Prominent journalists said they remain optimistic that those people and entities pushing misinformation will not win, even as social media and the contraction of local journalism strain the media industry.
Journalists Sam Fulwood, dean of American University's School of Communication; Elahe Izadi, media reporter for The Washington Post; and Terence Samuel, vice president of news at NPR, addressed the persistent problem of misinformation and the erosion of public trust in a discussion with PBS Public Editor Ricardo Sandoval-Palos at a joint PBS/National Press Club event on June 30.
Humans have always been susceptible to misinformation, going back to the first media outlets after the United States formed, Fulwood said. But he noted that the country survived then and will continue to do so, especially as there are voices who are pointing out that misinformation.
“It takes work,” Fulwood said. “It takes leadership, it takes education, it takes an understanding that we don’t have to be susceptible to the negative voices of misinformation and lies that some people parrot and (that) get an audience in our media.”
The fight against misinformation is global, too. Izadi recalled the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when rumors about the disease would originate in one country and then travel very quickly across the world. But she said that helped mobilize a “global army of fact-checkers” to fight back.
The continued battle against misinformation comes as trust in the media remains low, and as local journalism, in its struggle to adapt its business model to having less revenue from print ads, has seen a sharp decline in news coverage.
That lack of trust in journalism has been compounded by high-profile errors at the same time outlets have struggled to deal with a new reality in which they have less power than other institutions, Samuel said.
“There was a time when we at least kidded ourselves into thinking that we would hold people accountable,” Samuel said.
Social media has stepped in to fill the void of local news, something the panelists agreed has helped give voice to communities and people that were once marginalized, especially during a period of the 20th century that Fulwood said is held up by many as the “golden age of journalism.”
“The fact of the matter was, back in the 1960s, and in the 1970s and in the 1980s, journalism was a small world that was dominated, to be perfectly honest, by landed white men,” he said. “They were the ones that were able to determine what truth was and make it stick.”
But the growth of social media has created more room for argument and disagreement over basic facts, Samuel said, which in turn helps people take “ideological positions” over the issues of the day and avoid other perspectives. It all marks a dramatic change from the local journalism of the past, he said, when reporters would live in the communities they covered and be held to account by those around them.
“We’re covering things that allow for endless opinion, and we’re doing it on social media, which is an unbelievably great place to argue without consequence,” Samuel said, “because nobody’s going to call you up, nobody’s going to say, ‘Hey, can I ask a follow-up?’”
