Breaking News: Journalism is in Crisis (Again)

Picture just how many times this has happened to you. You open social media and there it is, trending some major public figure has done. The pause flew in, tweets with prionymologies dramatic headlines from websites who never heard of, but something doesn't sit right. You google it. Nothing. Nothing in the BBC, the moon, the país or any of the usual sources. Just smaller digital outlets, some with sketch names, other with headlines and all caps, all repeating the same thing. Then our Slater, the Truth Emerge. The sorority is alive, the story was a fate and yet for a brief window of time millions of people believed it. Some are embarrassed, others shrugged off and a few double down from views that the media is just trying to cover something up. This is a tale I fear as all as the internet itself. But it probably wants for price you to hear that the speed and scale of these kind of hoaxes has accelerated at an unprecedented scale in recent years. And for example what happened to Steve Harvey, the renowned American comedian and TV host, just a few months ago. In December 2024, reports of face online claiming he had passed away. The news spread like wildfire, flowed in aggregators, dominating social media feeds, and even sleeping into some traditional media outlets. But it was entirely fabricated. And you want to know the culprit behind it? Artificial intelligence. A false news story claiming comedian and longtime family feud host Steve Harvey has died, circulated this week. Now the media site, the rap says that original, now debunked story was generated by artificial intelligence. This wasn't an isolated incident. AI generated misinformation is becoming more sophisticated and more difficult to detect, targeting not just celebrities but political figures, global prices and even historical narratives. And if AI can manufacture a convincing news cycle out of thin air. What does that mean for journalism role in verifying the truth? How can audiences distinguish between real reporting and fabricated fiction when AI deepfakes and machine-generated news reports blur the lines completely? And now picture the same pattern, but with elections, war, pandemics, real world prices that depend on accurate information, if false news can spread faster than truth. What does that mean for journalism, for democracy and for our ability to understand the world around us? Journalism is facing an unprecedented crisis. Again, I mean as a journalist let me tell you, we'll be hearing this for decades. Ever since the dawn of the internet, the industry has been in a state of perpetual upheaval, constantly adapting to new technologies, shifting business models and waves of skepticism. But today the stakes feel higher than ever. The rise of social media, the relinquous acceleration of the news cycle, and now the explosion of AI generated content have reshaped the very foundation of how information is created and consumed. And what happens when the various institutions, one that's trusted to mediate the truth, are now seen by many as the enemy? In fact, checking is no longer a safeguard against falsehoods, but a battleground of partisan distress. And when journalism survival hinges not on accuracy or depth, but on the relentless pursuit of speed, engagement and virality. In this post-truth era, journalism has never been more sensual or more fragile. Journalists are still suspected to be the gatekeepers of truth. That they are constrained by commercial pressure, extremely tight deadlines, and the ever-growing challenge of separating fact from fiction in an increasingly fragmented information landscape. The core mission of journalism, that is delivering reliable, evidence-based reporting. Now struggles to compete against a digital economy that thrives on speed, sensation of the enforcement of existing biases rather than careful verification. The Reuters Institute has released a report examining the public's trust in news. The study carried out over three years of examining data collected from the UK, US, Brazil, and India, revealed that while there's still a lot of distrust in news outlets, the wider picture is more nuanced. And then, there's the issue of trust. Studies show that trust in the media has been declining for years, with audiences increasingly skeptical of mainstream news organization. This is characteristicism is unlimited to one side of the political spectrum. Under the sacrifice of liberal bias or corporate influence, the perception that journalism is compromised has fueled a growing reliance on alternative media sources. Fact-checking, once considered as straightforward tool for accountability, is now seen by some as just another weapon in an ideological battle. If trusting journalism arose completely, what feels the vacuum? Well, if journalism is doomed, it certainly won't happen in our watch. And definitely not in our podcast. I'm your host, Lucas Proto. And welcome back to Post Truth Be Told. This podcast is brought to you as part of Reclame, our ISON Europe Research Project tackling post truth as one of the most urgent challenges to liberal democracy. Today, we turn our focus to journalism itself, how it has evolved, the mountain challenges its faces, and whether it can still stand as the fourth power in an increasingly chaotic information landscape. And if the new industry is indeed in free fall, we are here to ask, who's still holding the parachute? Usually, we bring in one guest editor to help us make sense of the chaos, right? But, you know, today we decided that wasn't enough. So we're tripling the brain power. That's right. Not one, not two, but three expert voices are joining us to break down the state of journalism in the post truth era. We are honored to welcome Hans Jor, Trans and Jacobo Kustoli, both researchers at School and Armada Superioria, and Martin Moan from the University of Oslo. