Much at stake in battles over fake news
Truth and facts, lies and b***s**t. These were the dominant themes during last week’s amaBhungane town hall meeting in Cape Town, held under the title Investigative Journalism in the Age of Fake News. Judge Dennis Davis chaired a panel that included Sam Sole of amaBhungane, Lester Kiewit from eNCA, Ranjeni Munusamy from Daily Maverick and this writer.
US President Donald Trump has taken to giving the world his definition of fake news on a practically daily basis. According to Trump, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and all other mainstream media produce fake news. The evidence? He doesn’t like what they report. In return, the news organisations have pointed out that the occupant of the Oval Office has a difficult relationship with facts.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Nic Dawes, former editor of the Mail & Guardian and deputy executive director for media at Human Rights Watch, recently penned some advice to the US media on how to cover a hostile president.
“Journalism confronts an existential risk as an authoritarian populist attacks democratic norms once taken for granted,” writes Dawes. “But this moment of peril is also a moment of opportunity. Much depends on how a media system already under stress … responds to this new challenge. And much is at stake: not only a renewal of the journalistic vocation, public trust in the media, and its commercial potential, but also the accountability architecture of American democracy itself. Securing these things will mean returning to some old principles: fairness, accuracy, rigour and, above all, a position outside of power, exerting pressure on it, rather than inside, transmitting its message….”
The South African media, apart from the Gupta family’s outfits, are used to operating “outside of power”. It is credible reporting and adjusting to “fake news” that seems a big test.
Consider the so-called Decolonisation Foundation, an organisation led by one man with a Twitter account. It has no intrinsic news value but its owner is someone who is active on Twitter and is locked in a tight embrace with the dominant faction of the governing party. Together, they are pushing a narrative that postapartheid SA’s fault line is white monopoly capital.
The decoloniser moves from one office to the next making accusations about what he claims is white monopoly capital. This individual’s claims nearly stopped the Financial Intelligence Centre Amendment Bill in its tracks.
Now you have to ask: do such efforts constitute fake news, spin or propaganda? Perhaps that distinction isn’t so important. Fake news isn’t “new” — lies are as old as human history. Adolf Hitler used a successful propaganda machine to deadly effect. So did the apartheid regime.
Both were based on lies and distortions. But lies are given turbo-charged wings through social media.
The Guardian ran a useful piece by Carole Cadwalladr at the weekend showing how a right-wing IT billionaire, Robert Mercer, a big funder of Trump, is at “the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network” in a war on mainstream media.
In SA, there is a legacy of racism and no shortage of individuals with racist views. This is not news. But the mere accusation of racism can often become its own news – and not always in a way that is aligned with reality.
Consider the Sunday Times stories about the so-called South African Revenue Service rogue unit. A fake news story that ran in one of the country’s biggest newspapers for months and helped to undermine a major state institution and destroyed a number of careers.
This so-called story worked well as a frame for fake news until it was exposed, because facts are stubborn things. Similarly, the phony narrative about the South African Social Security Agency promoted by Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini and her minions was destroyed by excellent journalism at amaBhungane.
Journalism’s most important job is to report facts and ensure accountability. This requires more digging and thoughtful assessment, and less willingness to blithely report (often tweet) nonsense and focus on celebrities.
As Dawes says, this, in effect, entails “returning to some old principles: fairness, accuracy, rigour”.
Finally, combating fake news in the age of social media requires greater focus on developing critical minds. This has to do with reading, and it starts at a young age, especially as we integrate technology into our learning space. Teachers and parents need to help kids understand that “not everything you read on the internet is true”.
POSITION IS NEEDED OUTSIDE OF POWER ... RATHER THAN INSIDE, TRANSMITTING ITS MESSAGE Nic Dawes Human Rights Watch deputy executive director for media