The Dangers Of Post-Truth Journalism

From Unherd a piece holding that Everyone pays the price when journalists don't practise what they preach

Only a month ago, a journalist from a prominent British publication gave an interview to the online student magazine Kettle. The interview included advice for any young person aspiring to become a journalist. It included the following such nuggets:

Twitter is incredibly useful in helping me think about subjects to write about but you also need to be reading widely. Try to understand your opponents’ arguments and think about what you can learn from them.

And reflecting on the state of the media as a whole this sage advised:

A challenge for journalism is the rise of social media and the fact it allows false information to spread like wildfire. I think it’s an important time for trusted, credible titles to remain relevant and prominent. Journalists must win the trust back they have lost. It’s not enough to lecture the public, you need to earn that trust and have a degree of mutual respect and I think one benefit of social media is that if something is wrong, audiences have a platform to call this out.

The speaker of these words? It was George Eaton, deputy editor of the New Statesman magazine. And within days of him issuing this wisdom, he decided to publish an interview with Sir Roger Scruton which – as I have described elsewhere – serially misrepresented the philosopher’s words and got Scruton fired from his government appointment.

Continue reading @ Unherd

1 comment:

  1. As conservatives seemingly consolidate thei

    On FB this morning, a friend posted a link to Channel 4's website which debunked a rumour that Farage had been in the NF. Here's a response he got: "...in this case if it’s giving his critics the chance to show it COULD have been Farage given his well documented beliefs it’s allowing far more of his followers to see what kind of person they’re backing."

    In other words, who cares if it's not true? I can believe it and I'll use it to combat the reams of "fake news" doing the rounds today.

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