Fighting fake news with facts and firepower

There is a hubris and inappropriate self-confidence among mainstream media that their practices and approaches to media are sound, and new entrants are unsound. They purport to present fact-checked truths while pointing to new media as promulgators of disinformation, poor journalism, AI-assisted deep fakes, and propaganda.

Progress in assuring a healthy, socially responsible media consistent with democratic norms cannot come from just clinging to past platforms and norms.

Let me offer some perspective on the fragmentation of media and what it means for society.

First, the fragmentation of media has been a multi-decade phenomena, driven not only by new digital tools and platforms but, particularly in the United States, by changes in law that previously guaranteed “fair use” of airwaves so that anything that gave air to one political party’s perspective required fair time for the other political party. The Supreme Court and US legislators gutted those provisions of fair use requirements long ago, and thus the harnessing of TV, Cable and Radio airwaves, and later blogs, and even leading newspapers and journals by political perspectives took hold. This has helped fuel the tribalisation of perspectives and has driven the “filter bubble” phenomenon of individuals being surrounded and inundated by views that they want to have around them, rather than the generally objective, occasionally uncomfortable form of news that used to inform the body politic. Similar patterns seem clear in the rise of populist news platforms, blogs, and social media networks in Europe.

Second, the eruption of social media networks, video, and digital tools enhanced not only by artificial intelligence that has been around for some time, but by generative AI, that has created a strategic leap in the power content creators has changed the power relationship between news providers and news consumers. Now many more players, many untutored in the skills and norms of journalism, have become content providers, and that content often seems like or mimics news.

I started a successful political blog in early 2004, and my target was the mainstream news media as I saw them largely as homogenised, lazy, often missing key stories — and thus my blog at the outset was designed to shame and blame major news media for their own inadequacies and to provide better news and service to my own readers. Many blogs did this, and thus 20 years ago, the fragmentation of media, in my view, helped improve mainstream media which had to compete and re-establish itself as providers of quality news — a responsibility for which they had been lazy and inattentive.

However today, the challenges to mainstream media are more messy as the challengers do not necessarily fill the gaps left by a poorly performing mainstream media — they instead often create fake or ‘unreal’ media, deep fakes, memes, or engage in outright propaganda or perpetuate mistruths. Not all new media do this, but there is no doubt that lots of new media are up for sale, up for political harnessing, up for attention and celebritisation of their platforms and content.

So what to do? I feel that too many governments, think tanks, and public private foundations concerned with news quality have been clutching their pearls too much, lamenting the eroding quality of journalism and news rather than competing head to head with new content providers and low quality new media outlets. It seems clear to me that for media to return to a healthier place and to become part of the solid social contract in democratic societies, they need to evolve.

My belief is that the deep fake creations of some media are worrisome but only have impact on vulnerable societies if there is no competition with them. How are old media investing in new tools of story-telling? How are they embracing a less centralised approach to who their story tellers might be? How could they be promulgating and inculcating a younger generation of content makers with norms about sourcing, about real facts, about objectivity, about the importance of uncomfortable news and not just opinion-reaffirming news or perspectives? How are they experimenting with all of the new waves of technology coming online to make themselves the more attractive news and content option — thus stealing space and oxygen from those who are faking it and deceiving society.

My sense is that some states, Russia being just one, are taking advantage of this gap between old and new media — and they are exacerbating the negative impacts created by a lack of modernisation and vision of traditional media platforms. My sense is that for the old media to grow and compete, they need to be part of the media fragmentation wave, and rather than over-centralising need to figure out how to disseminate quality news across a fragmented sphere of options.

This is hard to do - and it challenges the way newspapers and TV networks of record organise their work. But I believe that the fragmentation is not going away, and thus news organisations that want to assure their place in healthy civil society need to adapt.

- Steve Clemons is Editor at Large, The National Interest