Where do we find truth when inundated with bots and falsehoods?
by Stacey Warde
The way we get information about our world today has changed radically since 1984 when I first entered the news business as a reporter. No one then could have imagined the daily flood of “news” (and “fake “news”) that overwhelms us today.
News was distributed mostly through newspapers, TV and radio, and was handled by people trained to gather and report their findings in trusted outlets.
Today, with the pervasiveness of the web, and access to endless data provided by both human and automated sources (also known as “bots”), we’re inundated with more news and information than we can possibly handle, some trustworthy, some not.
News will always be hard to define but we seem to have a hunger for it in the US, where, it is argued, a free press keeps the government in check, helps to inform the citizenry and sheds light on whether the republic is in good working order. News can also serve as a launching point for discussion, the public forum, where a variety of opinions and views can be shared.
Once, the newspaper’s editorial/opinion pages served as a safe forum for these discussions. Now, on the internet, where a majority (some 67 percent) of Americans get their news, it’s hard to find a safe forum, unless it’s moderated.
As a young journalist in 1984, my idea of news was, as a mentor once told me, information essential for a community to function.
A reporter’s job was to find and report the facts about subjects vital to that community, and to report them “without fear or favor.” Facts were not hard to find. With a little leg work and care, a reporter could paint a fairly accurate picture of the way things were—or were not—working in the community.
News was considered by most to be reliable data and information gathered, verified, organized and written by qualified journalists, able to give honest, accurate accounts of an event, industry, idea, person or issue that was deemed important for the community to know.
Truth in reporting, especially in government reporting, mattered most. A common and popular refrain from editors was: “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!”
If a journalist got it wrong and reported what today might be called “fake news,” he or she risked losing their credibility—and their job—as reporters. A false or misleading news report usually meant termination, and a new career. Truth mattered.
Today, in the blogosphere, it’s easy to clutter the information highway with lies and falsehoods, or what lately we refer to as “fake news.”
Fake news existed long before President Trump made it part of the American vernacular. Fake news was anything that slipped into the news page unverified or weakly sourced, or proved false and misleading. Corrections were made.
Journalists are still duped into reporting stories that come from questionable sources or they unwittingly pass on as “news” public relations ploys and marketing gimmicks. Other times, business/ad managers may try to bully or con journalists into promoting as “news” a potential advertising client’s business or services.
Overall, though, journalists still fight hard to give honest reporting and take pride in being considered trustworthy, reliable, credible sources of news and information.
Nonetheless, we find an insurmountable amount of questionable data in circulation today, mostly from the internet. Today, there are bots and hackers not just biased, sloppy journalists who muddy the waters, spreading false information.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that some two-thirds of links tweeted to popular websites are posted by automated Twitter accounts or bots, not humans. Some of the data proves worthy, other data is misleading. That makes finding reliable information more difficult than ever.
Still, we turn daily to the internet or our favorite news outlets to get the latest word on developments in the state and world. We’re drawn to the heroes and villains of the day’s biggest “news” events. We shudder at the most recent catastrophes and natural disasters.
We have plenty of outlets to choose from but usually go with the few that are most familiar. Often, they give views that reflect our personal biases rather than provide helpful or useful information about our world.
The Pew Research Center claims that 45 percent of adults in the U.S. get news from Facebook, where they are more likely to find sources that confirm their personal biases rather than provide vetted and fully sourced and truthful information that may or may not suit their views.
Social media have increasingly become the go-to source for news and information but also create bubbles where we see only what we want to see.
News is both a commodity and a resource. We sell it, buy it, and need it to get through the day for some reason. Yet, it’s become a Herculean task in today’s information ecosystem to distinguish fact from fiction, to know fake from real.
All of it is colored by the people (or bots) who spin it, and the notion of what constitutes “news” seems to get cloudier by the day.
Before the internet, reporters and editors were the information highway’s “gatekeepers.” They decided what got covered and how it got played. They kept the public discourse mostly civil and opened their pages to readers who knew how to put up a decent argument. It wasn’t a perfect public forum but it seemed to work.
That’s not to say propaganda (or fake news—read “disinformation”) didn’t proliferate, there was plenty of it, but it seemed easier to spot. In today’s partisan push to dominate the news and control the spin on events, and with the inundation of baseless information coming from who-knows-where, it appears that most news is propaganda and most propaganda is news.
You really have to work hard to get good information.
The internet was supposed to level the playing field and give citizen journalists the same power to dispense news and information as traditional or professional editors and reporters, who were often criticized for having limited or elitist views and unfairly dominating the public forum.
With the rise of citizen journalists—essentially anyone with a cellphone—and web-based news, all voices would have a platform from which to share their experiences and stories and observations, bypassing the gatekeepers, who seemed interested only in controlling and restricting access.
Gatekeepers would become unnecessary, eventually obsolete, a noisy hindrance to the free flow of useful (and worthless) data that virtually anyone can “publish” or post on social media, the new drivers and platforms for today’s news and information.
Today’s public forum, controlled mostly through social media outlets, seems to have devolved into a bot-driven wasteland of disinformation and propaganda.
The gatekeepers have given way to algorithms, bots and charlatans, whose purpose is to offer up the most clicks or views to questionable, unreliable or worthless data and websites. The internet was supposed to level the playing field and give everyone a voice, as well as provide easy access to useful information and public forums. What it did was eliminate the quaint beauty of civil discourse that gatekeepers attempted to provide.
Gatekeepers—reporters and editors—I would argue, whose role is perhaps outmoded in today’s information free-for-all, kept public discourse on a mostly healthy, dignified and lively trajectory. They determined whose voices got to be heard and avoided the spread of drivel that so often gets mistaken as news or information today.
Good editors and reporters knew their communities better than anyone, knew where the dead bodies were, kept close watch on the movers and shakers, the crooks and cons, and could put a spotlight on virtually any one of them. Editors had power because “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” especially when it comes to maintaining healthful and well-informed communities.
Some critics complained that this was too limiting and elitist; others saw this as a necessary guarantee against chicanery, provincialism, ignorance and animalistic bullying. Both views were correct.
Today, consumers of news must be more wary than ever before, they must be their own gatekeepers, sorting the good from the bad, trusting their instincts to know the difference between fact and fiction, between fake and real.
It’s a daunting but not impossible task. §
Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at roguewarde@gmail.com.
