Without Fear and Without Favour- Journalism in the Digital Age

By Himali Thakur, UG’ 19

The Financial Times is one of the leading financial news organisations in the world, and Lionel Barber, its Editor since 2005, has had some hand in the consistency of its quality. It is, therefore fitting for Mr Barber to address a collection of students and faculty members on the future of quality journalism.

          In his talk given at Ashoka University on April 15, Mr Barber spoke on how the Internet has changed journalism- for now, it looks like it has happened for the worse. Quality journalism, which Barber thinks is rooted in curiosity and critical thinking, is under threat from accusations of fake news, an army of public relations officials that restricts access to inside sources, and substandard volumes of material published online today. While the Internet is heralded as the ground that allows for the diversification of audience and debates, recent times have shown that nefarious agents are quite capable of manipulating this space through malicious misinformation and propaganda.

Yet shadowy corporations are not the only entities responsible for the strangling of quality journalism. “On the night of Donald Trump’s election, 75 million tweets were published about the elections,” says Barber. On the other end of these Twitter accounts are not just Russian spies but also ordinary people. The ability to publish one’s thoughts instantaneously without mediation means that sheer volumes drown out the voice of well-thought-out journalism. “It is no longer up to a handful of editors to decide who can broadcast their thoughts,” explains Barber. Even publications on the Internet hardly publish original content. The availability of all information online has given rise to the phenomenon of attribution; rather than create original content, online platforms extract the essence of other stories and publish them. As long as they “attribute” their sources, there is no legal problem. Newspapers continue to generate about 50% of the original information in comparison to TV, radio, and new media, which produce the rest. However, all this does is downplay the importance of the legwork that goes behind the production of robust news stories. Barber quotes David Simon, the creator of the HBO TV series The Wire, here: “This is how a republic dies—with a reprinted press release”.

To all these problems, Barber has one answer—the reporter must work harder. Journalists have to restore credibility to their work by producing better content. The independence of journalism is not the right of one section of a community. Even if large beneficiaries are no longer standing behind to pay for reporters and correspondents, moving to subscription models allows for monetary resources required to produce reliable news. Advancements in AI will mean that while reporting of financial markets and the like will be better suited for machines to handle than human beings, but the smart and well-edited snapshot of the newspaper will continue to be valuable. As a result, journalism will have to be kept alive for those who believe in its craft and can build the trust of the audience. “The editor has to be the custodian of that trust,” says Barber. “So that journalism can be practised without fear and without favour.”

Barber’s study of journalism today is a troubling reflection on the kind of future we may be headed towards. Original content is dwindling to be replaced by copies of copies. Instead of information from actual sources, what we encounter are public relations managers who maintain the “image” of the company through campaigns on YouTube or Twitter. Donald Trump’s active Twitter presence is a prime example of this. Often, PR aims to discredit actual journalistic work. Real-time commentary means that the relevance of “hot scoops” disappears as fast as they arrive—the half-life of a scoop is two hours and five minutes.

What Barber puts forward is not only an experience of the decreasing standards of journalism but also an experience of our own Jameson version of postmodernity. Instead of “true” accounts of events, our perception of the world as readers is informed by images of images, by a simulacrum. Claims of “fake news” simply manipulate our poor attempts of cognitive mapping—our attempts to place ourselves in this quickly spiralling world. In this scheme, Barber’s call for reliable journalism will be ultimately a tool in our understanding of the world. It is a step, a major step nonetheless, towards a culture that can endow us with a “heightened sense of [our] place in the global system”[1] and thus enable effective political action. Our habits of consuming and sharing news have exponential effects on the kind of news that is generated. The reason that clickbait and low-quality content continues to be produced is that we continue to consume it. The struggle to keep quality journalism alive is not only the reporter’s duty but also our duty as consumers.

[1]Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. 54.