Even as we celebrate the start of the 34th Cebu Press Freedom Week today, many media practitioners in legitimate news organizations are burdened with a nagging feeling at the back of their minds, something that doesn’t necessarily have to do with freedom of the Press.
Last June saw a big drop in Filipinos’ trust in legitimate news sources. According to a study by the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, trust in news in the Philippines dropped by 10 points, with only 28 percent of polled respondents saying they trusted the news most of the time.
In the months between now and then there were no further studies showing that the situation has improved, although we hope it has.
Indeed, we have seen for ourselves how some people now turn to social media or certain online personalities for what they think is reliable information. They rarely turn to legitimate news organizations anymore.
It’s not just that, some people are actually convinced that the media is deliberately reporting untruths, lies, and falsehoods.
In a highly-charged or polarizing political atmosphere, many people tend to stick to their beliefs. And when the media doesn’t report what they want to hear, or reports what they don’t want to hear, they tend to look for other sources to validate what they want to hear, even if this may not be true. Then in their minds the media becomes untrustworthy.
But this isn’t all that’s happening.
The media, or at least the image of the media, is also being used. Disinformants now have the tools to create content that they present as coming from legitimate news organizations.
It can be as simple as attaching a false statement to a photo of a news source then placing the logo of a legitimate news organization, as if the report came from them. It can also be as sophisticated as making a computer-generated likeness that talks and sounds like actual people or news sources.
Not only that; disinformants can now use AI to create scenes that are the quality of real footage. It can be hard to tell what’s real from what’s reel. Of course, the technology can be used to make it look like someone said or did something he or she never did, whether the goal is to create confusion, destroy a reputation, spread a falsehood, or represent something that they want to happen.
Little wonder trust in the media is slowly being destroyed.
Our challenge now is to restore that trust.
While many of us media practitioners feel that that trust was unjustly and undeservedly lost, we still see it as our duty to restore it.
Doing so is key to keeping the media relevant in an age where speed is now being equated with accuracy, fame with credibility, and glitz with truth. An age where people quickly believe and share what they see, without checking first if it’s true or false.
Doing so would help stop disinformants and those who want to distort the truth from achieve their nefarious ends.
Doing so is to safeguard the truth and preserve freedom.
Something like this is easier said than done. But then again, the Press has never backed down from a challenge, surviving even what many people consider the worst period of our democracy, the anniversary of which we remember this week.