By Patricia Kranz
The Vienna-based International Press Institute has sent representatives to meet with government officials in countries like Turkey, Myanmar and Egypt to promote press freedom and defend journalists since its founding in 1950.
Next January, in response to the Trump Administrations’s attacks on the media here at home, IPI will join a press mission to the United States, headed by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In advance of that meeting, the ICI’s North American Committee held an informal discussion with a small group of journalists and free press advocates in Washington on Oct. 6. The purpose was to “brainstorm ways to mount a concerted effort to counteract the recent attempts to mount public opinion against the press, limit access to public data or broadly interfere with the journalists’ ability to perform the duties of bringing truth to light.”
John Daniszewski, an OPC member who is vice president at The Associated Press and editor-at-large for standards, gave a detailed and frightening analysis on “The state of truth in a post-truth world.”
Here some excerpts from his remarks:
“Aside from the assault on truth by some politicians, we are also living through an era of intense and sophisticated propaganda. As we have seen in recent days, there is evidence that hackers from Russia were buying political messages and feeding them directly into people’s social media feeds – into their heads in other words, because so much of life now is lived in virtual space.
“Russian troll farms are creating posts using false identities specifically targeted to geographic areas. It is orchestrated by Russia and ISIS.
“Because it’s new, our brains haven’t really adjusted to it. We don’t know we’re being propagandized. They look like any other social media posts but they are created perhaps by a robot just for you. The technology makes it cheap to create and disseminate. Google and Facebook haven’t created tools to vet this propaganda.
“On one side, the pursuit of facts is being questioned. On the other side is insidious propaganda.
“As journalists, we need to be on the front line of the defense against propaganda. We need to counter it with factual information. This is why fact-checking has become such an important role for our profession. The AP is one of many news organizations that are amping up their fact-check operations. And those stories are among the stories that are most popular and engaged in by our audiences.
“We need to up our game with debunking stories in real time, both for the politicians who would try to confuse the public about facts for their political ends, and the sophisticated propagandists from Russia, the ISIS group and other despotic countries and extreme actors who now have the ability to target us one by one through the open door of social media.”