by TAMARA PEARSON
Only 29% of people in the US trust the news. Some 37% of Mexicans do, and 43% of Australians. That figure drops even further when it comes to social media. Some 18% of Australians trust news there, and 13% of people in the US do. People are being inundated with content, marketing, and headlines, and it is understandable that they struggle to differentiate between what is reliable and what isn’t.
Ad Fontes Media, Inc, claims they want to help people with this. They say they want to help people “navigate the news landscape” and “make news consumers smarter and news media better”. Unfortunately, their own bias steps in, and they fail at this task.
It all starts with clarity about the purpose of journalism. If you think the role of the media is to provide de-contextualized, Eurocentric reporting from parachute journos who cover countries they are unfamiliar with and give more quote space in an article to a violent coup plotter than to the millions who mobilized against him, then perhaps Ad Fontes is for you (since they rate the BBC so highly).
But a lot of journalists, particularly in countries like Mexico (where I am) or Syria, will put their lives on the line, while others will risk their income to provide content that has much more integrity, quality, and reliability than the above. Journalists will pursue narcos or follow the paperwork linking politicians and transnationals in anti-environment deals. We talk to strangers, we have 20 pages of notes for a 2-page story. We aim to expose the intricacies of events that the powerful don’t want readers to know about or understand. Our journalism should help people have a deeper understanding of the economic and social world they live in and give them the necessary information to stand up to local and global injustices.
And around about now, Ad Fontes will ring the alarm bells and tell you I am biased. “She’s left wing!” they will yell. And indeed it is seen as a crime and a career killer in journalism to care about the consequences of your work. But it shouldn’t be.
Tamara Pearson for more