Arc Tangent

As I was nod­ding off last night, think­ing about an arti­cle I’d read in the paper ear­lier in the day which irri­tated me — because it wasn’t good jour­nal­ism. The exact arti­cle and its source aren’t rel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion — lets just take it for granted that in a world of media out­lets like Fox News (“it’s Info­tain­ment!”) there’s a cer­tain ques­tion hov­er­ing over the idea of jour­nal­is­tic integrity.

The sta­tus quo makes it very easy for the media to get away with pub­lish­ing what­ever the hell they want to. Most media out­lets are in the hands of a small num­ber of com­pa­nies; they have vested cor­po­rate inter­ests in being loud, con­tro­ver­sial and highly debated. There is very lim­ited incen­tive — other than altru­ism on behalf of edi­tors and jour­nal­ists — to report fac­tu­ally and honestly.

It hap­pens. Many arti­cles are writ­ten with every inten­tion of telling the truth, as it’s known to the reporter. Jour­nal­ists aren’t all evil bas­tards, and not every report­ing mis­take belies a con­spir­acy. It just doesn’t hap­pen enough, and prov­ably consistently.

The Prob­lem of Old Media

Facts and hon­esty don’t usu­ally sell. Most events, if reported fac­tu­ally, boil down to a lot of “x said y, which we can­not cor­rob­o­rate” and “we don’t really know if this was true, but here’s what eye­wit­ness Z said”. If jour­nal­ists were being really altru­is­tic, they’d pub­lish their sources, notes and records of inter­view to put their dis­til­la­tion of these mate­ri­als into greater con­text for those of us who are inter­ested in that con­text — and the greater truth behind their inter­pre­ta­tion (I take it for granted, dear reader, that you accept that any report­ing of news is an inter­pre­ta­tion of events from an inher­ently and some­times blame­lessly, some­times shame­lessly, biased source).

The aver­age reader doesn’t seem to want to know facts and the prob­a­bil­ity of their cor­rect­ness; doesn’t care if a com­ment has been taken out of con­text and blown up to make a huge fuss. They want to be wowed by gee-​whizz new break­throughs in sci­ence that are going to change their lives. Aver­age read­ers want Paris Hilton’s lat­est sex­ual escapades. We are emo­tional crea­tures, and we crave the stim­u­la­tion of out­rage and shock, gos­sip and hearsay.

An exam­ple of this behav­iour in the media can be seen on this very blog — my com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the Right Rev­erend Pro­fes­sor Tom Frame ear­lier this year were inspired by an arti­cle in the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald. This arti­cle was con­cocted by an overzeal­ous Uni­ver­sity of News South Wales news release and what I con­sider to be obvi­ous lack of fact check­ing and cor­rob­o­ra­tion by an Opin­ion Edi­tor to gen­er­ate controversy.

Prof­its, under the cur­rent sys­tem, are made by sell­ing adver­tis­ing. More eye­balls means more sales; more sales means more adver­tis­ing rev­enue; higher shock value draws more eye­balls. Tak­ing a bal­anced approach to report­ing, whilst infor­ma­tive and eth­i­cally laud­able is finan­cially laughable.

The Quandry of New Media

The pill for this ail­ment, I keep hear­ing, is blog­ging. The crowd will take up the reins and report on news. Surely, they can’t do a worse job of it! Sprin­kle some social media on it and gee-​golly, we’ve got fac­tual report­ing again!

There’s all sorts of prob­lems there though. Blog­gers are, by and large, unac­count­able for their deeds. Exist­ing news cor­po­ra­tions at least have a hypo­thet­i­cal man­date to tell the truth, and there are cer­tain laws which can com­pel them to do so. Blog­gers are much freer to say exactly what they want to — whether it be truth or not.

Good jour­nal­ism (as opposed to lazy news­pa­per arti­cle writ­ing) is a full time job — you go out, travel the world, talk to peo­ple. You check what they say with other sources. You flat-​foot it around some­times dan­ger­ous places, search­ing for this elu­sive thing called The Truth. You find the story, write your angle. You write. You edit. You re-​check facts. You fight with your edi­tor, who wants to put a slightly dif­fer­ent spin on things. Even­tu­ally, some­thing gets pub­lished which may or may not resem­ble what you set out to write.

Being a blog­ger is not easy. Usu­ally, a blog­ger has a ‘real job’. Brave Blog­ger may aspire to be free of the require­ments of money, but it’s a hard slog to get there. That means less time for fact-​checking, edit­ing, spellcheck­ing, cor­rob­o­ra­tion with par­ties men­tioned in the article.

