Reporting and commenting are expected to be strictly separate compartments in journalism. Some platforms keep these functions so strictly separate that they don’t allow the personnel and planning of both to mix. But such conventional practices are being questioned, ironically, for making journalism more relevant and powerful in the context of social and political volatility in countries with a free press such as the U.S. and India. Objectivity, once considered the sacred principle of reporting, is now seen as a constraint by many practitioners. It is being discarded, or at least redefined, to deal with fake news and misinformation.
A recent report by an international agency on Russia’s claim that a bomb blast that killed the daughter of its nationalist philosopher Alexandar Dugin was qualified to add that the claim was ‘without evidence.’ The ‘without evidence’ qualifier was widely used in the reporting on Donald Trump. “Trump says, without evidence, every American will get coronavirus vaccine by April,’ The Washington Post reported on September 18, 2020; “Trump says without proof that FDA ‘deep state’ slowing COVID trials,” a Reuters report from August 2020 said. It is indeed the application of a higher standard when a reporter tries to seek evidence from their interlocutor. Journalists can seek the help of experts to verify claims made by someone, but whether there can be real-time fact-checking of a state functionary is a difficult question. Even if the custodian of the evidence is willing to show it to the journalist, would they have the capacity to process it?
In many cases, when the experts are themselves peddling fake information, as it happened in the U.S. propaganda on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, what can the reporter do? In the more recent case of Russian ‘meddling’ in U.S. democracy, the evidence was all provided by U.S. state agencies. And the doubting of state agencies is not tolerated even in the U.S. An AP report in 2022 cited White House and State Department spokespeople accusing reporters of advancing enemy propaganda by seeking ‘evidence’ regarding administration claims on national security matters. To their credit, the reporters in question wanted supporting evidence for claims that the White House and State Department were making about situations or events in Afghanistan or Syria.
Circumventing the gatekeepers of information to access what the state wants to keep secret can be dangerous, as Julian Assange is figuring out. So, demanding evidence from state functionaries regarding their claims is little more than feel good for the journalist. That being the case, stamping a claim as ‘without evidence’ hardly does anything to raise the standard of journalism. Inadvertently, the reporter ends up making an opinion, by adding the qualifier. A logical analysis of the claim being made can be more helpful but that is not as appealing as ‘evidence.’ Fact-checking and contextualising information are in principle very good, but difficult to insulate from subjectivity and capacity constraints.
Now, many people think that in an environment deluged with misinformation and propaganda, a journalist will be only be failing in their duty if they merely amplify those. As a result, we have anchors, reporters and commentators who have turned journalism into a mission. They have a moral case, of course. Supporting or opposing a politics is a moral crusade. The thinking journalist gets hyperactive, trying to go beyond reporting an event and fix the problem. It’s a small detail that such polemical journalism can be profitable too.
There are also thinking journalists who overthink and become immobilised. A sense of history can be an asset for a reporter, but too much of connecting the dots will make them useless. Getting caught in the ‘big picture’ can trap them into missing the day’s story. From a long-term perspective, nothing that happens today is all that relevant after all.
varghese.g@thehindu.co.in
