05/04/2023 Notes on reading
In ‘The Roots of Fake News’ (Routledge 2021) academics Brian Winston and Matthew Winston offer contemporary and historical analysis to dismantle the myth that objective, or neutral journalism signposts quality and a lack of mendacity in the media. Instead, the authors suggest that the news media would do better to adopt a “honest, subjective, biased foundation on which journalism may be rebuilt.” They argue that this core change would improve the basic function of journalism by removing the lofty, pretentious and impossible aims toward neutrality that shroud the subjective nature of all context, and that this would make the process of producing journalistic truth more transparent for the audience. They add that “without the requirement to pretend to an impossible, ‘gagging’ neutrality, different perspectives will be able to be explored, and to contend with one another, openly, and without the value quixotically assigned to ‘objectivity’, etc., distorting the nature of the discourse.”
The book is also particularly strong on the false binary between technological determinism and pessimism — a trend we see much of in the AI debate. Toward the end of the book, the authors write: “the only way to cut the head off the dragon is to move society’s understanding of news past the myth of objectivity, to the point where pointing at any item of news coverage and saying ‘This is an example of unbiased journalism’ is generally, and correctly, understood to be ridiculous.” If only that were true.