In 2016, WTOE 5 News, a website that has since shut down, published an article claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for US president. While the pontiff quickly made a statement saying he would never comment on an election campaign, data from Buzzfeed showed that in the three months before the election, the fabricated article resulted in 960,000 Facebook engagements.
Disinformation — false information deliberately designed to manipulate or mislead — has been with us for centuries. After Caesar’s death, rivals Mark Antony and Octavian waged a propaganda war to win support. Octavian ran a better campaign, using “short, sharp slogans written upon coins in the style of archaic tweets” to besmirch Antony’s reputation. This helped Octavian to become the first Roman emperor, and set the benchmark for politicians forevermore.
While there are hundreds of examples of how people, groups and political organisations have used false information to further their aims, the use of disinformation has been in the spotlight since the 2016 US election.
Trump’s term in the White House delivered some real doozies when it came to manipulating US citizens for support. Unfortunately, his team was never terribly subtle. Who can forget Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”? (The Orwell estate must have been delighted, though, when the sale of Nineteen Eighty-Four bounced up 95-fold immediately afterwards, sending it to No 1 on Amazon).
And so, while Trump and his team may not have been doing anything new, the damage done by the spread of bad information through the pervasiveness of social media has grown exponentially.
It may not be intentional, but it’s just as destructive
Misinformation — false information that is spread without malicious intent — has also had unprecedented growth. In a December 2020 survey, more than 38% of US news consumers admitted to having unknowingly shared false information or fake news on social media.
This rise in freely available and widely spread misinformation soon crept into poorly staffed newsrooms. With journalists pushed for time and often not enjoying the safety net of good editorial support, news outlets became part of the misinformation problem. Between 30% and 45% of people surveyed in 2023 said they had witnessed false or misleading news about Covid, climate change, politics and the war in Ukraine.
This rise in freely available and
widely spread misinformation soon crept into poorly staffed newsrooms
Fighting for facts
In South Africa, the struggle to maintain news integrity has become even more difficult over the past few years. Covid took its toll and newsrooms continue to shrink, often relying on inexperienced reporters as the more senior (and more expensive) staff leave to find work that could meet basic needs.
The attrition of skills has been exacerbated by a contracting economy, and with it a rapidly shrinking advertising budget from local companies. The recent bloodbath at Media24 sent shockwaves through a battle-weary industry and left hundreds of skilled staff looking for work.
The result is that the people left staffing our news desks will have even less time to identify newsworthy stories, research and investigate them, interview those affected, and write copy free of errors. They will naturally turn to social media to get quick, citizen-driven information and augment their stories with AI-sourced copy. And while AI does not automatically mean bad content, without a rigorous fact-checking team there will be more mistakes that slip through the cracks.
Call the banners
PR agencies are increasingly tapping newsroom skills by employing seasoned journalists to help identify the kinds of angles publications are looking for and giving input on the value of the content that is being produced. They are also helping with research, checking that information being put forward is factually correct, free of hyperbole and generally of a quality that even the most exacting subeditors would approve of.
Of course, the media crisis gives the unscrupulous every opportunity to take advantage of the challenges facing newsrooms. But it won’t be long before the remaining editorial teams will separate the agencies that give them exactly what they need from those trying to slip through client puffery.
The challenge for agencies will be journalist inboxes that are even more clogged than before, and so we will be fighting even harder to break through the noise. But the alternative — a failing, untrustworthy news media — is simply too terrifying to contemplate.
The next few years will be defined by how the South African media and the PR industry can work together to ensure that the spectre of more mis- and disinformation doesn’t obliterate what remaining trust the public has in our media.
Bronwen Kausch is an associate at Semaphore Communications.
The big take-out: In South Africa, the struggle to maintain news integrity has become even more difficult over the past few years.
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