Нов български университет

Lyubomir Stefanov, PhD

lstefanov@nbu.bg 

 

Abstract: The article will focus on some recent showcases namely the ongoing US presidential campaign and the Brexit in order to make a point that it is not just media to be blamed for the content they pick up to present and the manner of its presentation. The process of news making and case selection is of no lesser extent function to the more general trend of growing public exhibitionism caused by the new social media. The boundaries of private and individual are forced nowadays beyond the limits of common sense, which results in classic media quite often succumbing to the pressure of the 24/7 demand for news and skipping or reducing fact checking. In turn the speed of news delivery prevailed over the quality of the their content.

Key words: content reliability, fact checking, media, news, quality of information, social transformation, trustworthiness

 

Mass media are often accused that they switch off the brains of their publics, especially the TV auditorium, for feeding primitive reactions and demands instead. The build-up of informative choice, which is supposed to be the ultimate goal of media, i.e. to provide the audience with enough and diverse information that will allow space and privacy for making up individual opinion is looking more of a myth these days. It seems that media opt for easy-to-digest, emotional and fast-responsive news instead of investing their efforts into researching hard cases while remaining relatively unbiased on the way of reporting and reflecting on events. One may claim the competition between media outlets for being responsible for this dramatic change as the boom of Internet-based “social media” turned every logged user into reporter providing news and opinion on almost everything from North Korea to the GDP of the USA and the global warming. But is it just that nature of competition and the dynamics of no seen match before that influence the approach of media to news selection and airing? Is it just them to be blamed or the clients-the consumers of news also have changed and the media adapted accordingly? How much the content of news is dependent on public interest and how much on editorial politics?

Aside of being marketing reaction in the competition for customers the quality of news is no less a victim to some cultural and psychological phenomena which were not inherent to the human societies on Earth. At least not in the way, they are now. The Internet revolution was preceded by the consumerism revolution, which brought upon every one of us the lust for more of the fancy new gadgets that kept on pouring down the automated production lines: it was first the laptop, than Apple’s iPod and the iPhone swiftly followed, than came in Google-the almighty all-knowing searching engine, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. The world became smaller than ever before with the GSM technology, but it was the smartphone-incorporating phone, camera, leisure and work applications and above all 24/7 Internet browsing that changed the way we, humans communicate.

Sharing moved on from a social function for bringing and holding up individuals together into society or specialized groups/publics through exchange of ideas to a new level – that of personal exhibitionism. Torrents of intimate detailed information drowned the Internet through myriad of applications. The World Wide Web turned into a non-stop exhibition of curious, funny, awkward and often, quite often actually, embarrassing details from individual lives and experiences. People shared everything they believed presented them in good way or just find it interesting – from high-school experience to everyday habits; from their grandmas’ recipe for cookies to explicit sexual content; from musical and literature preferences to racial abuse; from astronomy to appeals for genocide and world war. Reality became quite hard to be differentiated from imagination, respectively truth from speculations or mere lies.

The massive influx of new wannabe-interesting to the general public personal experiences and stories, often looking for profit out of it, was no more subject to thorough and detailed research by young just-hired Pulitzer-aspiring reporters. Instead, it was almost immediately posted or bragged about online through the new “social media” thus making it public before their reliability being proof-checked. Mass media had to adapt to the new reality, initially rather unwillingly, after being thunderstruck by this new competitor which did not have neither editorial board, nor newsroom but just an Internet-connected device.

High-speed broadband connectivity allowed room for many new opportunities as well as for new threats. It does not mean that people stopped calling or mailing traditional/conventional media for crazy stories like aliens attacking a cow and it giving birth after being abused [1]. It just transformed their agenda accordingly to the dynamics of the news flaw. Once they survived a seemingly devastating attack when CNN launched its 24/7 news coverage from around the world some 25 years ago during the first Gulf war. Now classical media [2] react by endorsing eagerly on the new technologies and applying new approaches to their implementation with the “crowdsourcing” being one of the most prominent examples. It allows for each and every user of the classical media to upload, share or submit a story which to become, after being proof checked, incorporated into the main news stream and even being published or aired.

