WHAT is factual is not seen as trustworthy; what is unverified is treated as reliable.
These two scenarios tell us how trust in journalism is under threat, and that journalists face an existential challenge to remain relevant to their audiences.
As United Nations official Guy Berger said, when doubt is sown so that people in the end don’t know what’s credible, they are thrown back on their hearths - their networks, their social bubble, or a strong leader who reinforces predispositions, hunches and biases.
“The expectation that society can find professional journalism and trust it is eroded,” Berger said during the World News Media Congress organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News publishers (WAN-Ifra) in South Africa last June. Berger is director for freedom of expression and media development of Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).
“The overall effect,” Berger said, “is that healthy public skepticism about the merits between different information flows is shifting toward cynicism about all of them altogether.”
“The news media is in trouble,” said Jason Tanz in his Wired.com article titled “Journalism fights for survival in the post-truth era”. The advertising- driven business model is on the brink of collapse. With declining revenues for media companies, the industry has seen the loss of journalists through early retirement or redundancies.
But without journalism, who will go after the liars, expose the corrupt, check on government abuses? Who will ask the questions for the people? Who will report on triumphs and tragedies, and explain actual events?
WAN-Ifra chief executive officer Vincent Peyrègne called on news industry to take seriously the increasing number of surveys showing that people around the world are losing their trust in societal institutions, among them the news media.
“We used to trade in attention. But trust is our new currency,” Peyrègne said. “Any decline in trust erodes the foundation of our business: credible, first-rate journalism.”
What is clear is that the media industry has to go into self-examination mode on how to regain that trust. And the examination has shown that the great challenge of the next years is to build a different kind of relationship with the audience.
Cebu media organizations are doing their part in trying to regain that trust. They go back to journalism principles and standards, and they call out fake news, as they take extra care to attribute content correctly.
They use digital media to bring their journalists closer to the audience by responding to comments, showing how they report events by going live, and admitting and correcting errors. On the social media arena, they point to journalism standards being upheld regardless of platform.
If humanity ahead is to inherit a legacy to be trusted and cherished, the fight back for journalism has to be intensified, Unesco’s Berger said.
(This is a short version of my “Restoring faith in journalism” article in the Cebu Journalism and Journalists magazine for this year.)