Comment: How Truth Died
Retired journalist Lewis Stuart reflects on the global breakdown of media principles and journalistic standards
Whether it’s censorship in Singapore, the Duterte administration’s crackdown on the press in the Philippines, or how truth became a casualty of war in Myanmar, those who have lived and worked in authoritarian countries know all too well how declining fact verification and journalistic standards can corrode institutions and distort information. Now — as we’re seeing in the United States — similar trends are beginning to spread in other places, that once championed these ideals as fundamental to democracy.
To change things up a bit, this week’s edition of Currents features a guest column from my father, Lewis Stuart — a retired journalist who spent over 40 years in the media industry — discussing the erosion of core principles in the media, the Internet’s role in undermining truth, and the enduring need for responsible journalism.
The law of unintended consequences has another winner, and real journalism has turned out to be the biggest loser.
The Internet was supposed to liberate us all but, instead, it handed power to whoever shouted loudest and, bizarrely enough, that turned out not to be the traditional, trained news media.
So these days, “facts” come from your mate Joe, something on Facebook, a message on Elon Musk’s poisonous X network, or whatever, and the “MSM” — mainstream media for the non-internet savvy — only gets a look-in as a supposed source of bias and misinformation. The irony of taking a highly partisan, one-sided, openly abusive and often ignorant commentator as a judge of bias and misinformation is, presumably, lost on most people.
That said, the traditional media outlets haven’t helped themselves and in many cases they are not much more credible as a source. Fifty years ago, journalism was a vocation, and almost everybody who went into it had the noble goal of bringing information to the masses on the basis that freedom depends on accurate data. Freedom is still a fragile beast nourished by facts, but the news media increasingly see themselves as a branch of the entertainment industry, where presentation and strong opinions are key, and actually getting things right is secondary.
No wonder public trust has become harder to find, and when the Internet came along, people were already conditioned to the blurring of facts and opinion. The idea that everyone is entitled to their opinion but not to their own facts had already been dumped, as readers and profits became the only things that really mattered.
The Internet then came along to administer the last rites. Back in the heyday of journalism, newspapers were driven by news and maybe made a bit of money on the side. The great press barons of the 20th century — Beaverbrook, Rothermere, and Northcliffe in the UK, Hearst in the US — were themselves steeped in the news media and understood it and its value. They were probably not particularly nice men, but they did understand that their business was about information, not money.
Did the journalists always get it right? Of course not. The important thing is that they tried. Facts were seen as sacred and firmly to be separated from opinion. Even when they got it horribly wrong — and they did — it was usually a cock-up, not a conspiracy.
Then along came Rupert Murdoch and the drive to slash the costs of the news industry. Suddenly profits, not the public good, became the driving force behind most large news organisations. News became what interested the public, not what was in the public interest. Salacious showbiz gossip became the mainstay of many papers, and the old, hard division between news and opinion disappeared, while the agenda was dominated by trivia.
Worse still, the old Hearst line — “news is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising” — went by the board. Diving into the nitty-gritty to uncover hidden secrets is expensive; reprinting press releases is cheap. No contest, then.
To be fair, the US held out a bit longer than the UK. Forty years ago, when CNN was barely out of nappies, American journalism was still the gold standard. Driven in large part by an almost religious commitment to the First Amendment of the Constitution, American journalists were widely seen as the benchmark for the serious and committed delivery of accurate news.
This was when the American press was still basking in the glow of Watergate, where fearless probing of the affairs of the rich and powerful ended up bringing down the president. That followed hard on the heels of the Pentagon Papers scandal, where government lies about the Vietnam War were laid bare, and a decade later the feel-good reputation of the US media was secure.
There was more to it, though. At that time in the US, copy editors took control of every word put in front of the public. Apart from making sure the spelling and grammar were correct, they saw their job as independently checking every checkable fact in the copy. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias lived on their desks, other reference books on a library of shelves nearby.
It was perfectly normal to go to the phone book or electoral roll to check that somebody really did live in the street the reporter claimed they did, to check government and company records to make sure somebody’s job title was exactly right, to pore through record books to check the exact date of some event or the exact profit on a named transaction. It was not just about getting things right in general, but doing it with real attention to detail. Elsewhere, sub-editors were a bit more trusting of their reporters but still revelled in their reputation for pedantry.
That was all expensive, though, and as the news industry got taken over by businesses interested in profit more than accuracy, standards dropped and nowadays, across the planet, it is almost standard for the reporter’s work to go out with nobody checking it for typos, grammar, or accuracy.
The worst of it is that in more and more cases the mainstream media are deliberately misleading or flat-out getting their facts wrong. It’s not just Fox News — though they are arguably the modern template — but across the board, facts are being ignored or twisted to suit an agenda, as any front page in the UK’s Daily Mail or Daily Express will testify.
The broadcast medium was late to the party but has now arrived. Fox started that way; now CBS, now part of the Paramount Group, led by Trump ally David Ellison, has not only paid millions for the standard editing of an hour-long interview but appointed Bari Weiss, whose opinions got her into trouble with the New York Times, as head of news. The raft of resignations tells its own story.
It all adds up to the death of real journalism as far as the traditional media go. Newspapers, news websites, radio, and television are all heading down the same path. Those of us who value the old ethos of journalism as a fact-driven vocation have to find other outlets – newsletters, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels – to keep the flag flying in the hope that one day standards and honesty will return to the profession.
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