Abstract
More than ever, journalists must pursue the facts in these uncertain times, says
As Thomas Jefferson came to realise, he needed to rethink. Only democratic governments – using the rule of law and with a free civil society – can guarantee the conditions for free media. The free media’s responsibility in 2020 and for the future must be to seek for something like the truth, within the inevitable limits of time, space, libel law and audience attention.
Saying “something like” is to acknowledge that we cannot escape those limits – especially for complex investigations. But those challenges are incredibly important while, during this global crisis, the public works out who it can trust.
Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times, told me that coverage of justice has “been a casualty of the economic trauma of our business”. Keller, who also founded the Marshall Project, a website covering US criminal justice, said: “It’s complicated, time-consuming investigative or quasi-investigative work; it’s just something that most [media] organisations don’t feel they can afford any longer.”
A search for the facts which govern our lives has always meant holding every kind of power to account, to pose awkward questions, to provide space for dissident voices and to uncover secrets whose publication is in the public interest. And of course, this is of vital interest during the coronavirus pandemic.
CREDIT: Stellina Chen/Cartoon Movement
This hasn’t been stopped – though it has been diverted – by the loud contempt the 45th US president unceasingly shows for journalism. Donald Trump monopolises press conferences and uses them to harangue and insult those journalists who press him for hard facts on a pandemic, which is growing exponentially. He may rail, but the legal, political and civil institutions of the USA are, so far, strong enough to protect the space for combative journalism.
Steve Coll, director of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, even gives his behaviour an optimistic spin. Trump’s attacks, he says, have “really clarified what journalism is about… and why the founding fathers thought a really healthy press was important”.
Other societies are not so lucky. The authoritarian rulers – China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – all, as the US economist Joseph Stiglitz observes, “made sure when they came to power that the first thing they did was to close down the independent media”.
Power, especially autocratic power, says Ezio Mauro, former editor of the Rome-based daily La Repubblica, “has an insuppressible temptation – the temptation of the balcony”, referring to the speeches Mussolini would give from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.
“It is to transform the consensus acquired from one political sector – which is always temporary – into an everlasting totality, transforming the citizen into the public, the public into the people, and the people into an applauding crowd,” he said.
Where there’s room for optimism is in the apparently unquenchable proactivity of journalists who are creating space for a journalism of fact and varied opinion.
Alexandra Vladimirova, a young journalist who has researched corruption in Russian sport, said: “For the Russian audience it is often not easy to understand who is who and who can be trusted. On the other hand, despite all the problems and prohibitions, there are still possibilities to do what you believe in.”
India did have plenty of room for independent journalism but journalists are now being increasingly harried and threatened. For example, Siddharth Varadarajan, founder of news site The Wire, has been caught in a web of charges including creating panic and spreading rumours designed to cause a riot – a group of alleged crimes which could attract a jail sentence of up to 20 years.
“Across India,” Varadarajan wrote in The New York Times in April, “the pandemic and lockdown have provided an occasion for the free play of authoritarian impulses.” The investigative journalist Rana Ayyub said that much of the coverage of the pandemic in India portrayed it as “a Muslim plague… and the government condemns those journalists who try to tell the truth [as] anti-nationalist”.
Nothing in the democracies of Europe and North America, in Japan, Australia and New Zealand, approaches the level of suppression in the authoritarian states.
Instead, there are the challenges of freedom, of the market and of the relentless growth in power of the tech companies which are both destroying and gathering-in the functions of the news media. There is also the continued decline of newspapers – still the medium which employs most journalists.
“We have yet to craft a durable economic basis for a new era of journalistic independence in the digital age, free from government control and sustainable, whether commercially or through philanthropy,” said Coll.
The few newspapers which remain economically healthy, and look like continuing to be so, include The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist and very few others.
We also see the constant intrusions of fake news. According to Peter Pomerantsev, who directs a programme on the burgeoning falsities of autocratic governments at the London School of Economics, “we live in a world in which the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied – a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, Putin, trolls and Trump”. The spread of fact-checking sites and centres helps, but much depends on the ability of citizens and institutions to sort the false from the true.
As Russia’s army moved into Georgia in 2008, annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea in 2014 and sponsored and reinforced the breakaway factions, it unleashed what the US-based Rand Corporation called “a firehose of falsehood”, where visible interventions and reinforcements were flatly denied and labelled as western lies.
As the US scholar Martha Bayles has written, this “firehose” has the intent “to pollute the global information space with disinformation, conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies in the hope of sowing division and cynicism among the citizens of liberal democracies”.
We also see the widening division in our societies as another challenge for journalism. Citizens around the world, most clearly in Europe and the USA, have – through votes and demonstrations – signalled their radical alienation from politics, an alienation disproportionately concentrated in lower income groups.
Part of this is due to being ignored by the news media, as much as by politicians and officials.
These protests should cause journalists to reflect on how the economic shocks of the past two decades have caused a series of crises. We must now examine where the coverage has been scanty or absent and how journalists, especially in “elite media”, have accepted the dominant political and economic explanations, giving little space to those who see themselves as the victims.
Journalism will always depend on good democratic governments. Yet government and civil society depend on journalism remaining independent, accepting the responsibility of truth-telling, account-holding and attention-getting.
Independence means giving expression to differing, including unwelcome, opinions.
In a constantly shifting media space, where possibilities for free expression jostle with a narrowing of coverage and the cull of newspaper reporters, there’s a tendency for the news media to huddle round one political pole.
Jochen Buchsteiner, a senior foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in Germany, believes journalists must also let both sides be heard. “Activism, be it for a ‘good cause’, should be for others,” he said. “Our task is to allow and understand complexity, reduce it and explain it in a fair manner. I don’t see any other way to preserve – or win back – our credibility and value.”