News Credibility in an Age of Disinformation
By
Where I live, it’s common to hear people say that the U.S. government destroyed the World Trade Center. What looks to me and my reporter colleagues like a Russian invasion of Ukraine looks to them like a murky situation where no one is right or wrong. But when someone said to me over dinner that a Polish fighter plane had shot down MH17 over Ukraine, citing yet another obscure Internet “news” site, something snapped. I turned away, but the problem is still there.
For about a decade I have been studying the rise of media that are owned by stakeholder groups — people with an axe to grind. They may be militant ecologists or other NGOs, investors, product users, or anyone else who worries about the unkept promises of the people who run organisations. To me, they’re proof that individuals still have power, and that the ‘hegemony’ of the mass media is a hollow myth. They’ve demonstrated more than once that communities can influence, stop, or even destroy powerful entities by reaching out to others through their media.
We are in a new age of disinformation, and it builds on the belief that journalists are hired liars.