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Perhaps the most basic task of journalism is to distinguish truth from falsity. To identify the facts, and to present those facts to a readership eager for information. Journalists may once have believed that their responsibility stopped there—but in today’s media environment, it’s become clear that delivering facts to the public is not so straightforward. Distinguishing true from false, which often entails calling attention to false information, risks amplifying and even legitimizing that information. There is no better contemporary example of this problem than the media coverage of Donald Trump.
Trump’s brazen dishonesty in his public comments is without political precedent in this country. During his first term, the Washington Post’s fact-checking database clocked 30,573 untruths. That rate shows no sign of slowing during his second term, and now he seems to be combating accusations of lying by simply manipulating who is allowed in the press pool.
“Our norms and conventions of how we cover politics and politicians were not created for a president like Donald Trump,” Rod Hicks, director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists, says.
Hicks questions the utility of “both sides” journalist protocol in covering politicians who’ve taken cues from Trump on manipulating the press to their advantage. “Every side doesn’t deserve equal weight,” he said. “It’s actually misleading your audience if you give too much weight to something that evidence says is not valid. We think that we’re doing our jobs by following this both-sides rule, but we really aren’t.”
Newsrooms have struggled to find a way to hold Trump accountable. Initially, media outlets were hesitant to use the word lie, preferring falsehood so as to ward off accusations of bias or personal attack. To lie denotes an intention to deceive.
“I don’t know that we’ve called him a liar in so many words,” said Tony Cavin, the managing editor for standards and practices at NPR. Cavin prefers descriptions over labels, he said.
Seth Lewis, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon, believes that journalists shouldn’t be wary of calling out lies and racism. Otherwise, he says, they unwittingly become mouthpieces for untruthful speech.
“There are more efforts that can be made in getting better at simply telling things as they are rather than, in some cases, hiding behind objectivity as an excuse to not be fully engaged in portraying reality,” Lewis added.
Stephen J.A. Ward, a media ethicist and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, recalled Trump’s 2019 tweet telling Black US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The tweet was widely reported as containing “racially charged” language.
”It’s not ‘racially coded.’ It’s racist. Please,” Ward said.
Steven Springer, who was for years the editor of standards and best practices at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, notes that while it’s difficult for news organizations to counter the quantity of misinformation found on social media, this is now also a vital part of a journalist’s work.
“We can’t stand on the mountaintop and say, ‘You must listen to me because my organization tells the truth,’” he says. He believes the best way to combat falsehood and misinformation is to “do your job as ethically and as smartly as possible. And then, hopefully, people will find your organization’s work. And they’ll come and start to see what you have to say. It’s the only thing I can hope for.”
What about when misinformation and disinformation come from official channels?
In March 2024, to commemorate Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom, Kate Middleton, the princess of Wales, released a self-portrait with her children via Kensington Palace. It was the first image the public had seen of her since she’d undergone unspecified abdominal surgery a few months prior.
Royal watchers were almost immediately skeptical of the image. Professional photographers and amateur sleuths scrutinized the photo, pointing out inconsistencies. Within hours of the photo’s release, four major news agencies had retracted the image. One of them, the AP, noted that the image had been digitally manipulated and therefore didn’t meet the AP’s standards.
In a tweet from Kensington, Middleton issued an apology, explaining that she was simply trying her hand at photo editing. No one believed it. The moment typifies the current era in more ways than one. The direct access that politicians, celebrities, and people in positions of power have to the public via social media allows them, to an extent, to bypass journalistic media. Of course, that relationship works both ways, with readers also able to comment on and react to public statements without the mitigating eye of the editor.
So when the exclusive ability to publish is taken away from them, what purpose do journalism institutions serve? “The one thing that sets us apart, I would argue, is our standards, our ethics,” Cavin said.
Consider another situation in which a manipulated photo slipped by media professionals: the viral 2023 photo of Pope Francis wearing a designer white puffer jacket. The photo initially convinced many that the pontiff was decked out in Balenciaga, but was later shown to be an AI-produced image. The digital media marketplace demands that writers and editors publish quickly, potentially sacrificing accuracy for speed. But when misinformation of the type apparent in the Kate Middleton photo, and the Pope Francis photo, is uncritically republished by reporters and editors, journalists risk losing their credibility. In cases like these, newsrooms that cover the fakes need to be smart in their sleuthing and clear in their language as they describe what happened.
“Our policy that we do kind of ram into everyone’s throats is that accuracy is first, and fast—you know, the timing—is second,” Eileen Drage O’Reilly, Axios’s managing editor of standards and training, said.
As technology gets better at producing fake content, other tech tools are being created to help suss them out. For example, the NewsGuard browser extension is a paid service that provides “reliability ratings” for thousands of websites. The ratings are determined by a pool of dozens of journalists who look at the sites’ ownership, content, and operations. Similarly, researchers are exploring the use of watermarks—visible or invisible, buried in pixels—as a way to label images that have been created or manipulated by AI. But a review of the options by the Center for Data Innovation indicates that watermarking is “fraught with significant challenges,” and instead advocates media-literacy training, enforcement of creators’ intellectual-property rights, and the possible adoption of technology that would allow users to trace the origin of digital content.
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