“We are in danger of getting to a place where no one believes anything they read or see or hear anywhere.”
So said Chris Morris, CEO of fact-checking organisation Full Fact, at a recent conference organised by Reuters Institute (reviewed by Alan Geere here).
We all know this to be true.
Our initial response to practically everything we see or hear on the open web is, is it real?
Followed quickly by, where’s it from?
Those two questions, ‘is it real’ and ‘where’s it from’ help us navigate the online world.
Fakery is not new. Witness the Piltdown Man (1912), Zinoviev letter (1924) or the Hitler Diaries (1983).
What is new is its ubiquity.
The tools to quickly create convincing fakes are in everyone’s hands, including in the hands of people who seek to embarrass, sow confusion, create division, cause mischief or defraud. These individuals might be working off their own bat, be put up to it by a hostile government or be part of a criminal enterprise.
So, those two questions should be what all people who care about the truth should be asking all the time.
And, therein, lies a massive opportunity for professional publishers. In a world full of lies, we are incredibly well placed to become trusted sources.
Where people are unsure about the provenance of something they read or see, we need to be the ones they turn to.
But, we need to aspire to being more than just a fact-checker, there simply to verify stories read elsewhere; we need to be the place people go to first, a safe space where they can drop their guard and consume content safe in the knowledge that it is real, that it has been fact-checked and judged by a professional editorial team to be worthy of publishing.
We are a lot closer to being there than many pessimists think. But it relies on publishers maintaining audience trust. They do that by:
- investing in human journalism: in recruitment, training, quality control et al
- being transparent about authorship and processes
- maintaining high ethical standards
- publishing content worth reading / watching / listening to
- consistently demonstrating their trustworthiness
The global collapse in trust is publishers’ golden opportunity.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
