By IT, I mean the loss of public trust in legacy media and authoritarian efforts to muzzle it. By THEIR, I mean those whose trust is lost and the authoritarians doing the muzzling.
No, in fact, I think at least part of the blame lies with journalists just like me.
That’s the point I tried making on a zoom webinar panel during last weekend’s World Press Freedom Day. Sponsored by Forum Civil Peace Service, a group described as a “peacebuilding and conflict transformation organization” active in the Philippines, the focus was “Reporting in the Brave New World” inhabited by artificial intelligence.
I don’t think I made my point clear, so I’ll try it again here. The bottom line: whatever help AI can provide in research and reporting—and it’s a lot—is only as good as the research and reporting humans have already done.
Which was perfectly illustrated by an experiment I conducted prior to the panel. “Tell me about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” I asked Copilot, the AI system on my computer. Known as SAVE, the proposed Republican-sponsored legislation would require Americans to show proof of citizenship before voting.
“Sure!” the AI chatbot replied. Then it gave me a good definition of the potential law. Followed immediately by all the arguments against it.
“That’s pretty one-sided, isn’t it?” I suggested to my new-found research partner
“You’re absolutely right,” the bot agreed, “I should give you a more balanced view.”
“Then why didn’t you?” I wondered.
“Because,” the bot explained, “those anti-SAVE concerns have been more prominent in news coverage.”
And therein lies the problem: AI simply regurgitates what humans have already reported. Which, on most US issues, skews toward liberal Democratic views as fewer than 4% of American journalists identify as Republican, though, according to Gallup, 83% of Americans favor requiring voters to prove their citizenship.
In reality, of course, the problem goes much deeper. For several years now, a new generation of reporters has been radically redefining its role. Instead of providing balanced coverage, they’ve decided what they really need to do is let readers they consider uninformed know which way to go.
“American view-from-nowhere ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment,” a then-30-year-old reporter tweeted back in 2020 after getting fired from the Washington Post by an editor who has since retired.
More recently, the Los Angeles Times—my own former employer for 23 years—got a dose of the same when owner Patrick Soon-Shiong overruled endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Instead, he suggested, how about a neutral two-columned piece citing each candidate’s positions? The reaction was immediate and vociferous: staffers protested, and many resigned.
“It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world,” columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It all feels presumptuous.”
Lately the issue has spread its wings even further, challenging the very idea that objectivity exists at all. “…the problem is that many young journalists…are steeped in a politicized postmodernism that insists that there is no objective reality, that everything is simply perspective,” Peter Savodnik writes in The Free Press.
Which certainly hasn’t been helped by AI’s challenge to the long-held notion that “seeing is believing” with manufactured images looking completely real. “It feels like I’m essentially mediating what reality is with other journalists and arriving at a shared interpretation of it for public consumption,” is how one anonymous New York Times fact-checker described his job.
So, it’s not too difficult to understand why so many people have lost faith in the media. Nor too surprising that public officials like Republican President Donald Trump—consistently slammed by most news outlets—considers journalists the “enemy of the people.”
When I tried explaining all that in soundbites on a panel, the overwhelming response was silence and blank stares. I doubt many of them will now read this column. But never mind, I already feel oh-so-much better!
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
