Navigating Social Journalism

A Handbook for Media Literacy and Citizen Journalism

Martin Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315401249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

Public trust in the once powerful institutions of the News Establishment is declining. Sharing, curating and producing news via social media channels may offer an alternative, if the difficult process of verification can be mastered by social journalists operating outside of the newsroom. Navigating Social Journalism examines the importance of digital media literacy and how we should all be students of the media. Author Martin Hirst emphasizes the responsibility that individuals should take when consuming the massive amounts of media we encounter on a daily basis. This includes information we gather from online media, streaming, podcasts, social media and other formats. The tools found here will help students critically evaluate any incoming media and, in turn, produce their own media with their own message. This book aims both to help readers understand the current state of news media through theory and provide practical techniques and skills to partake in constructive social journalism.

1

The Democratic Deficit

The News Establishment and Social Journalism

The “Democratic Deficit” and “Alternative Journalism”

The purpose of this book is to encourage a greater level of public involvement in the practice of journalism, broadly defined as the production, distribution and consumption of news and news-like information. I believe greater public participation—the foundation of what I am calling “social journalism”—is necessary to rebuild democracies that are in danger of collapsing into authoritarian populism. Part of the process of encouragement is an attempt to fill what I believe is a gap in the literature about various forms of what, broadly speaking, we might call “alternative journalism.” This term was coined by two communication researchers in a book called Alternative Journalism (Atton and Hamilton 2008) to describe, in broad terms, various experiments in combining professional and non-professional journalists in the news production process, both inside and outside the traditional newsroom. As a concept and a set of practices, alternative journalism is even more relevant today because of a second issue, the perceived failure of mainstream journalism—and the news industry—to overcome what has become known as the “democracy deficit,” or what journalism academic Lucas Graves (2017) calls the “democracy recession.” This is the notion that institutions, governments and politicians are failing us by coming up short in their promises to defend and extend democracy; it also hints at a rise in authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes and politics in many parts of the world. The election of Donald Trump in the United States, with a decidedly authoritarian bent and a hatred for what he calls the “fake news” media, is one alarming example that features heavily in the following pages.

In an interview with The Atlantic magazine in January 2018, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, one of the authors of the book How democracies die, said that the United States had not yet become a failed democracy, but “alarm bells” were ringing. “In our book, we develop a litmus test for [authoritarian politicians] and Trump tests positive. He has exhibited the kind of behavior and the kind of language characteristic of other authoritarians,” Levitsky said (Friedman 2018). Trump’s praise for demagogues like Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose regime has murdered dozens of journalists, and Rodrigo Duerte, the Philippines leader who boasts about shooting drug peddlers, is also a signal that we may indeed be moving away from democracy, rather than towards it. In fact, Duerte may well surpass other emerging authoritarians—even Turkey’s Erdogan—in the anti-democratic stakes. In January 2018 the Philippines government launched an all-out assault on media freedom when it began actions to shutter the nation’s pre-eminent public advocacy news site, Rappler. The site, which describes itself as a “social news” provider and home to “citizen journalism” had—until January 2018—been a beacon of democratic journalism and a thorn in the side of the Duerte regime since it was launched in 2012, and CEO Maria Ressa bravely continues to publish despite many death threats and legal challenges. The Philippines government tried to shut Rappler down on spurious grounds, but as of August 2018 it was still publishing. The news site’s senior political reporter, Pia Ranada, was also banned from Presidential press briefings, a move that drew condemnation from Reporters Without Borders and other human rights groups (Rappler 2018). The ongoing harassment of Rappler is a serious blow to media freedom in the Philippines and has drawn the attention and protests of international press freedom organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), among others. Journalists and press freedom are under attack all over the world today, even in ostensibly liberal nations like Australia, which has enacted legislation allowing spy agencies to target citizens and criminalizing media whistleblowers, that media organizations say will have a “chilling effect” on public interest journalism. Such repressive moves are not limited to authoritarian regimes, they are (unfortunately) becoming typical in many so-called liberal democracies. The CPJ says that techniques to censor news media are becoming more sophisticated each year and range from the subtle—like laws against whistleblowers—to the extreme “Repression 2.0”:

Repression 2.0 is an update on the worst old-style tactics, from state censorship to the imprisonment of critics, with new information technologies including smartphones and social media producing a softening around the edges. Masked political control means a systematic effort to hide repressive actions by dressing them in the cloak of democratic norms. Governments might justify an internet crackdown by saying it is necessary to suppress hate speech and incitement to violence. They might cast the jailing of dozens of critical journalists as an essential element in the global fight against terror.

