WORLD NEWS DAY: The fight for journalism is a battle over reality itself

There is a curious thing about journalism: everyone seeking power calls it dead but still wants to control it. Authoritarians attack it, oligarchs try to buy it, propagandists mimic it. Powerful tech platforms filter the news you read to build their billion-dollar empires, simultaneously making journalism look insignificant and small.

Not to be left behind, governments intimidate, sue, sometimes jail and spy on the people trying to bring you the facts. They also shut publishers and their ­publications down.

If journalism and independent truth were so truly irrelevant, so very much dead, why would so much money, political energy and fury be spent trying to bury it? It is an important question.

The rich were always more powerful than the poor. Governments abused their authority. Businesses bought influence over institutions; courts failed to protect the unprotected. Even the Fourth Estate was doing a balancing act. Journalism was never as pure as journalists sometimes like to remember it. But the system was at least recognisable.

Power had physical addresses. Governments existed inside (mostly) recognised borders. Newspapers had editors. Companies had owners. Laws could, at least theoretically, be enforced within jurisdictions.

A new class emerges

Then Big Tech happened. The balance changed faster than our institutions could adapt. A new uber-class emerged, its members possessing galactic wealth and power – some of them wealthier and more powerful than the overwhelming majority of governments on Earth.

They run the show. They shape communication between billions of people, determining which information will travel and which will disappear into the void. They built infrastructure that underpins politics, commerce, culture, knowledge and pretty much everything else. If they stop, our modern world stops.

We should not be surprised by the collision of power happening right now. These systems, old and new, were created in different centuries, according to profoundly different rules. These indeed are extraordinarily chaotic times – and the news media appear to be the trophy every power badly wants.

This friction is only starting and will likely cause huge conflict and suffering. The battlefield on which much of this struggle is being fought is the information environment itself.

The very people declaring journalism dead or irrelevant understand something that parts of our own industry often forget: information is the most powerful technology ever invented by our human race.

The battle for humanity’s future is quickly recognised as a battle over perceived reality. Control what people know and you influence what they believe. Influence what they believe and you shape what they fear, whom they trust, how they vote, what they buy, whom they hate and ultimately what kind of power they will accept as legitimate.

Fight of a lifetime

This is why repeated declarations that the news media are dead should make journalists ready for the fight of our lifetime. The trust crisis is real. Although we – journalists, editors and publishers – were and are subjects of an extraordinarily broad and powerful attack, there is no running away from the fact that our own industry helped create the crisis.

Long before Big Tech captured the advertising market, too many news outlets forgot about public service. Readers were treated like metrics, coverage was turned into content, and outrage became the business model. It was our own mistakes that Big Tech exploited.

Our future depends on our ability to explain to our communities that a modern information society needs reliable journalism in much the same way it needs functioning courts, schools, electricity grids and clean water systems.

Our self-evident truths remain:

• Truthful, verified information in the public interest cannot be negotiable. Independence from political and commercial power cannot just be a slogan. Our relationship with the communities we exist to serve must sit at the foundation of everything we do.

• We must strive to become radically better at explaining how we know what we know. We must find the inner strength to acknowledge errors, show evidence where possible and listen very carefully.

• Trust is not something we are entitled to inherit from previous generations of journalists. Every generation must keep renewing it.

• Technology itself is not our enemy. That would be both foolish and hypocritical – we use it every hour of our modern lives. Technology has allowed journalism to reach audiences we could never have imagined. AI will transform reporting, analysis, translation, investigation and distribution.

The question is not whether technology will shape journalism – of course it will. The question is whether the power created by technology will remain contestable, and whether we, the media, can rise to the challenge of keeping that power in check, for the benefit of everyone.

We may have to change our form, the way we function and the way we reach audiences, but we cannot abandon our purpose.

It is not about us, the news media, possessing an unchecked power – quite the opposite. The purpose of our existence is to ensure that nobody does.

News platforms will come and go. Business models will come and go. But there will still be someone whose job it is to find out what is true – and tell everybody else, regardless of who would rather they didn’t.

On World News Day, amid all the anxiety about our future, perhaps that is the promise journalism needs to make again. Not that we are always right, not that we deserve to survive because we have existed for a long time, and not that people should simply trust us. We believe it is much more demanding of us:

We will stand with the communities we serve rather than above them. We will do the work. We will show how we did it. We will correct ourselves when we fail.

And, above all, we will strive to keep the light of shared reality on. DM

This opinion piece was commissioned as part of World News Day, a worldwide campaign highlighting the essential role of journalism in providing facts and clarity.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R39. The e-edition of Daily Maverick’s weekly newspaper, DM168, is now free for readers who are signed into their Daily Maverick account. Click on the cover of the newspaper below to access the e-edition.