There is more to fake news than Trump’s lies. Real journalists are needed more than ever

I live in the Cathedral city of Canterbury where I suddenly became aware last month that the neighbouring district of Swale had the highest Covid-19 infection rate in England. Close behind it in terms of the severity of the outbreak were several other districts on the Thames estuary along the north Kent coast. During an epidemic everybody carries out a rough assessment of the risk to themselves and their families, so I naturally wanted to know the extent of the threat posed by this surge in infection 20 minutes’ drive away.

I know Swale, which includes the Isle of Sheppey and the towns of Sittingbourne and Faversham, fairly well. Sheppey is the worst affected area, probably because it contains three prisons and is poor compared to the rest of Kent. Many people there have to travel to work and cannot work from home, and life expectancy is significantly lower than on the mainland.

More than that I found it difficult to learn, though not for lack of trying. The local media provided sparse facts, but there is little on-the-ground eyewitness reporting. When the soaring infection rate in Swale, along with Medway and Thanet, became a national story, the reporting was shallow and unrevealing because few reporters visited the places hardest hit by the virus, or showed any background knowledge of the area. Much of their reportage consisted of street interviews with passers-by in towns in Kent such as Tunbridge Wells far from the outbreak, several of whom confessed that they did not know where Swale was or had never heard of it.

I was not surprised by this lack of reliable local information, even on a matter of pressing public concern, because I had encountered the same failing during the last few years when the news agenda in Britain was dominated by Brexit. There was much criticism by the “talking heads” encamped in front of the television cameras on College Green outside Parliament of “the Westminster bubble” and a consensus that much of the pro-Brexit vote was a revolt by left-behind England and Wales against the metropolitan centres. 

Yet there was a depressing lack of well-informed reporting from the areas where those left-behind voters lived. When there was a patronising bow in their direction, it was usually in the form of an inarticulate local focus group presided over by a presenter, visibly on a day trip down from London. I travelled around the country in the first six months of last year, talking to people from Dover to Hereford and Tyneside to the Welsh Valleys about why they had voted for or against Brexit. Almost everywhere I went I was struck by how little information was available about these communities in the local and national media.

This lack of basic information about two vastly important events – Brexit and the Covid-19 epidemic – affecting everybody in Britain has created surprisingly little stir. It is masked by people being over-impressed by the 24/7 news cycle, the vast quantity of information instantly accessible through the internet, and the supposedly tireless gaze of the social media. Yet – though these developments may accelerate the quantity of news available and the speed at which it circulates – they do not necessarily leave people better informed. Indeed, in many respects we are more ignorant today about events affecting our lives than our parents or grandparents would have been.

Much of what is billed as 24/7 news is the repetitive churning of a limited number of facts, often self-evident or provided by the authorities. The problem about the internet is not “fake facts” – these have always been with us, and half of Shakespeare’s plays hinge on people telling deliberate lies. The problem with the internet is rather that information that is important is submerged by the boundless ocean of information, true, false or irrelevant, that the internet makes available. Quantity of news trumps quality of news. Social media, for its part, may be immensely influential, but it is an incoherent influence that may provide the building blocks for real news-gathering, but is not, in itself, a credible news source.

For all the boosterism about how we are living in “an age of information”, few consider that, if Brexit and the pandemic had taken place in the second half of the 19th century, we might have known more about them. Local newspapers once reported in detail on every incident that occurred in their locality, from murders and accidents to political campaigns and flower shows. 

When I was growing up in Cork in Ireland in the 1950s there was no event so trivial that it was not reported by the Cork Examiner newspaper. Years later I became interested in violent quarrels about wills and property in which my great grandparents had been involved in the 1880s, and I quickly found a transcript in a small local newspaper of the proceedings in a magistrate’s court concerning the violence that ensued. I would not have been able to do that today.

Part of the explanation for this is that advertising revenues fell off a cliff. The internet broke the 200-year-old link between advertising and the print press. Job, property and retail advertising was first siphoned off elsewhere and, more recently, much of the rest of advertising has followed it. Many local newspapers – using local in its broadest sense since some of these newspapers covered giant metropolitan areas with populations in the millions – were peculiarly vulnerable because they had established profitable media monopolies. 