It’s not their real job, unless they’re one of the lucky few who can build up enough of a rep and a view­er­ship. That’s hard. So our new online journalist/​blogger types tend to aggre­gate together, with many tal­ented writ­ers work­ing together on a site (like the Huff­in­g­ton Post!). More eye­balls get drawn to the pages. Costs go up — more view­ers require more server power, more power needs more money. It becomes viable and maybe attrac­tive to sell adver­tis­ing to … earn … your …

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.We’re back to sell­ing adver­tis­ing. I don’t doubt for a moment that the same mechan­ics will play out. Adver­tis­ers will begin to demand more expo­sure — more involve­ment. To make money, our intre­pid online jour­nal­ists will have to spice up their arti­cles a lit­tle, pro­mote some debate, get more eye­balls on their site. Maybe they’ll be altru­is­tic. Just maybe they’ll suc­ceed where old-​media journos failed, and man­age to keep the dol­lars rolling with­out hav­ing to sac­ri­fice an iota of jour­nal­is­tic integrity.

All of a sud­den, we’re back to sell­ing adver­tis­ing by draw­ing eye­balls. The incen­tive to be con­tro­ver­sial returns; and there’s still no incen­tive or dri­ving force to be hon­est and crit­i­cal, open and factual.

We’re back to square one.

Aren’t you just per­pet­u­at­ing stereo­types of the incum­bent model there?

To a cer­tain extent, you could argue with what I’ve said above. There’s a base assump­tion I’m mak­ing, which is that ‘good jour­nal­ism’ requires com­mit­ment, pas­sion, inten­sity and skill. I see blog­gers reg­u­larly call­ing this into ques­tion, claim­ing that they can be just as good or bet­ter, with­out the pay, train­ing and 100% focus on journalism.

I do believe that it is pos­si­ble for blog­gers to report on events, check their facts, and pro­vide a higher qual­ity of jour­nal­ism to their read­er­ship than cur­rent news­pa­per arti­cle writ­ers do.

I would hes­i­tate to call this ‘good jour­nal­ism’ in and of itself, how­ever — some of the most shock­ing and amaz­ing sto­ries pub­lished have been the result of long and con­vo­luted hunts for the truth that few lone blog­gers could main­tain. I sus­pect it will be a long time before we see a blog­ger win, say, a Pulitzer prize (or some equiv­a­lent thereof) for world-​shattering reporting.

It’s pos­si­ble. As time goes on, the prob­a­bil­ity will approach 100%. I doubt very much that ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism’ will get us reli­able, fac­tual and infor­ma­tive jour­nal­ism on any con­sis­tent basis any time soon, however.

Apply­ing Pressure

To my mind, the biggest prob­lem our soci­ety has is a lack of pres­sure to be hon­est and infor­ma­tive over mak­ing money. The age of tele­vi­sion has bred a pop­u­la­tion who are, in gen­eral, more respon­sive to fast motion, emo­tional impact and small, bite-​sized chunks of infor­ma­tion. Sex, crime and scan­dals sell, because that’s what most peo­ple want.

Some of us want some hon­esty, though. We want more open­ness in our jour­nal­ism. I strongly sus­pect that we can get what we want, too, if we’re deter­mined enough — and I sus­pect that the idea could catch on pretty quickly.

We need to apply some pres­sure. Cre­ate a force that, implaca­ble as grav­ity, draws peo­ple to telling the truth — jour­nal­ists and poilti­cians fore­most among them.

We can see things like this hap­pen­ing already in the polit­i­cal sphere. There’s some really cool move­ment occur­ring in the Open Gov­ern­ment and Open Data spheres. One such exam­ple: http://​www​.ope​naus​tralia​.org/

What we need is a way to track jour­nal­ists — be they employed by a news­pa­per, TV sta­tion, or unem­ployed as a blog­ger — and give them an incen­tives to be hon­est; and dis­in­cen­tives for being dishonest.

I’m envi­sion­ing a sys­tem — a pro­to­col, an open frame­work — for mod­er­at­ing the verac­ity of arti­cles pub­lished any­where on the Inter­net. Con­cerned mod­er­a­tors — the pub­lic — can pull apart arti­cles in one easy loca­tion, debate them, pub­lish and link to addi­tional mate­ri­als. Their con­tri­bu­tions are, in turn, meta-​moderated to keep even the mod­er­a­tors hon­est. Nobody gets the power to tip the scales unfairly against any­one else.

There’s flaws with a model like this — throw­ing a crowd at some­thing doesn’t solve the prob­lems of truth and hon­esty, it just pro­vides a plat­form to let the masses tear things apart for fun and profit. At least we’d have a venue for it, as opposed to now, where — well, we don’t.

I don’t think this is The Answer. I don’t think there is An Answer. You can’t solve a social prob­lem with purely tech­no­log­i­cal devices (but you can get part of the way).

I think hon­esty and truth will be arrived at — if we ever get there — by a vari­ety of means. I just hope they’re easy to use, eas­ily acces­si­ble, and hard for any par­tic­u­lar major­ity to dominate.