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, and hello everybody. Thank you. So Hans Jor, let's start with you. Based on your research, what is the role of journalism as a mediator of truth nowadays? Well, journalists, first of all, they need to make money, which means that they sell the truth. How do they do this? They get our information, and they turn this information into news stories, and these news stories then hopefully have some value for the public to spend money for news. And the news need to have a value for the people, and usually this value is based on a claim that the news are true. So truth in a way has a worth for journalism, and it can be turned into money. And the problem then starts that journalists simply only have limited capacities to approach truth. They are not experts or everything. They are not scientists, and they are modes of investigation of the facts remains always incomplete. So most importantly, there are time constraints that apply to journalists, because journalists have to deliver daily news, but investigation often takes some time. So this is dilemma. If the worth of news is based on these truth claims, the people then also need to find the work of journalism trustful, and they need to find the news stories credible. So the claim for truth of a news story in this sense is related to a claim to be trustful. So truth and trust are quite closely related in the work of journalists. And journalists in a way then are not kind of inventing truth, but they are mediating truth claims. And this is their basic drop, which we then also use to describe the main functions of journalism as a mediator of truth. And truth then is defined in relation to the value that people are willing to pay for evidence-based news. And here the problem is that such evidence-based news simply tend to be expensive. And they are also time-consuming in the production of news. And this is the main challenge for journalism, for contemporary journalism. Now, let's talk about the digital shift. How has digitalization both trefton and transform evidence-based journalism? What happens when audiences expect news to be free, instant, and credible all at the same time? Well, this is a kind of starting question for our project in the sense that through social media, through the internet, information is readily available. It is cheap. Often it is even free. There's even the expectation by audiences that information should be freely available when you serve online. And then on the other hand, the truth value of information is challenged, which means that the role of the mediators, the journalist, the institution of journalism, is kind of difficult to accomplish. So when you encounter online information, you do not know exactly how credible this is. We can no longer directly link this to a reliable institution of professional journalism that works according to ethical standards of truth finding. So we have the problem here that there are two competing expectations when you encounter news and information online. On the one hand, audiences still expect to be informed. And that information is based on evidence. On the other hand, they want the information free or very cheap. And they want it very quick. So there's also this acceleration of news distribution that counts here, that information needs to be turned into news in faster and faster ways. These are competing expectations. And we need to investigate here what type of news people actually want when they are online. Do they still-- or are they still willing to pay the price for evidence-based information? Or do they have different preferences? And this is the basis of a survey we did where we investigated how people demand evidence-based news. And this is something that my colleague Martin will be able to give you further details. Martin, over to you. Your research looked into what audiences actually expect from journalism today. In an era of this information and the client's trust, what did your findings reveal? So what we found through our survey, which was done in Norway, Italy, and Poland, is that people, even in this day and age of post-truth disinformation and fake news, essentially want a lot of the same things that they've always wanted from journalism. They want quality journalism that is unbiased, that puts news into context. And that is accurate. And that's not really surprising. What is new today, as San Scherid pointed out, is that it's not really what people want-- what people want from journalism, but rather that the fast pace of the news cycle, digitalization, and so on, makes it more difficult to fulfill and meet these demands than what has been the case in the past. So when you add in, when you add together, essentially, the fast pace of the news cycle, these very high demands, really, because this type of journalism, as San Scherid said, is both expensive and difficult to produce. And the elite actors, like Donald Trump, the high-eirable sonar in Brazil, the former president, and so on, essentially painting legacy media and so on, as an enemy of the people in many ways, you could potentially have a recipe for declining media trust. And we see that in specific subsets of the population. We're still not in many places in a situation where there's a broad decline in media trust. But we do see it among these people who are particularly receptive to, for instance, the kind of discourse that Donald Trump and other right-wing populists are putting out there. And what about fact checking? It is often assumed that fact checking is an antidote to misinformation. But how do you always perceive it? What kind of practices or institutions are considered the most credible? So our research hasn't really focused too much on specific fact checking practices. And what kind of messages are most effective? What we have focused on is something that researchers have tended not to look at, which is the kind of organization of fact checking that is considered most credible. And what we find interesting in our survey is that, according to our data, people, regardless of country, seem to be convinced that independent organizations are more credible fact checkers than journalists working in legacy media institutions. And this is incredible, in a way, because