Dealing with Distrust

Based on the seminar “How news media survive digital transformation? A focus on media ownership and innovation” - 18 Nov 2021 - Jaron Harambam

Since on that day, I had another classes, I only catched the chance to follow Jaron Harambam’s session. Following, will only going to cover this specific period.

Dealing with distrust:

How journalists engage with conspiracy theorists and their critiques?

A Review

Most of the media industry is based upon strong people’s guidance. The corporates, which owns the news agencies, are stakeholders and mostly they coact with governments for their benefits. All the news that we are seeing in social media, newspaper etc. reflects what media wants us to see. So, it can be easily said that, truth is a serious societal problem. And even though it is a basic human right, usually a person’s right to reach the truth is getting banned.

The word post-truth, which has been mentioned frequently with its entry into the Oxford Dictionary in 2016, appears as a term used to comprehend the news environment as well as to understand today's political climate. The concept of post-truth, is important in that it requires rethinking the news-fact relationship.

Fake news debates are closely related to the dominant narrative of what the news is. News is often seen as a product of journalism, a profession that is expected to provide “independent, reliable, accurate and comprehensive information”. In liberal-democratic journalism, news is the latest, most recent and interesting information about events, people or things that happen somewhere in the real world. In the news industry, the term information is traditionally used to tell stories organized around "factual facts.”

In liberal normative theory, the purpose of journalism is defined as providing citizens with the information they need to govern themselves. Therefore, first of all, journalism is expected to report the truth. However, in my opinion, the relationship between journalism and reality has always been problematic in the communication literature.

On the other hand, the dissemination of news through social media has created a situation where social media platforms such as Facebook, technologies designed to be outside journalism, are now intertwined with journalism and become the primary sources from which people see news. Such platforms have now become not only platforms where individuals share the moments of their personal lives, but also places where they share news stories that they like, believe and agree with.

But what should journalists do while they are so busy with revealing the truth based on their subjective ideas and the political ideology of their corporates in the mean time conspiracy theories are spread throughout all the social media? Like Jaron Harambam suggest, there should be more sociological research involved in the media surveillance. Watchdogs should encounter more with more contexts, diversities and truth. Without media manipulation and mind control, journalists should follow more empirical research. Since conspiracy theories also not manifests by itself, every aspect should be discussed and covered more. But the world where only journalists monitor is not a realist goal, the audience should also be included. When it comes to communication realm, inclusion and pluralism gains more content.