Finally, technology capture means using the same technologies that have spawned the global information explosion to stifle dissent, by monitoring and surveilling critics, blocking websites and using trolling to shout down critical voices. Most insidious of all is sowing confusion through propaganda and false news.

These strategies have contributed to an upsurge in killings and imprisonment of journalists around the world.

(Simon 2017)

From Trump’s America, across much of Eastern Europe, in Asia, the Pacific region, and parts of Africa, the suppression of information goes hand in hand with anti-democratic political action by state actors and the local, national and transnational elites they protect and serve. It is no wonder that experts are worried about where so-called democratic nations are headed. The literature on the question of the “democracy deficit” is extensive; some has a focus on the Middle East and various Arab states, some also questions the future of democracy in an increasingly divided Europe, and more still are focused on North America, including Canada. As Stanford Law School professor Nathaniel Persily wrote in an article with the disturbing title, “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?”, Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 US Presidential election was only possible because “established institutions—especially the mainstream media and political-party organizations—had already lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world” (Persily 2017: 64).There is no doubt that rising authoritarian figures and regimes are a global problem, one perhaps exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, by the Internet, despite the early nostrums of the digital evangelists that the World Wide Web would bring more freedom and more democracy to the world. After 20 years of the World Wide Web we are finally awake to the contradiction—the digital dialectic—at the heart of twenty-first century communications technologies; they are as much a tool of repression and propaganda as they are a technology of liberation (Tucker et al. 2017). The democratic void left by the failure of mainstream institutions, writes Nathaniel Persily, has been “filled by an unmediated populist nationalism tailor-made for the Internet age,” and such populist, nationalist—and ultimately racist—politics have also emerged in European nations, in Asia, and in Australia. We cannot ignore the failure of the traditional news media in this scenario. Hardly any serious American news organizations were able to foresee Donald Trump’s victory. In fact, it is potentially worse than this. A detailed study, published in the respected Columbia Journalism Review, found that as much—if not more—blame for the rise of Trumpian populism should be laid at the feet of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, which are, ironically, Donald Trump’s favorite targets for accusations of “fake news.” The authors, both senior researchers at the Microsoft corporation, wrote:

To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.

(Watts and Rothschild 2017)

Of course, they would say that wouldn’t they? After all, Microsoft is a giant tech company and other giant tech companies, notably Google, Twitter and Facebook, came under sustained criticism post the 2016 US elections for allowing so-called “fake news”—much of it allegedly generated by Russian-financed robot (bot) accounts—to rise through their secret sauce algorithms to dominate social media feeds (Leong 2017).

Much has been made of the ways in which both Google and Facebook—by their sheer size and economic weight—are distorting the so-called “marketplace of ideas” and helping to undermine the commercial viability of journalism (Bell and Owen 2017). Certainly, this is a problem, but I do not think we can lay all of the blame at the foot of these platform giants. In 2011 I wrote a book about how journalism was facing two crises, largely of its own making, my title was News 2.0: Can Journalism Survive the Internet?. The twin crises I outlined were the ongoing turmoil around declining profits and advertising revenues, and rising levels of public mistrust of mainstream news. Today we are still confronted by my fundamental question; it remains unclear if journalism will survive the era of digital disruption. All we’ve done is add to it Nathaniel Persily’s equally perplexing query, substituting “democracy” for “journalism.” This is an interesting, and not unnatural juxtaposition, because for two centuries common sense has told us that good journalism (public interest journalism) is vital to the democratic purpose. Without the “Fourth Estate” playing a watchdog role and holding those in power to public account, we were led to believe, democracy would not survive. This belief might have been common sense, but was it accurate? Journalism and the news industry have always had a troubled and contradictory relationship with the public interest. Often public interest is defined in terms that benefit elites in business, finance, politics and culture; it reflects a status quo of market forces that are never fundamentally challenged. Ultimately, journalism is bounded by an ideology that upholds fundamental class divisions between those who work and those who benefit from the labor of others. As a profession—and despite its noble ethical ideals—journalism is dominated by the economic rules of capitalism “characterized principally by intense competition and speed” (Champagne 2005: 52), and “the constant search for new niches in which profitability can be generated” (Faraone 2011: 202).

Today we are confronted by the fact that democracy is failing and journalism is failing too. Surely this cannot be a coincidence? Perhaps not. I don’t think so anyway. For me, the two are intrinsically linked. As the for-profit capitalist model of the news industry appears to be irredeemably broken, so too is public trust in the institutions of the Fourth Estate. In the following pages I hope to offer the outlines of a potential solution to this problem. If the traditional—legacy, if you like—models of journalism and the news industry are broken, then what are we (citizens) going to do about it?

