The responsibility of journalism does not extinguish with the publication of news.
As the confusion of readers, listeners, viewers and Internet users increases in the face of the avalanche of information on the internet, the error of the contemporary press in not paying due attention to the way in which the news is perceived or interpreted by people becomes increasingly clear. Today, in the age of frantic circulation of data, facts and events in the digital space, it is no longer enough to worry only about the reliability of news. It became fundamental to pay attention to its consequences in the face of the risk of irreversible and irreparable developments.
The way news is published is the result of procedures, rules and values of journalism. It is assumed that professionals know what the public wants and needs, which is a false premise, especially in the increasingly diverse information ecosystems in the post-internet era. The fact that we are unable to clearly identify the desires, needs and positions of the social segments that make up contemporary society, imposes on journalism the obligation to be concerned with the way in which news will condition the attitudes of ordinary people.
For example, a newspaper commissions an opinion poll on the political attitudes of the population. It is asked if a person considers himself a Bolsonarist or PT. The question itself already reduces the country’s political reality to just two concepts, which obviously can lead to distortions. But this concern is not taken into account when disclosing the result, which is turned into headlines with X% of Brazilians calling themselves Bolsonarists and Y% calling themselves PT. That is, the reality is simplified by leading the public to focus their attention only on the winners and losers of a political dispute.
Everyone knows that among Bolsonaristas there are right-wing extremists of varying intensity and moderate conservatives who detest violence, also to varying degrees. The same occurs in the case of the PT expression in the questionnaire. But this diversity is only in the head of the person responsible for the research. The people who answered the questionnaire and, mainly, those who accessed the research results, had their reactions conditioned only by the disclosed data, which created conditions for simplistic positions in a complex situation.
The social and political cost
In most situations similar to the one we hypothetically take as an example, journalism considers that its mission to inform ended with the dissemination of the research result. But for society, it is precisely from the publication of the results that the debate begins, because each person will interpret the data according to their cultural level, socioeconomic standard, political activism, and ethnic origin, among other factors. The different interpretations will serve as a basis for social and political positions that, in turn, will determine party options and different levels of ideological activism.
The press thinks it is not responsible for what happens after the publication of a piece of data, fact or event. But she does have a responsibility and a lot of it. In the analogue era, when the news was a highly valued commodity, information responsibility ended when the news ‘product’ was sold, that is, it helped to value paid advertising spaces. But when the internet and digitization transformed the news into a form of knowledge capable of supporting individual and collective decisions, the responsibility of the press became broader.
The global controversy surrounding fake news is an example of the consequences of unscrupulous disclosure of news. When falsehood is evident, the consequences can be avoided in time. The problem arises when the veracity is not identified in time, especially when the context is complex, as in the case of allegations of corruption or an electoral campaign. We had very clear examples during the Lava Jato case, when the news was not checked before publication, leading the population to take positions that later turned out to be wrong, with a high social and economic cost.
The professional culture favours speed, which on the internet takes on critical dimensions due to the enormous competition between bloggers, influencers, social networks and media outlets. The best way to prevent the reader, listener, viewer or Internet user from being misled is to assess the possible consequences for the vehicle’s target audience before publication.
Changing professional routines like this is not an easy or quick process, as it breaks the traditional process of journalistic production. The concern with the social, economic, political and human effects of a piece of news comes to prevail over the news “scoop” and, consequently, over an eventual immediate loss of audience. This is one of the reasons that gave rise to what came to be known as slow news, slow news or slow journalism, more concerned with the consequences than the race to publish before everyone else.
