A Communication Revolution
We are living in the middle of a communication revolution and change is the only thing we can trust. We have gone from handwriting to print to the internet, and we still don’t know the full effect of this most recent communication revolution. Journalism is writing, but it’s also storytelling and a filter of reality.
The Foundations of Journalism: Facts vs. Fiction
Journalism is still about the five w questions and one h question.
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? At times, one might feel the urge to add are you joking? And seriously? Or at least to oneself, is this real?
Journalism is a filter of reality. Journalists are information consultants who filter through information and opinion
The Rise of Engineered and Fake News
Today, we live in a world with engineered news and fake news. Journalism is losing power to people journalism or citizen journalism. We live in a reality where alternative news and facts are shaking and stirring not just journalism but politics and democracy.
It’s old media against social media and also asocial media. Today, journalism compete with people shaping news with their opinion and feelings.
The Blurred Lines: Information vs. Opinion
Journalism has to adhere to ethics and take responsibility for unbiased reporting. Journalism must tell, inform and enlighten not falsify, mislead and seduce, but the border is gone.
It’s hard to see what’s real and what’s propaganda. We filter news to get our worldview confirmed not challenged. Friends and family and celebrities mean more to us than journalists. X breaks the news now, not newsrooms.
Different truths fight for attention in media, and false news have it easier since disbelief is everywhere now. It’s no longer sure that news is real and unbiased, the lie has become normal. Journalism has lost its status. Journalism has become misplaced.
But does it have to be like this?
The Impact of the Digital Era on Journalism
We consume more news now than ever before. Technically, journalism has never had such good conditions to be produced and distributed as in the digital era, but everyone wants news and stories for free, and it must be short and instant. The erosion of the boundary between truth and lie has changed journalism.
The erosion of the difference between information and opinion has changed journalism.
The fact that good journalism can still be produced does not mean that it will be able to play the same role in people’s perception of reality as before. The information gap we see opens up in a digital society is not because the information is missing or unavailable, but the digital era has revolutionised the terms not only for journalism but the conditions for all human communication.
How we tell the world has an impact, and as we today say it more through pictures, we don’t necessarily get more than a thousand words. A picture hasn’t been analysed the way a printed text on the subject has been and images can also be manipulated and sometimes we don’t know if what we see is what is there.
Fiction as a Lens for Truth
What is communicated directly through sound and moving picture say something different than when the same news is delivered through print. It speaks to another part of our brain. We are intellectually more defenceless when faced with pictures and also emotionally more vulnerable. The internet is changing how we see the world.
How we tell the world is no small matter, we can make it better or worse depending on our ability to truthfully depicting our experience and the stories we are told to the world. Veracity is not the same as truth. Veracity is an aim, not a result.
Journalism can’t be fiction or lies or untruth or degrees of truth. Journalism is the art of relevant storytelling, and we need it more than ever. Journalism informs and educates us on what we need to know not just what we want to know. The innate level of journalism is curiosity.
Realistically today, we can charge for good journalism on the internet if the demand for good journalism exists and it does. We have to make the internet free and let people pay for quality content instead.
What This Means for Journalism Today
I grew up in an era when reading the morning newspaper and watching the eight-o clock news were sacred rituals. The news seldom confirmed my worldview, but we didn’t question the news as we do today. The news informed, and people took newsbreaks instead of getting depressed. Today part of being both a journalist and a citizen is the ability to distinguish between true and false.
Facts are essential in journalism, and no fiction is allowed. Fantasy is allowed and expected in fiction, but it must still be believable and also contain facts.
So, is there is a clear line between fact and fiction?
As an unconventional fiction writer, I know that everything I’ve written so far is way off the mainstream, but still, it contains facts but perhaps because a lot of my stories are fantasy it’s easy to think it’s all made up, but there is also a lot of research in imaginative writing. I like using fiction to find facts if that makes sense at all.
Does it matter if something really happened? Are all non-fictional works absolutely truthful? I doubt it as without even a flickering of fiction a non-fiction book would be dull. There could also be more truth in fiction, but non-fiction is sometimes written as fiction for protection.
Could it be the same in journalism?
Non-fiction reveals lies while fiction shows us the truth? Does the value of the story lie in its truth or how it makes us feel?
A Call to Action: The Need for Veracity in Journalism
We value truth, but all of us lie every day. We have always mixed fact and fiction, but anything marketed as based on a true story seems to give a story more value, whether we are reading or watching. Even historians make interpretations of the truth, so a novel set in the past must be both fact and fiction, it can’t be anything else. A historical novel can be based on historiography, but it can still never be truly non-fictional because history has layers and even if we were there, we can’t see all the layers of an event. And so can’t a journalist, they have to interpret the facts at hand which can differ from source to source.
The best way might be to keep an open mind when we read fiction, and presume there is some truth in there and when we read non-fiction presume there are some inventions or biased views in there.
All fiction can also be true depending on what multiverse one presently occupies. My daughter who frequently inhabits the magic world asked if Harry Potter is fiction or non-fiction and when I replied by asking what she thinks she said, both. And why not?
Of course, that’s not the correct journalistic view to take, but it certainly can be a more liberating view of literature.
People don’t read the way we used to though, and it’s not literature shaping our present reality, apart from perhaps Harry Potter, but the stories we share online and the stories that go viral are the ones readers seems to trust the most because they are the most popular ones. So, do we as humans prefer fiction or at least a mix of fact and fiction and is that why so many prefer the stories behind the news?
Is fiction just another angle of truth?