JotCast | The Future of Media in a Post-Truth Age

The Future of Media in a Post-Truth Age

Sourish Samanta

1:57

Hello and welcome to a panel discussion on 'The Future of Media in a Post-Truth Age' hosted by the Oxford Union Society. We have Jeremy O'Grady, Editor-in-Chief of The Week, Robert Guest, Foreign Editor of The Economist and Jim White, Telegraph columnist, writer, and broadcaster.

1:59

Robert Guest kicks off the session saying: "In the era of fake news, if we go back to 16 century, it was common for owners of printing press to publish the most extraordinary non sensical stories because those were the things that were sold the best."

2:02

Guest adds: "In 1835, the New York Sun started running a series of stories about a man called Hershel who was looking through a modern telescope at the moon and they reported what he saw and it was 'hotstuff'. He saw half- man-half bat monsters on the surface of moon. Goat like creatures with blue skin, palaces build out of sapphire-- and as the New York sun serialized his observations their circulation shot up because it was gripping."

2:03

2:10

Guest asserted that the story was not fake because there was a man with a telescope called John Hershel who was sitting in South Africa observing the moon. And, the circulation got them advertisements and they made a lot of money up until other papers started claiming that New York sun was making things up.

2:13

Guest points out that we've gone back to the period where we had anonymous pamphlets being put off presses. "Each individual story on Facebook isn't connected to anywhere else which can be put out by a teenager sitting in his room who's putting fantastic stories to get clicks, without caring about advertising revenue."

Have you heard of the Great Moon Hoax? In 1835, a New York newspaper reported that John Herschel had found life on the Moon! He supposedly saw bat-men, unicorns, oceans and forests on the Moon during a trip to South Africa. #fakenews #WSW2019 #lifeonthemoon

2:17

On that note, Guest adds: "It didn't cost me anything to make it up. If I put it on Facebook," citing the example of the Queen and Brexit.

2:19

Guest ends by saying: "If you want news that's true, someone has to pay for it."

2:20

2:22

Jeremy O'Grady starts by tracing the idea of reputation and believing in news. "We have Robert's excellent magazine, The Economist and other titles like Guardian, Times, Telegraph which have managed to build a reputation and made us believe in news."

2:27

O'Grady also hopes to distinguish between fake news and the idea of partisanship today, citing Reuters' survey on fake news where the participants said that their problems with the fake news is the main stream media.

2:29

O'Grady: "We just don't have a problem with identifying fake stories which is an easier problem to deal with."

2:32

O'Grady adds: "Today we hope to discuss as to what extent are we in this post-fact age, an age where opinion matters more than facts."

2:35

2:36

Jim White starts talking about the earlier times when he was working for The Independent, he says, his immediate editor would everyday count who was reading what, while being on the train. "That would be very close to the actual purchasing figures."

2:39

White reveals that if you walk down a train now you will find people would be consulting their phones. "The change has been absolutely revolutionary to the point that The Independent no longer even prints a newspaper. It is entirely online and that shift has been two things- it has been very uncomfortable for the existing media and they don't know how to deal with it."

2:41

White: "Young budding journalists can create a new world via the new technology."

2:44

White says, "Social media has an algorithm, which will show the kind of stories you've liked, dividing people into clubs like the left and the right wing clubs."

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