It is arguable how innovative this practice is as at the dawn of the daily-published press many articles were comprised or directly based on stories from subscribers’ letters or alleged eyewitnesses. Nonetheless, the crowdsourcing allows for that fresh air needed so badly by the classic media in times of super fast news creation and spreading. For it is no more appropriate to stick just to one printed edition or news emission per day when the world is willing to share its doubts, fears, aspirations and demands. However, the problem arises when speed is confronted by quality, i.e. the hunger for news being juxtaposed to fact checking.

As a consequence both classic media outlets and new social media became unreliable as sources of information. Looking for facts that are plausible has become absurdly painstaking process. The paradox is that it takes place in the peak of unlimited access to the Internet and its myriad sources that turned to be rather problematic after the initial enthusiasm of joy for the newly available billions of bits of information is now over. In order to demonstrate this trend lets have a brief look over two events of global importance-thus suitable as valid examples, the ongoing presidential campaign in the USA and the Brexit-UK’s campaign for leaving the European Union.

And a word of warning at this stage. The author is perfectly aware that above statement could (and should) be doubted and probably easily overturned with in-depth research including the content regarding the topics in mind from at least one media source from all the countries around the word in language different from English. However, as the publishing standards and fact checking of BBC, Reuters, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press are still considered hallmarks in the profession, I strongly doubt that Brexit or the US presidential contest will be portrayed with significant changes from the original reporting. Of course, writing about things asks aside from research and intellectual capabilities and access to resources, which most often is paid, i.e. it’s all about the money. So austerity is a huge factor that influences the quality of information spread around the world via the classic media as their incomes suffered immensely in the aftermath of the Internet revolution, where bloggers are often more popular than TV channels or tweets draw more attention than central news emissions.

The presidential campaign in the USA, which will end up in early November 2016, in a truly remarkable clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump started almost a year ago. And if in the case of the Democratic Party nomination there was not much of a doubt, although Bernie Sanders really gave it a go, the GOP was severely shaken by the fact that it had to endorse the real estate tycoon from New York as its candidate for the White House. Both controversial, still the former first lady looks more on the odds of becoming the first female president of the USA. How did media take part in reporting the atmosphere of this extremely interesting contest?

Well they do participate actively in polarizing the general public, as is the tradition of theirs. It is not forbidden to take side during election campaign of that scale. On the contrary, if media outlets do not pledge allegiance to some of the candidates they are considered to be not serious and conspiring. Unlike the European tradition, the media across the Atlantic firmly believe that announcing their preference in advance will allow them to help the candidate of their choice win the office. Not doing so is damaging both in terms of customers withdrawing or/and corporate commercials reduction, but above all for their self-proclaimed political orientation and positioning.

 It is beyond doubt that money does not play role in this process. Of course commercial partners influence classic media partaking, however the same could be implied for the new social media as well as they receive increasing amount of financial injections from the very same politically biased corporations. The thin red line that divides US most influential classic media is dating back from the beginning of 21[st] century and even further. WSJ, FOX, ABC and CNN stand for the Republicans while NYT, Boston Globe, Washington Post, NBC and CBS group with the Democrats. The same could not be applied for Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, as they are more of global phenomena than of local USA character. Still they play a huge role in the run of the campaign shaping voters’ preferences even more successfully than party rallies.

