian measures taken by the royalty. I was invited to join the deliberation and, unlike what is happening in India today, not seen as an alien poking his nose in the domestic affairs of a foreign country. Kanak Mani Dixit, a senior editor and regular contributor to this newspaper, invoked Faiz Ahmed Faiz in a moving manner. Armed with the brilliant multimedia production of Faiz’s major poems by the Dawn group of publications, Mr. Dixit rendered the poem “Bol (Speak)” and explained how Faiz made the blazing smithy a symbol of the freedom movement during colonial rule. Here is the English translation of the lines that moved me:
“Speak — your lips are free,
Speak — your tongue is still yours
Speak — your life is still yours
Look inside the smithy —
Leaping flames, red-hot iron.
Padlocks open their jaws.
Chains disintegrate.
Speak — there is little time
But it is enough
Before the body perishes
Before the tongue atrophies.
Speak — truth still lives.
Say what you have to say.”
In a year when the resistance cascaded into what Nepalese political historians call the Jan Andolan-II, another brilliant poem of Faiz ,“Soldier’s elegy”, was used to create a space for reconciliation after a decade of civil war. If Faiz can help restore democracy in our neighbourhood, he can do so here too.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
The importance of being the bearer of bad tidings
When I sought readers’ responses about the impact of digitalisation, and what measures this newspaper should take to reach out to millions who access news through their hand-held devices, I had three sets of nagging questions which eluded answers on my mind. First, can legacy newspapers retain their original credo of remaining a ‘newspaper of record’ in an era where news is breaking every minute? Is it important to retain the idea of recording the present for the future or, in other words, of performing the role of being the first draft of history?
Second, when digital marketing ideas like targeting and distributing content, Search Engine Optimisation and framing tweets to trend a story have become major determinants, has the tried and tested inverted pyramid story structure that dominated the news industry become redundant? Do we need a new forms of structuring a story that reflects the relentless nature of the 24x7 news cycle?
Third, in a heavily polarised environment, where does a readers’ desire to get news end and where does the wish to have a confirmation bias begin? If closed encrypted platforms like WhatsApp attract more readers because of the lure of confirmation bias, what is the role of journalism whose primary objective is truth?
Giving print journalism its due
Vijay S. Raghavan, a reader from Navi Mumbai, came up with a 2,300 word response in which he touched upon a range of issues, including the spread of multiple print editions since liberalisation of the Indian economy, readers’ perception of bias, and why print must be given its due even today.
He argued for more print editions that have a good mix of local and national stories rather than national editions which, in his opinion, fail to offer substantial reading fare. I am not sure whether the present economic reality will permit this newspaper to implement all his suggestions but one seems to be an immediate possibility: bundling the subscription for e-paper and the Internet edition into one.
V.N. Mukundarajan from Thiruvananthapuram felt that the news industry was not nimble enough in the first two decades of the 21st century and it took time to understand the aspirations, preferences, attitudes and reading styles of the youth.
In his view, publications are trying to navigate two landscapes — the traditional print and the online. “No two worlds can be as different as these two. The nature of the medium dictates the format, content, and curation of news stories… The screen demands understanding visual cues. The appearance of the page is as important as its content. The print is conservative; the screen is liberal, especially in its comments section,” he wrote.
He wanted to newspapers to follow the ‘Carl Sagan Standard’ to weed out fake news. The well-known astronomer came up an aphorism, “ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE) and Mr. Mukundarajan felt that ECREE should not be restricted to science but test all claims.
Baloney Detection Kit
Let me share Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit” which was succinctly summarised by the ever-engaging reader from Kerala.
The tools which he wants journalists to use in defence of truth and to deduct fake news are: “1) confirm the facts; 2) encourage debate; 3) remember that authorities can be wrong; 4) develop more than one idea. 5) try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it is yours; 6) quantify; 7) If there is a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise), not just one of them; 8) Occam’s razor — a rule of thumb. When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler one; 9) Always ask whether the hypothesis can at least in principle, be falsified.”
The biggest challenge for a newspaper in a polarised environment is to create a public sphere where debate, doubt, argument and dissent lead to a more informed choices without being subjected to savage personal attack. While discernible vitriol flows from open sources, the quantitatively overwhelming maliciousness is generated in the encrypted messaging world. Is there an acceptable approach to deal with the encrypted world of toxic circulation without undermining the privacy of the individual? If a newspaper fails to be the bearer of impending bad tidings, who else will perform that democratic duty?
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
