What can reputable professional publishers do about the breakdown of trust and the polarisation of society?
What can we do about a dystopian world where, for instance, millions of people genuinely believe that covid was a hoax?
Why are people falling for “information” being peddled by dishonest, cynical and self-serving sources and not us, professionally trained journalists?
Why do they trust them, not us?
The solution might be to level the playing field...
In delivering this year’s Reuters Memorial Lecture in March, Dr Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, advised his audience to, “rather than hope for a return of a more trusting public, we should work for a more equitably sceptical one. Do not trust us. In fact, don’t easily trust anyone. Let doubt proliferate.”
The populace should be encouraged, educated, to be sceptical, not to “take us — or anyone else — at their word”, but to demand evidence of trustworthiness before bestowing trust.
News organisations should “steal a page from the social sciences, where every source is documented, and the hard sciences where every finding must be replicable. In those arenas, showing how you derived your conclusions has long been a professional requirement. Every piece of significant journalism should be accompanied by a hyperlink with a caption that says, “How this story was reported,” where a reader or viewer can find the documents, interviews and research that went into the story they just consumed.”
To win in an “equitably sceptical” world, news organisations would need to “adhere to our codes of ethics more scrupulously than ever before.”
“Crucially,” he continued, “when we make mistakes, we should not hesitate to own up to them... the definition of an untrustworthy news organisation is one that has never deemed it necessary to issue a correction.”
By documenting sources and methodology, Cobb concluded, not only will this “minimise the argument that the news is, as some cynics speculated, simply made up, it would throw down a gauntlet before other types of outlets that we must now compete against for public influence. Our great strength is that we report, we probe, we seek answers. In short, we are prepared to show our work. A healthy, well-informed public is one that demands that the competing sources of so-called information do the same.”
(The full transcript of Dr Cobb's lecture can be read here and you can watch a video of the lecture here. The video includes the post-lecture Q&A.)
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