Moderator: Pamela Paul, columnist, The New York Times
Participants: Persiana Aksentieva, youth fellow, International Youth Think Tank; Dr. Battinto L. Batts Jr., dean, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University; Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, president, International, The New York Times Company; Camille Grenier, executive director, Forum on Information and Democracy
Excerpts from the panel Rethinking Journalism: A Crisis of Confidence have been edited and condensed.
PAMELA PAUL We are at very fraught times for journalism. People don’t believe journalists, and they don’t want to pay for journalism. So with that, I just ask each of you: How you see the future of journalism given those enormous and perhaps insurmountable threats to its existence?
DR. BATTINTO L. BATTS JR. Despite the dramatic change that’s happened in the industry from an economic standpoint, I remain very positive and bullish on the future of journalism. We still need it very much in our communities. From a global perspective, it’s very much a part of a healthy democracy. And I’m encouraged by the students who I get to interact with on a day-to-day basis at the Cronkite School.
PAUL All right, Persiana, perhaps you can talk about the future and what you see as an aspiring journalist.
PERSIANA AKSENTIEVA I’m representing the International Youth Think Tank as a youth fellow, so I’m very happy to bring this young perspective to this important discussion today because I think it’s not a surprise for everyone sitting in this room that young people distrust media. There are many reasons for that. There is, for example, fake news, and misinformation that let young people avoid media. But what we have to do as International Youth Think Tank members is dive deeper into understanding a bit more, what makes us distrust the media?
At the International Youth Conference in South Africa people discussed the factors that make us distrust media. And one of the things they identified is that media is lacking diversity. Not only diversity in terms of representation of sexual differences, racial, gender, disability, and so on, but really also diversity in terms of content, in terms of representing different perspectives and different views. And another challenge is also the ownership, because young people are saying if there are several very, very strong entities that control most of the media, how are we actually getting the unbiased picture?
It’s also not a surprise that a lot of young people are turning to social media nowadays. They’re getting their news there, their information there. However, that also poses a lot of risks. Because the algorithms on social media create so-called echo chambers, filter bubbles that really influence the way that we see things, and the political beliefs that we have.
And therefore, today I have two proposals. that I would also like to give to you. The first proposal was actually developed at this International Youth Conference in South Africa, where people have [built] this idea of creating a global media guild that controls and regulates the media in terms of diversity to track how diverse different media outlets are but also track the ownership. Because we do believe that we need to implement very strict caps on ownership so that there are no few entities that hold very big market share. And it’s therefore very important that we prevent monopolies.
The second proposal that I have is [protecting] the political and the journalistic community. We think that the journalists are the key actors in sustaining democracy, but they can only do so if we support them. So what we propose is that we engage the United Nations, that we create a global agency that really tackles journalistic community.
And I know that you might say, “Oh, that’s such a, you know, idealistic, far-fetched proposal,” but hear me out. The United Nations is investing so much into peacekeeping. — why don’t we do that for truthkeeping as well?
PAUL So in terms of protecting journalists obviously there were maybe a few bright spots this year — the return of Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal from imprisonment in Russia — but for the most part it’s been a very grim year with a huge number of journalists killed while reporting. Camille, do you want to talk a little bit about those challenges?
CAMILLE GRENIER Yes. We see that the space where journalists can do their work really freely with no pressure is not increasing, it’s rather shrinking throughout the world. But I just wanted to get back to your question on what is the future of journalism. The social function is to provide facts, and I’m not sure if it’s truth. I would say facts rather than truth. We’ve seen how truth can be different from one place to another.
But bringing facts and context, and letting people decide enlightened by these facts and context. To preserve this social function a few years ago, in 2021, we launched one of our landmark reports calling for a new deal for journalism, where we need all stakeholders and all of those who can support the sustainability of journalism, and the ideal of journalism, to take action. We have basically three buckets of action. The first is, we need to ensure that journalists are able to do their work freely, independently, pluralistically in a way. The second is around public intervention, and we need better, stronger, future-proof policies to ensure the financial sustainability of journalism.
And the last bucket is making sure that we have an enabling environment for journalism and news media to innovate, to create value and to be sustainable.
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON If you really want to understand what’s happening on a national scale you have to understand what’s happening on a local scale. And right now there are no journalists going into town halls, procurement meetings. No one’s holding people to account, which is not healthy for democracy. So if we believe that journalism is a core ingredient for a functioning healthy democracy, we need to think about new models that will support that journalism.
PAUL The issue of trust I think is tied into the question of “What is journalism?” Right? Because if you’re talking about young people getting their news on social media there’s no way to verify the source, whether it’s just someone randomly tweeting something, whether it’s someone in Russia pretending to be — posting something as someone else, whether it’s an institution with any kind of standards. And even within journalism there is a lot of debate about “What is journalism? Why should we trust it?” And you have a confusion as to “What is opinion journalism? What is news journalism? What is advocacy journalism” or “activism” rather than “journalism?”
Part of what The New York Times has tried to do is to educate people about just what our process is, and what “conflicts of interest” mean, and what it means to be “fact-checked.” I don’t know if those values are understood by most young media consumers, and whether that’s important to them.
AKSENTIEVA Yeah, that’s a very interesting issue, and I’ve already mentioned this in different conversations before, that you mostly trust people that look similar to you, right? So that’s why young people relate more to, for example, social-media content creators. They’d rather turn to this side of the story because they use more accessible language; they understand everything that is being somehow transmitted to them. Which is also not correct, because as you said there are algorithms that influence all of this. There are missing sources. There is a lot of misinformation going around, but people choose to still believe in that. And that’s why I think that this education in that matter is very, very important to find a middle ground on how to create an article, for example, that is widely understood by everyone, that really portrays plausible information that people can trust.
I don’t think that the media, the way that it is right now, if it doesn’t evolve and doesn’t match the new trends and the newer requirements of young people, will get to them. So I think it’s work on both sides to find this middle ground for everyone to be on the same page in the end.
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