It is no lesser part to the new social media that America is now polarized like before, even during the first election campaign of incumbent president Barak Obama who became the first Afro-American to win the office. We tend to believe that this role of theirs is to a great extent caused by their ability to influence individuals much more efficiently on emotional level than classic media. It is because they are much more than a media in its classic perception for they allow personification and self-identification much better and on another new level than TV, radio or magazine could offer or achieve. People flock in millions to check on the Facebook and Twitter accounts of Trump (over 19 millions combined) or Clinton (over 11 million combined), not speaking of worldwide celebrities with football star Cristiano Ronaldo holding the record with almost 160 million followers [3] altogether. Now like never before they have the chance to be part of the everyday life of the persons they adore or hate, which creates an incredible feeling of belongingness and turns mere sympathy into empathy. This in turn is fostered, encouraged and channeled by politicians (and not only) in order to create community of all-fateful ready to spread and follow their cause individuals. 

As Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer to NYT found out “Mr. Trump’s rise is actually a symptom of the mass media’s growing weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable to say [4]. For decades, journalists at major media organizations acted as gatekeepers who passed judgment on what ideas could be publicly discussed, and what was considered too radical”. Conversations outside the parameters of the political discourse established between the gatekeepers and those in power were not tolerated (“Overton window” [5]). But with Trump that has come to an end with the US society joining the other societies being exposed to the side effects of rising populism and demagogy.

What Tufekci surprisingly for her discovered while monitoring a number of Twitter accounts of Trump supporters was that they explicitly declare their distrust in “any big institutions, whether political parties or media outlets. Instead, they share personal stories that support their common narrative, which mixes falsehoods and facts — often ignored by these powerful institutions they now loathe — with the politics of racial resentment”. Thus, surprisingly for her, comes the understanding that “the Trump phenomenon is not simply a creation of newspaper columnists or cable news bookers who initially thought his candidacy was a joke to be exploited for ratings. His emergence shows the strength of his supporters, united on social media, who believe that the media is a joke”.

So with the playbook of media ethic code thorn apart in practice what were the consequences for the general presidential debate? Devastating. America like never before, with some minor exempts, has been exposed to such gargantuan political rhetoric. Trump promised to raise a wall on the US-Mexican border and to ban all Muslims from entering the US. He added to that termination of all trade agreements of the country and a re-negotiation on new terms. NATO is no more of primary interest to the US. “Lets make America great again!”

Moreover, while the classic media still managed in accord with their capacity or editorial politics to withhold the barrage of populism the social networks exploded. Trump appears to be speaking nearly to everyone in America and not only, as admirers from around the world like the Russian president Putin, French populist Marine Le Pen or the UK newly appointed foreign minister Boris Johnson encourage him. It seems like everyone in the States is angry with Washington for some reason and wants to shake the status quo. Trump appears to listen very carefully to his audience and willing to give them what they want to hear adjusting and tuning up his rhetoric after each and every rally or public speech. But that is more of a demagogic behavior rather than of a leadership of a man who knows what, when and how to get the job done.

What is really disturbing though not unexpected is that people tend to believe almost everything Trump and likes have to offer to their ears. Even more. It seems that people are ready to be mislead and thrown into Never land’s parallel universe because they believe that what classic, conventional media are presenting to them is false and fake. Even Bernie Sanders, who was until recently tormenting Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primary contest, said a couple of months ago in a an interview broadcasted via YouTube-based “The Young Turks” channel, an original talk show on Sirius satellite radio and the first live, daily webcast on the Internet, that “the media is an arm of the ruling class of this country [6].” Undermining the role and meaning of classic media by merely picturing them as instruments for manipulation (though not without reason especially under political regimes different from democracy!) and propaganda is the beginning of the end.

But there is hope. Ant its name is fact checking. Yes, people do not have usually time for researching what they consume as news stream but is not it what media should do? Well it was, at least for most of them and for very few it still a common practice. And while classic media still make efforts in proof checking their sources of information and their reliability the same could not be said about the social network sharing. And it is not actually what they were meant for.

