Last year, I joined more than a thousand other journalists in filling out a survey from PEN America, the writers’ group, about the impact of widespread disinformation on our work.
The online world has made the practices of the evil-doers among us — the liars with a purpose, with ends who don’t care about the means — much easier to disseminate.
From Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump to, well, Elon Musk, their wickedness comes in many forms, similar only in the facts of their baseness.
“Your responses showed how significantly disinformation is changing the practice of journalism by disrupting newsroom processes, draining the attention of editors and reporters, demanding new procedures and skills, jeopardizing community trust in journalism, and diminishing journalists’ professional, emotional, and physical security,” PEN’s Dru Menaker and Hannah Waltz wrote us back last week, attaching the survey results in a report called “Hard News: Journalists and the Threat of Disinformation.”
People in power, and the rich, have always worked to obfuscate when we probe for the facts. That wicked game wasn’t invented by the worldwide web. Journalists have had to work to separate the wheat from the chaff since news was invented.
“Never before, however, have they had to do so in the face of such an extreme surge of falsehoods and manipulations supercharged by algorithms and nefarious actors, and at a time when their news outlets are struggling for survival with starkly depleted resources,” PEN reports.
The key takeaways:
“Virtually all the journalists responding consider disinformation a serious problem for journalism today; 81% say it’s a very serious problem.
“Most deal with disinformation regularly: 61% on some days and 15% all or most days.
“Only 8% say that detecting and addressing disinformation is ‘not too important’ a priority at their news outlet; 40% categorized this task as ‘urgent.’
“More than 90% said disinformation had an impact on their experiences as journalists in recent years; 65% had faced hostility from the public, 48% reported feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, and 42% felt some portion of their audience had lost trust in them.
“While 99% of the journalists expressed at least some confidence in their own ability to detect disinformation as they worked, 11% acknowledged they had unwittingly reported disinformation themselves.”
As I recall from my answers to the survey, I was certainly among the 99% who felt I know a whopper from the real deal most of the time. But, 11%ers, come on — every single one of us who’s either quoted a slippery pol or, for that matter, published an op-ed piece, has passed on information that doesn’t pass the smell test.
One of the saddest of the survey results: “And 17% said they had avoided doing a story they were considering covering due to fear of ‘fake news’ backlash that would seek to discredit their accurate reporting.”
Again, trolling wasn’t invented in 2000. When I got my first upper management newspaper job in my early 30s, an older reader was convinced I was “too wet behind the ears” for the position, and constantly lied to my boss about me, trying to get me fired. You could do that through the telephone and the U.S. mail the same as in a snarky social media post. She never believed him, and came into my office to laugh about it when she heard from him. Funny thing was, I still ran his letters to the editor. Copy-edited, by me, writing the eye-catching headline, keeping his lies in check, eliminating the obvious ones. Because that’s what we do in the newspaper business. Trust, but verify, 365 days a year, forever and ever, amen.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.