all journalists are supposed to be fact checkers. That is their job. And the fact that people think that independent organizations are better at this kind of fact checking than the people working in traditional media institutions is actually something that I believe a lot of professional journalists should take seriously, because it seems to suggest that a lot of people believe that journalists are not the people-- professional journalists are not the people that should be trusted to do something that is at the core of their job, which is to ensure that the facts that they put out there are true. And I think this is also something that speaks to a potential warning sign and a relationship between media and journalistic institutions more broadly. Now, Jakob, let's bring in the journalists themselves. How do they view their profession in the face of growing this information? What time of challenges do they see up the biggest threat? OK, so we interviewed several journalists across seven different European countries. And what we notice is that journalists understand this information in a rather complex way, in the sense that they identify different types of problems with information. And the first one is the classic one, we could say, which is the traditional online fake news, the false content, which is usually due to economic profit or political manipulation. And we find that mainly on social media or alternative media. But according to many journalists, this is not really the main problem we are facing, because according to many of them in their replies, the other two types are more problematic. And the other two types are subtle disinformation, which is an information that is not entirely false, but is biased, is out of context, is selective. And so it's like a low-quality information. And according to many journalists, this is a type of disinformation that is growing due to the increase of media ownership, due to the rise of partisan press, and so on. And finally, the last type that they identified is misinformation, which is like the unintentional spread of disinformation. And this is a problem that can be found also in traditional media. And this is due to the fact that journalists are working in a work environment that is faster than in the past, YouTube Digital. in an environment that is more polarized, in the past, at least in some countries, in an environment in which media ownership is more concentrated, and in which media outlets need to follow the algorithms of media platforms that are poorly regulated. And all of those reasons, in a way, facilitate the spread of misinformation or of subtle disinformation. And for a final question, let's talk about policy. What role, called the European Union play in safeguarding journalism? Are journalists aware of EU initiatives in this area? And what kind of action do they think it's necessary? So something that we noticed is that journalists, at least the ones that we interviewed, were not so much familiar with the European regulations on those domains. This is partially understandable, due to the fact that the European Union has been interviewing, I mean, has been acting on those issues only, like, very recently. And some regulations are not even fully operational, like the European media freedom act. But in general, there was also this perception that the European Union was not very close to their work life. But something that they told us was that they would like to see a stronger role of the European Union in regulating algorithms of social media platforms. This is something that the European Union is already up doing, actually. But many journalists would like to see a stronger role of the European Union on those issues, especially because they believe that since those media platforms are transnational, the national states are not so capable of really like controlling and like regulating them, while the European Union, since it's also a transnational organization, could have potentially more power. And finally, something that came out of, from the interview, was the idea that the European Union should increase funding for media outlets that have pulled high standards of reporting, that have good professional practices, that have good working conditions. And of course, like deciding whether a media outlet is doing good reporting or not, it's not always so easy, you know, it's a slippery terrain. But nonetheless, it's a terrain where the European Union should probably act more in order to subsidize and support good coverage, good working conditions, and eventually good media outlets. Journalism has always been a business of adaptation. From pre-interradio, from television to digital, its transitions has brought both opportunities, existential threats and frequent layoffs. But today, something different is happening. The old business models are collapsing faster than new ones can emerge. And the financial pressures of newsrooms are pushing Journalism to the edge, where credibility, sustainability, and public trust are a lot of risk. To understand the depth of this crisis, I spoke with Oro-Alu, senior policy manager at News Media Europe, and Hennate Shrother, Director of the European Federation of Journalism. Their insights, being the picture of an industry fighting to adapt, even as the ground beneath it, continues to shift. Oro, describe the media landscape today, where quality journalism must compete for attention against misinformation and sensation of content. Yeah, this is a very good question. So, you're absolutely right. We are in a tricky media environment, where the attention of people is saturated, and we need to compete with sensationalism, we need to compete with disinformation. And I would say the best way to compete is to provide quality and reliable information to people, information that they can trust. And I think this business model is not dead, quiet the contrary. So, you've probably seen the developments in the US, and the fact that some journalists or press publications decided to leave some social networks because their polyhies, monogocorrespond