2021 questions (35/365)

[nanila]

February 4

What responsibilities do you think the media have, if any?

Wow, this is a big question, given the events of the past few years. What happened to all that fluffy cuddly what's-your-favourite-X stuff, meme?!

I think both traditional and social media have a huge responsibility to carefully vett and caveat their reporting. Especially when people in power are consistently and blatantly lying. Don’t just play that clip with the lie in it and then move on to the next topic. Call it out, verbally and visually. Lying to the public should have consequences for the people telling the lies, rather than allowing the public to bear the brunt of them, as we are with the global public health crisis we’re experiencing right now.

Comments

[sunflowerinrain]

It's frustrating to watch/listen to interviews in which someone states a falsehood which isn't challenged. What happened to investigative journalism? I turn off now - can't bear it any longer, was getting a sore throat from screaming at the screen.

I had this argument with an ex-colleague who thinks freedom of speech is the most important thing and that it's wrong to control it. I countered with freedom for one can mean harm to another, which is why murderers aren't allowed to do what they want, and speech/typing can have terrible consequences. We didn't find agreement.

There's a worthwhile campaign on socmedia asking people not to share such things, even to call them out or mock them, because so many people only get the first few words of something and even when there is a rebuttal they don't see it. I was reminded of this yesterday, reading an article on the BBC site which started off with all kinds of silliness and though the debunking was thorough, it came after a scrolldown. As we were taught back in the early days of websites: People Don't Scroll. And many just read headlines, which are often thrown together for attention-catching purposes by someone who hasn't read the article.

How to fix it? Educate the children - of which you are already doing a good job. Slow for results, but I don't think there's an alternative.

[silveradept]

Indeed. Any entity that wants to claim to be respectable and truthful has a responsibility to say when there are lies, especially lies by figures where there well be serious consequences because of their lies. It seems like at least some amount of the reason why the conspiracies continue to have traction is because we keep discovering that our supposedly trustable media outlets went along with lies or propaganda.

[brainwane]

Wow, this is a big question, given the events of the past few years. What happened to all that fluffy cuddly what's-your-favourite-X stuff, meme?!

[sounds of camera flashes from press pack]

Journalist shouts: "Senator, are you evading the question?"

[caulkhead]

I wonder a lot, in the context of my own small and very specialist publication, about my responsibility to share views I think are misguided or outdated on the grounds that People Need To Know Other People Think Like This so that they can counter it, or be aware what agendas it's driving, against my responsibility not to promote those views.

I can do it on a case by case basis, but it must be a nightmare on a larger scale.