I would argue that the democracy deficit means we cannot wait around for the legacy news media to fix itself, or find a way out of its current economic woes. I’d even take this a step further, the news industry cannot fix itself because its fate is tied into the fortunes of an economic system—global capitalism—that is, itself, fundamentally broken (Frase 2016). As I elucidate in the early chapters of this book, for a century or more, journalism has taken the form of a commodity, reliant on both sales and also on the commodification of audiences—the sale of eyeballs to advertisers. This is no longer generating enough profit to sustain the news industry as it has been organized for roughly the last century. The Internet has broken the old duopoly of print and broadcasting, and it has lowered the price of advertising to a fraction of what it cost to advertise in newspapers and on television. The legacy publishers and broadcasters are still struggling to adjust, despite having now had more than 20 years to try and figure out a solution. They hadn’t been able to fix it when I wrote News 2.0 and, as my extensive review of the literature shows, they haven’t fixed it yet. In fact, I don’t think the news industry, or professional journalists can fix the problems on their own. Both are part of the problem—the News Establishment—not part of the solution.

Establishment News is Broken

I have dedicated several chapters to discussing the crisis in journalism and the news industry because this is the starting point for any discussion of alternatives that allow us to begin addressing the democracy deficit by taking positive action, based on increasing our digital media literacy. Understanding the origins of, the extent and possible solutions to this crisis is a key aspect of expanding digital media literacy. In this chapter, I want to elucidate my key thesis: that there is an “establishment” in the news industry that serves as a controlling elite, and that has a vested interest in maintaining the system of commodity journalism, despite its obvious and many flaws. Acknowledging this should not be controversial, because for any establishment, or social elite, maintaining its powerful position is of paramount importance. The news media is an important weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class (Forgacs 2000). This “News Establishment,” as I have decided to name it, is so invested in the current economic and political configuration of journalism and news that it cannot escape the downward spiral of the crises of trust and profitability at the core of the problem. Further, the ideological blinkers worn by many in the Establishment—coupled with the material economic interest they have in the system—make them incapable of developing alternatives that might actually help turn the situation around. So, who are the News Establishment?

There are four main groupings who make up the News Establishment: “News Capitalists” are members of the ruling class and this grouping is made up of the owners of news industry capital and the senior managers who look after their interests—company CEOs and their senior lieutenants who manage media capital. Reporters and editors with a conscious or unconscious ideological investment in the news industry as currently constituted are the Systemic Journalists. Alongside the invested Systemic Journalists sits another group of reporters and editors who are more committed to the principles of Fourth Estate journalism. I call this cohort the “Fourth Estate Idealists” and argue that it has a conflicted view of journalism and of itself—a belief in public interest journalism is combined with a supportive view of the news industry. It is a serious contradiction and it also affects the fourth group in the News Establishment, the “Normative Scholars” of journalism. The scholars’ role is to provide arguments and justifications for maintaining the system as it is—and devising ways to save it. The Fourth Estate group and the Normative Scholars want to save and to improve mainstream journalism, but they also want to find ways to help the news industry to survive. In my view—and as I establish in this chapter—these two aims are incompatible and almost impossible to reconcile within the framework of capitalism. The News Establishment has its own belief system “that defines the appropriate practices and values of news professionals, news media, and news systems” (Nerone 2012: 447). It is a belief system worth describing and analyzing if we are to learn how to deal with this powerful elite.

News Capitalists

The News Capitalists are the easiest group to deal with. They are not necessarily the most important when it comes to exercising influence over public opinion; but they are the most powerful group when it comes to making investment or dis-investment decisions that affect the overall economic structuring of the industry. Saying this is to state no more than a basic principle of the political economy of the news media business (see Chapter 2). Journalism and news must inevitably take the form of a generic commodity when ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Media Literacy in the Digital World
• 1. The Democratic Deficit: The News Establishment and Social Journalism
• 2. Journalism and the Internet of Things
• 3. Journalism in a “Post-Truth” World
• 4. The Political Economy of Fake News
• 5. Can Journalism Be Saved?
• 6. Social Journalism and the News Establishment
• 7. Social Journalism Reimagined
• 8. The Ethical and Legal Principles of Social Journalism
• 9. Research and Verification
• 10. How to Do Social Journalism
• 11. Writing Social Journalism
• 12. The Future of Journalism is Already Here
• Epilogue: Droning on about Drones
• Index