Last modified on Sat 7 Nov 2020 06.03 AEDT
We’ve all been transfixed by the American election, glued to CNN or our preferred network or live blog of choice, constantly refreshing our social media feeds, cursing Nate Silver – demonstrating that global anxiety is the glue of 2020.
At the time of filing, the vote count is grinding on, and my purpose is not to get into winners and losers and the consequences. Here, I want to step back and look at some propositions that are uncomfortable for a person in my position to look at.
Full disclosure. There are questions I ask myself constantly as a long-term political reporter. Some of these questions are easy. The daily one: am I telling the truth? The semi-regular one: do I have Stockholm syndrome? The hardest one: am I part of an apparatus that is making things worse?
It’s the last question I want to focus on this weekend, the existential one, because the moment renders this question paramount. Donald Trump has accelerated the drift towards post-truth, and the media is shackled to that acceleration.
The post-truth festival reached a desperate zenith on Friday when Trump entered the White House press briefing room, and began lying copiously. The purpose of the lies, apart from graceless pique, was incitement. Trump wanted to rile his supporters. He wanted hackles raised. If Joe Biden wins, Trump wants to bequeath his political opponent a poison pill: a polity where resentments are so acute the country becomes ungovernable.
Faced with this reality – a lying, dangerous demagogue openly hostile to political conventions and democratic norms – media outlets face difficult choices.
Do networks refuse to broadcast the lies? Do media outlets disrupt the tirades with live fact-checking? Broadcast the news (and a president speaking meets the news test) without interruption, but put straps at the bottom of the screen alerting viewers to the fact a politician is making false claims? Broadcast minus the filter, leaving viewers to form their own conclusions?
Puncturing self-serving propaganda with facts is the primary duty of journalists who take their professional responsibilities seriously and Trump’s egregious falsehoods have triggered a rolling debate in my profession about the gossamer thin line between reporting and enabling. Call this rolling seminar atonement for the media’s role in facilitating Trump’s rise by treating the insurgent as a laugh track rather than the danger to democracy he actually was.
But the problem with the seminar is there are no easy or even right answers to the questions we’ve been asking ourselves. Consider Friday’s Trump tirade as a case in point.
Trump was trying to make a case that there is a conspiracy against him. Fake votes. Fake polls. Fake news outlets pretending the fake votes aren’t fake. Obviously this is a florid fantasy, but Trump is speaking to supporters, American citizens, who also hold these views. He’s validating voter predispositions, not inventing them.
Biden looks likely to win this contest, but not by a landslide. Millions of Americans have stuck loyally with Trump, turning out in record numbers in 2020, in large part because they feel alienated from the institutions Trump constantly attacks.
Decisions about live fact-checking or censoring Trump’s corrosive monologues carry higher stakes.
If we agree verifiable facts are important, that is a fact we can’t overlook.
So with that important context in mind, decisions about live fact-checking or censoring Trump’s corrosive monologues carry higher stakes. The decision becomes about more than what is true and what is false. Broadcasters also have to consider how that most fundamental expression of our professionalism sits with people who suspect the media is conspiring actively to tear down the brave politician who, in their eyes, speaks truth.
Journalists believe that speaking truth to power sits at the foundation of what we do. That’s our value add. But in a time where polarisation is so pervasive, we also need to consider whether our longstanding professional objective feels persuasive to people who believe everything is broken, and the media – the personification of winner-takes-all smug elites – is one of the principle reasons why it’s broken.
The simplest way to express the perilous crossroads my profession stands at is this: truth is all we have, but truth is not enough.
Having been honest about that, about the power of truth and its limits, we can now delve a little deeper.
Part of the reason why our once shared societal realities feel fractured – why truth feels increasingly informed by where you stand as well as what you see – is because the mass media has stepped away from helping to shape those shared realities.
Curating the commons was one of our roles during the golden age of journalism, but that “voice of God” era was already waning precipitously by the time I arrived as a reporter 20 years ago.
The reasons for this are complex. It would be a stupendously twee bit of reductionism for me to say the change has been driven entirely by commercial factors – that would miss the cultural revolution triggered by technological change – but the economics of our industry are part of the picture.
We can step the commercial drivers out simply. The internet ate our revenue. Since that happened, media outlets have had to chase paying audiences. Emotions drive engagement and subscriber/supporter loyalty, and opinion is cheaper than news gathering.
These underlying conditions incentivise media outlets to be sources of confirmation bias rather than pluralistic places where the resting views and dispositions of audiences will be challenged. The inexorable economics of the business is pushing media outlets to become preachers rather than persuaders, and this is part of the reason why democratic societies – America being the most critical case in point – are becoming ungovernable.
Bear in mind too that contemporary media outlets are also under constant pressure to shrug off their alleged golden age/gatekeeper arrogance and listen more to their increasingly self-selecting audiences – cries that become louder when journalists present to the world as self-important, or brittle in the face of criticism.
Preaching replacing fact-based persuasion is highly problematic for free societies, because there is no progress without persuasion, and there is no progress without active listening followed by compromise.
Now this isn’t me saying “woe is me”, or “media outlets do unhelpful things because *reasons* and we can’t help it” – it is about laying out the contributing factors to why things are as they are.
My profession did not wake up one day, hold a secret meeting, and determine our contribution henceforth would be to amplify and abet the cultural and technological forces herding people into tribes.
Truth is there’s been a significant disruption to the way we do business, and we have had to respond to it. This isn’t a plea bargain, this is a statutory declaration from a person living through a revolution in my own profession.
Tracking back to the central question I wanted to focus on this weekend: am I part of an apparatus making things worse, when you assemble all the parts of the puzzle, the only honest answer to the question can be yes.
Some days I wonder whether I can keep doing the job at all, given that knowledge. The insight induces profound anxiety, at least for me.
But I know these things as well.
Truth may not be enough, but it is all we have. History tells us that truth sometimes loses the battle with lies – that monsters, despots, and fiends sometimes prevail. But cycles also turn, particularly when good people maintain hope and strive to perform modest acts of good in the world.
I know journalism at its best bears witness, and brings people verified facts.
I know that honest, diligent reporting is an act of public service, an expression of modesty rather than hubris.
I know reporting can change lives, it can speak for the powerless. Adequately resourced outlets can also stand and challenge the powerful when that job needs doing – which is most days in my experience.
I have no idea whether the values that exemplify my professional life prevail over the grand sweep of history.
But I know the core mission matters enough to persist.
Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor
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