However, for the very short, compared to that of classic media life span, time the social networks became sources of information or what is probably more correct of rumors and gossips. Those channels were created for the people to share personal thoughts, feelings, moments and emotions rather than for reporting news. But overtime the individual experience and perspective became more important than the actual news and unbiased facts. Because it was much more easily understood and grasped compared to the refined and polished just reporting language of the mainstream media. And the element of censorship, i.e. it was the individual who got everything now under control by choosing whom to believe and whom to simply not pay any attention – an option which the central news scarcely presented. Of course, there are those faithful who stick to their preferred classic media sources although probably for the sake of habit and not actual need but their number is decreasing.

The responsibility for checking, double and triple if needed, before posting on Facebook or Twitter is not a must. It is not even something most of the people think of when reading their friends’ posts or twits. However it is paradoxical how often people refer to what they read on someone’s “wall” as being trustworthy. For those who want to do it for real there are finally some helping tools next to the old-school encyclopedias and vocabularies – the fact checking engines. These are tools, which could help the user to identify the reliability of a given fact by verifying it through available public information.

Many projects devoted to fact checking were launched recently most prominent of them aimed directly at monitoring the reliability of the facts which the presidential candidates bring forward during the 2016 campaign. Some of them are sections of mainstream media like Washington Post, NYT and ABC, while others are online sources like Snopes, OpenSecrets, Hoax-Slayer, FactCheck and PolitiFact. There is and an integrated fact checking source, something like a meta search engine, called FirstDraft, which incorporates several other prominent checking websites like  Bellingcat, Eyewitness Media Hub, Emergent, Meedan, Reported.ly, Storyful и Verification Junkie. Of course there are some non-American resources as well like that of UK’s FullFact, Canada’s FactsCan or French’s LeMonde which also do a good job in demolishing “well-known” from the social networks “facts”.

A perfect example how badly fact checking, i.e. informative choice is needed is probably the just passed referendum on UK leaving the EU also known as Brexit. During the campaign before the voting date-June 23[rd], Remainers and Leavers competed for the support of the UK citizens with dozens of facts. Both sides made mistakes biggest of them was that their appeals were on the negative side, i.e. providing more of threats than incentives for their cause, leaving individuals with strong sense of reluctance to vote. And all of this happening through the available channels for communication both online and offline.

What mass media do (or at least what they are expected to) is to present information and deliver it to the general auditoria in most attractive and engaging manner, which to result in higher customers’ ratings and bigger incomes due to lucrative commercial packages contracts. In this case the cause was more than appealing to the public so the interest of the media was beyond securing add money or additional ratings. The extensive coverage and attention that Brexit secured was necessary, at least on theory to provide the UK population with enough facts which to allow them make the crucial decision of voting for or against UK being member of EU.

The focal point of the campaign were the executive and legislative independence of the London government from the Brussels’ bureaucracy, the control over immigration, not just from third countries but from other EU members as well, the amount of money UK pays annually to the EU budget. To sum it up it was all about jobs, money and security. How the UK media did their job in presenting the two stances on EU proved to be decisive for the outcome of the referendum. But they were just following the strategy of the camps they joined beforehand publicly.

 For example, the cover of the Daily Mail newspaper featured on June 15[th], 2016 a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline “We are from Europe – let us in!” The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait after being exposed by the likes of the Guardian and Huffington post who listened carefully to the attached video where the people from the trucks announce their identity. The Remain campaign openly criticized this practice of misleading interpretation of facts offering instead experts’ opinions what are the positives for the UK to remain in the EU. It caused an unexpected backlash as this campaign was tagged “Project Fear” by one of prominent Leavers Michael Gove who declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts” on Sky News. As an article in the Guardian by Katherine Viner pointed out “when a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not. The leave campaign was well aware of this – and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards Authority (UK’s commercial adds regulatory body) has no power to police political claims”.

But the ultimate recognition of how the political reporting of news in mass media has changed inevitably in the UK came a few days after the vote when Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side was perfectly aware that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.” And that is exactly what the inflammatory poster of queue of mostly non-white migrants and refugees with the slogan “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all” presented by Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage a week before the voting day did.

