“This is the first time we are seeing a consistent three-pronged attack on journalists as a fraternity,” said Suhasini Haider, Diplomatic Editor, The Hindu, at the Lit for Life fest here on Monday.
Speaking at a panel discussion, ‘Crisis of credibility: Fighting Fake news’, Haider said: “The idea is not that you are a good or bad journalist... we now have a political establishment that wants to directly deal with the people.”
“As a journalist you are expected to be only a postman putting together the story provided by the establishment,” she added.
While political leaders are trying to discredit journalists with terms such as “pliant”, “News traders” and “presstitutes”, social media tends to discredit journalists rather than the stories they put out, said Haider.
“One of the chief sources of fake news in the US is probably the most important person in the country,” said Sriram Lakshman, US correspondent, The Hindu .
Citing research studies, Lakshman said that according to The Washington Post , President Donald Trump has made 7,645 false tweets in 710 days while a CNN study says he had mentioned ‘fake news’ around 210 times in 2018.
“Senior citizens tend to share more misinformation online than youngsters and conservatives tend to share more than liberal people,” Lakshman said, citing research studies.
Fake narratives
In his speech, R Jagannathan, Editorial Director, Swarajya magazine, said: Fake news and fake narratives are two different things and journalists as storytellers tend to allow a certain degree of narrative. He added that fake news can be controlled 80 per cent through algorithms but fake narratives are here to stay. Terming fake news as a great menance to society, Pratik Sinha,co-founder Alt News, said: Social media companies themselves are not serious about preventing fake news.
“Twitter doesn’t even have a fake news option, while Facebook has this but hasn’t been seriously viewing it till now,” said Sinha.
Sanjay Pinto, Advocate, Madras High court and former journalist at NDTV, said: “Anonymity and credibility cannot go together... You need nothing to start a social media account and that really is the crux of the problem.”
Moderating the session, former Seminar Consulting Editor Harsh Sethi said there are internal and external problems for media houses as some are owned by corporates closely affiliated to political parties.