{"id":2214,"date":"2019-04-21T17:42:12","date_gmt":"2019-04-21T17:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-edict.in\/?p=2214"},"modified":"2019-04-21T17:42:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-21T17:42:14","slug":"without-fear-and-without-favour-journalism-in-the-digital-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/2019\/04\/21\/without-fear-and-without-favour-journalism-in-the-digital-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Without Fear and Without Favour- Journalism in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Himali Thakur, UG’ 19 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet shadowy corporations are not the only entities responsible for the strangling of quality journalism. \u201cOn the night of Donald Trump\u2019s election, 75 million tweets were published about the elections,\u201d says Barber. On the other end of these Twitter accounts are not just Russian spies but also ordinary people. The ability to publish one\u2019s thoughts instantaneously without mediation means that sheer volumes drown out the voice of well-thought-out journalism. \u201cIt is no longer up to a handful of editors to decide who can broadcast their thoughts,\u201d 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 \u201cattribute\u201d 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<\/em>, here: \u201cThis is how a republic dies\u2014with a reprinted press release\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To all these problems, Barber has one answer\u2014the 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. \u201cThe editor has to be the custodian of that trust,\u201d says Barber. \u201cSo that journalism can be practised without fear and without favour.\u201d
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Barber\u2019s 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 \u201cimage\u201d of the company through campaigns on YouTube or Twitter. Donald Trump\u2019s 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 \u201chot scoops\u201d disappears as fast as they arrive\u2014the half-life of a scoop is two hours and five minutes.
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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 \u201ctrue\u201d accounts of events, our perception of the world as readers is informed by images of images, by a simulacrum. Claims of \u201cfake news\u201d simply manipulate our poor attempts of cognitive mapping\u2014our attempts to place ourselves in this quickly spiralling world. In this scheme, Barber\u2019s 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 \u201cheightened sense of [our] place in the global system\u201d[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\u2019s duty but also our duty as consumers.
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[1]Jameson, Fredric. \u201cThe Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,\u201dPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism<\/em>, pp. 54.
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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[30,126,315,153],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2218,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions\/2218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edictarchive.the-edict.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}