In the US, cities and states that had once boasted several good quality newspapers now only had one that provided less and less added value to the readers. Such publications were in no position to compete with anybody, and particularly not with platforms on the internet providing news for free. Journals closed altogether or had far fewer bureaus at home and abroad, and fewer professional writers were employed. The number of journalists in the newsrooms of American print newspapers fell by 45 per cent in the decade up to 2017.

As a foreign correspondent, I have a particular interest in the decline of foreign news coverage, though I try to contain my Cassandra-like moaning about the profession going to the dogs. There are many fine journalists and fine journals still with us, though not, sadly, as many as there once were. At one level, journalism is quite a simple business: good reporters find out significant news about what is happening in the world and pass that information on to the public. This is easy to state, but to do it requires professional expertise, because what constitutes news will always be a matter of judgement. 

The good journalist does not simply collect unsorted facts, as if he was picking up potatoes in a field, but he or she chooses,  out of the infinite number of facts in the universe, those that, individually and in combination with others, mean something and are significant. This choice requires experience and this in turn requires resources which are less and less available, even when the news to be covered is about conflicts and wars affecting the whole world. “In more than 40 years reporting,” writes Sammy Ketz, the retired Agence France-Presse bureau chief in Baghdad and one of the best journalists in the region, “I have seen the number of journalists on the ground steadily diminish while the dangers relentlessly increase. We have become targets and our reporting costs more money.”  

Cynics will respond that one should not be too romantic about the decline of the foreign correspondent since many of them seldom wrote anything discomforting to the authorities, or were in any danger of setting the world on fire. Yet there has always been a minority willing to challenge the powers-that-be. But even the most combative of these need jobs, salaries and some credible public platform wiling to publish their work. Such places are increasingly thin on the ground and many people may conclude pessimistically that the decline in quality news coverage is irreversible and the era of “fake facts” has come to stay. 

This may be so but the mistake is in imagining that there has ever been a moment in history when somebody was not trying to dilute factual reporting with propaganda. This was true of western intervention to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, but it had also been true of the First Gulf war in 1991 and the Suez crisis of 1956. Earlier still, 3000 years back, and Egyptian pharaohs were inscribing hieroglyphs on their monuments glorifying their non-existent victories and suppressing news of their defeats. What has changed is not so much the “false facts”, but the ability of journalists to investigate and refute them.

Many of these negative developments in news gathering are blamed on Donald Trump but this is misleading, toxic though his presidency may have been.  Certainly, he set a new low standard in government mendacity, forcing news broadcasters and newspapers to have fact-checkers in constant attendance to expose his lies and distortions. These have been so gross and so blatant – and the detestation of Trump by outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN so virulent – that the reader or viewer gets the impression that he is the root of all evil and his predecessors as president were paragons of truthfulness. 

But linking the revolution in communications over the past 30 years to the rise of Trump is surely mistaken. Trump certainly owed a lot to twitter and admitted that he would not be president without it. His tweets, true or false, bombastic or weird, are perfectly framed news headlines, enabling him to dominate the news agenda of a largely hostile American media. Drawing on his own lengthy experience of television, he understood the news business in which the imperative is never to be dull, even if what is said is an outrageous lie.

But keep in mind that the effectiveness of these tactics owe as much to Trump’s personal skills in manipulating the traditional media to his own advantage as it does to anything that is the fruit of the new information age. Senator Joe McCarthy used much the same techniques as Trump, aside from Twitter, to focus public attention on himself in the 1950s. Like McCarthy, Trump is invariably on the verbal attack, and by the time one lie is exposed, he is on to the next one, forcing his opponents on to the defensive. Another advantage for Trump today, or McCarthy in the past, is that refuting a false accusation requires restating it and risks giving it legs as a story.

Trump has until recently been a more skilful and cunning politician than his critics ever gave him credit for, bringing the dark arts of political spin to a new level. But he is more a creature of television than of the internet and he would not have got very far without the support of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. Overall, Trump’s political clones around the world have used traditional instruments of media control that pre-date the explosive expansion the internet as a means of communicating news.

The problem with television and radio is that they provide too little information about what is happening, while the internet provides too much. Overall, the internet is a liberating vehicle, but a morally neutral one that can be used for democratic purposes, outflanking state and private media monopolies, or it can be in the service of tyranny and violence, as when Islamic State relied on it to publicise its atrocities and inspire fear. Newspapers, online and in print, stand in between these different means of conveying information, as the indispensable provider of essential news.