to European democratic values. So, to that extent, it could be a threat to the future of journalism. If journalism cannot find its space online, but this is why organizations like ours is strongly defending the business of journalism and professional, reliable, trustworthy content for every citizen. We're not to point it out that the issue is not just competition. It's who profits from this information. We have always had this information. We have always had to face with propaganda, but today we are looking at a phenomenon that not only has a different speed, because due to digital technologies, but also due to the business models of the tech giants, who actually thanks to their specific algorithms earn most money from this information and false information. We all know that lies and this information, I don't want to use the word fake news because it has been misused by Trump and Co. It's much quicker than facts. Facts these days seem to be boring. That's why I agree with your term of post-truth and the reasons are many fold. But one reason I definitely blame the mostly American US digital platforms who have made a lot of their living due to this information. And we all know now we have European regulation. We have the Digital Service Act switch and we have the UPME Freedom Act and at least the Digital Service Act is dealing with illegal content and the need for content. moderation also regards systematic risks and the platforms just lately shied away and said, "We don't want to deal with regulation. We only want to deal with innovation." In this debate, public funding is often proposed as a solution, but I'll explain why it cannot be the only strategy. So first of all, you're absolutely right. Journalism is a public good and the European Union should support editor-on-media as an essential public good for citizens. But at the same time, it's also a business. We should not forget that journalism needs financial viability at the precondition for free and independent reporting. So public funding can be a solution to ensure this financial viability but it cannot be the only way to sustain the future of journalism. So what we do is we work on policy recommendations to create the right market conditions to allow press publishers and journalists to operate and to operate in a safe and in a viable business environment. And I could tell you more in details about everything on competition and advertising models but though they're quite essential for journalism to continue operating in an independent way. Also, when I emphasize that any public funding must not lead to political control over the press. If you say journalism is a public good, you have to create an environment. You also have to create an environment that allows public funding. Of course, always public funding at Slingx. We always say we need a mix. We need a mix of public funding at Slingx of private funding and of philanthropic funding. And philanthropic funding is something that is growing at the moment. And the force, very important digital taxes. We need and we have in Australia, we have some attempts but even in Austria, there is a digital tax for news. And the money is already going into some smaller news outlets with the public interest mission. So it is possible but we need the political will and the political courage to do that. There had been discussions also at the European Commission level in 2018 about the digital tax but it's sort of hidden away. I don't know if there is at the moment the courage to get something back to that. But I think it's utterly needed because alone only with the wallet, we won't make it. Beyond public funding advertising has long-sourced staying journalism. But today, so all points out that market is dominated by theft giants. Yeah, absolutely. So advertising remains a very important sort of revenue for press publishers. And the problem at the moment that we are facing is we operate in a broken ad-tech market. It's quite technical but in a nutshell, the press sector had been an economic decline for the past decade due to the capture of advertising revenue. used by big tech players, Google and Meta. So what happens is that those dominant players absorb most of the revenues on content that they do not produce and to give you an idea for every euro worth of advertising between 65 and 85 cents go to Google. So we need to rebalance the online advertising market to support journalistic activities and this is something that the European Union is looking into and we absolutely need to drink more competition, fairness and transparency into the advertising market so that it can continue being the source of revenues for full-press publishers. And finally, Grenade Highlight that trust in journalism is not only about funding, it's about connection with audiences. I think to get back the trust which is needed to be able to use the wallet to pay, you have to show transparency, you have to show who is behind the writer, you need closeness to your audience, you need engagement to your audiences and that we have seen now a generative AI is not providing. I don't know if you see in the latest research by BBC where they found out that the use of generative AI has led to many errors actually so they are reconsidering the use of AI and we are not surprised by that so we have to be extremely careful. And that's it for post truth we told today. A big thank you to Hans George, Hatkopo, Martin, Oloh and Renata for helping us navigate journalism battle for survival. From tech giants siphoning at revenue to AI blurring the lines between fact and fiction, one thing is clear. Journalism is just traveling, it's fighting to prove it's still matter. So we need to reclaim its role at the 4th state or will it be swallowed whole by algorithms at this stress. We'll be back next month to dig deeper, challenge generative and figure out if the truth can still hold this ground in a world that seems to prefer basically everything out. Until then keep questioning, keep curious and remember if the truth is hard to find, it's probably worth searching for.