It simply did not matter at all that politicians from both camps denounced the poster as racist because the damage has already been done. People were scared and angry. Exactly what was the goal, as emotional people do not act rationally. It was little surprise as Viner writes that Britons were shocked after the result to discover that Brexit might have serious consequences and very few of the promised benefits. “When “facts don’t work” and voters don’t trust the media, everyone believes in their own “truth” – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating”.

So in a story with both sides responsible for the current situation where information presented by mass media is twisted, pressed, diverted, adjusted and often even neglected how to deal with the challenge? Well, it is 21[st] century now and the sooner one realizes it the better. Since the time Gutenberg presented Europe with the printing machine the world has moved quite fast-forward both in terms of channels fro communication and what is interesting.

If in the beginning of mass media journalists and their editors were the gatekeepers of information and guarantees for its quality today their role is deeply under scrutiny from the general public-the recipient of the news they produce. Of course, journalists are not that innocent and they got plenty to be ashamed from the past decades – either by mistake or prejudice or sometimes by intent classic media have delivered to their audience a lot of misinformation. So it would be a mistake to link the rising distrust to mass media as a new phenomenon inherent or caused by the digital age. Still, what is new and a direct consequence of the Internet bum is that rumors and lies are read as widely as solid proof facts – and often even more “because they are wilder than reality and more exciting to share” [7].

This approach has been epitomized by Neetzan Zimmerman, former employee of Gawker (an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers, focusing on celebrities and the media industry) in an interview for the Daily Show on July 30[th], 2014 when he commented on how the Internet is killing the newspapers. “Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real,” he said. “The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it. If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not news.” What matters actually is the headline. If it is not scandalous than it is not interesting. Does it sound familiar?

The times when the information was served top down as a settled “truth” was determined quite a lot the attitudes of individuals towards classic media turning them into customers rather than being users. The feeling that the establishment was all over the news both in terms of coverage and behind the scenes dependencies became a favorite story for the conspiracy theories lovers. As a consequence from this “Overton window” people distrust much of what is presented as fact today – particularly if the facts in question are not corresponding to their own views. The paranoia that the government is always trying to hide something is now thriving on the back of the outgoing global financial crisis, ISIS, the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and the two Iraqi ones. And of course you have Facebook at a hand to convince others that it is true.

What people usually do is to share a friend’s post on Facebook, either out of agreement and support or to demonstrate that know staff and are aware of some things. And so the domino effect starts escalating its effect progressively through the number of shares rising. Algorithms such as the one behind Facebook’s news feed and Google’s search engine facilitate the increased visibility of rumors and often lies. It is designed to give users more of what they think they want – “which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs” [8]. Bottom-line, “it means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared”.

So, yes, media nowadays are not what they were used to be. Yes we can stay in touch with the news stream 24/7 with the Internet revolution and the smart devices miniaturization. Yes, classic media are doing probably their best to catch up with the unimaginable penetration abilities of the new social networks thus lowering the quality of their news for the sake of speed and high ratings. Yes, fact checking was, is and will be the solution for preventing the public sphere being poisoned with exaggerations, rumors and false information. But 21[st] century is the one of new socio-political realities and Facebook, Google and YouTube are both part of them and their facilitators, moderators and editors and we have to get used with that.

Claims like the one of Emily Bell-director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that “social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security [9]” do sound reasonable though overreacting. The quality of news content must be safeguarded by both competing parties-classic media and new social networks because the alternative is again in Bells’ words “instead of strengthening social bonds, or creating an informed public, or the idea of news as a civic good, a democratic necessity” the new channels for communication and news dissemination could create “gangs, which spread instant falsehoods that fit their views, reinforcing each other’s beliefs, driving each other deeper into shared opinions, rather than established facts”. However, as a word of final warning, let us not forget that it is not Google or Facebook that decide what to read and whom to trust instead of us as neither CNN nor BBC did.