Newsrooms confront lies and win

That the mission of journalism is to speak truth to power and hold power accountable doesn’t need explaining or defending — except, currently, to many of the powers in question.

It’s not news, of course, that accessible fact-based journalism is increasingly under threat. But in the past year — and even the past month, with the election of Donald Trump and its cascade of potential effects on independent news media and the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation globally — it’s becoming increasingly real and more urgent.

I think literally no newsroom will be able to consider themselves unaffected. The intensification of the official top-down and informal cyber-driven siege on journalism will accelerate the diminishing trust in news media, and the diminishing access to facts on the digital platforms where most people get their news.

I predict, and hope, that in 2025 this will become a powerful motor driving not just commissioning but the creation of new formats and beats, and maybe even new roles. To cite Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa, without facts there is no truth, without truth there is no trust — without those, there is no more shared reality. So no matter what the nature or the size of a news media — legacy public broadcasters like my own, digital startups, local news organizations, global subscription newspapers — all of this will affect all of our audiences, and it will affect our impact and even viability.

Add to this snapshot of the current state of play two other powerful trends we’re seeing develop globally: first, the growth of generative AI in all forms, from text to images to video, turbocharging the potential production and impact of disinformation; and second, the increasingly blurred lines between traditional media and influencers with media-size followings, and also between influencers and politicians who adopt influencer tactics of persuasion and have influencer-size followings (c.f. Trump cabinet nominees Elon Musk or Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former regularly bashing the media, and the latter selling products whose claimed health benefits are contestable).

Newsrooms will need to create new products in the broadening domain of what used to be called fact-checking. It is now a more urgent form of safeguarding of the facts, and in some newsrooms it may actually become a dedicated vertical or desk. We’ve already seen fact-checking, as a literal exercise, grow and diversify into now common genres like debunking, decoding and explainer formats — becoming videos, charts, newsletters, sidebars, and embeds.

Now and in the year to come, more new genres need to emerge that use new kinds of facts, like satellite imagery, open source databases, and a whole diversity of often user-generated content accessible across the social web — the same resources used to proliferate misinformation and lies. These will push newsrooms to develop new forms of narrative to produce those stories in ways that explicitly explain and clarify. These will call for new skills and the dedication of specific newsroom resources to these kinds of stories, even if in many newsrooms this may mean the difficult reallocation of resources to doing this.

Newsrooms will need to commission differently, dedicating journalists to “prebunking,” the process of identifying and debunking misconceptions, lies, or toxic sources before they rise and go viral. Many newsrooms already do this indirectly, producing formats of what we’ve been for years called explanatory journalism. This will become even more embedded in newsrooms, and increasingly viewed as just as essential and important a part of coverage as any traditional beat.

Whatever a newsroom decides to call it — fact-checking, explainers, OSINT journalism, explanatory journalism, debunking, prebunking — the deliberate and explicit advocacy for facts will eventually become part of everyone’s job.