{"id":264753,"date":"2017-02-06T11:31:37","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T16:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/de-institutionalization-fake-news-and-the-crisis-of-journalism\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T21:27:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T01:27:20","slug":"de-institutionalization-fake-news-and-the-crisis-of-journalism","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2017\/02\/de-institutionalization-fake-news-and-the-crisis-of-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"De-institutionalization, fake news and the crisis of journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

As far as mainstream media is concerned, 2016 will be remembered as the year that print media ran out of runway, as the transition-to-digital bluff was called.<\/a> It\u2019s clear there is no reliable digital business model for online publishing. The recent round of mass layoffs at Medium<\/a> has only underscored that even the digital-only ad-supported initiatives are a fool\u2019s errand.<\/p>\n

In short, journalism is in a huge crisis. That\u2019s not a novel observation. But as the business has collapsed over the past decade, we have tended to think of the crisis in terms of raw numbers \u2013 newsroom headcounts, number of layoffs or buyouts, and so on.\u00a0 But recent developments, in particular the growing problem of fake news, have made it clear that there\u2019s another dimension to the crisis \u2013 the de-institutionalization of journalism.<\/p>\n

Journalism has always resisted professionalization. Unlike, say, surgeons or chartered accountants or architects, journalism has resisted creating a guild-style accreditation system or body that would be responsible for setting and maintaining standards and determining who qualifies. Partly it\u2019s for cultural reasons. Journalists have long cultivated a sort of working-class vibe and a healthy anti-elitism.<\/p>\n

Yet journalism, for most of its history, has been solidly institutionalized. That doesn\u2019t just mean journalism has traditionally taken place within large corporate structures, although that\u2019s a big part of it. It also means that it was embodied in various broader social and legal mechanisms of trust, responsibility, and accountability.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why simply working for a news organization was just about the only formal accreditation needed by a journalist. The barriers to entry for all the major journalism formats \u2014 print, TV, radio \u2014 were always so high, there was little to worry about in the way of fly-by-night publishers. A journalist was just someone who worked for a media organization that had formal and effective procedures for ensuring transparency, accuracy, correction of errors and basic accountability, and this fact alone provided a considerable degree of what we might as well call consumer protection.<\/p>\n

Then along came the internet, blogging platforms, social media, smart phones with cameras and video and editing and publishing apps, and suddenly anyone on the street has more publication power, in terms of platform diversity and potential audience reach, than the entire New York Times<\/em> newsroom of just 25 years ago. Add to this the cult of the \u201ccitizen journalist\u201d and the now-discredited late-1990s cant about the democratizing power of the internet, and you get people seriously claiming that \u201ceveryone is a journalist.\u201d (For comparison, imagine claiming that widespread access to sharp knives suddenly makes anyone a surgeon, or the fact that a phone has a built-in spreadsheet app makes everyone an accountant.)<\/p>\n

What this means in practice is that journalism has been effectively de-institutionalized because those consumer protections are no longer in place. There is no longer any way of ensuring that we can trust the news.<\/p>\n

The problem of fake news<\/strong><\/p>\n

The initial and possibly most difficult problem with fake news is one of definition. In a New Yorker<\/em> piece late last year entitled Solving The Problem of Fake News<\/em>,<\/a> Nicholas Lemann opened by stating: \u201cWhat we are now calling fake news \u2013 misinformation that people fall for \u2013 is nothing new.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right, fake news is not a new phenomenon: Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon didn\u2019t invent it. But it\u2019s completely unhelpful to reduce fake news to misinformation that people fall for. If that were true, every single episode of Three\u2019s Company<\/em> could be analyzed as a case study in fake news. (If you think that\u2019s unfair, note that Lemann himself lists Viola disguising herself as a man in Twelfth Night<\/em> as an instance of the phenomenon.)<\/p>\n

As it stands, a cottage industry of fake news has sprung up, dedicated to devising little folk-taxonomies of fake news. Most follow a spectrum from honest mistake through to sloppiness, torqued or biased reporting, raw propaganda and, finally, full-on fake news, such as the claim that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizza joint<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this last type \u2014 the extreme and unadulterated form of fake news \u2014 that concerns us here, because it\u2019s parasitic on the de-institutionalized character of online journalism. There have been a number of jaw-dropping expos\u00e9s<\/a> written lately about the fake news industry. In some cases it\u2019s literally guys in sweatpants sitting on a couch making stuff up, writing their fabrications as a news story, complete with dateline, byline and quotes, and putting it on the internet, where it bobs along with all other newsy-looking items out there, competing in the same ecosystem for the same scarce resources.<\/p>\n

Washington Post<\/em> public editor Margaret Sullivan gave fake news the pithiest definition when she described it<\/a> as \u201cdeliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public.\u201d The fact that it takes the form of news stories, in a media ecosystem designed to obscure the institutional character of the publisher, is what makes it so dangerous and difficult to deal with.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the key part here, and what distinguishes fake news from propaganda, is that it takes the form of news articles. And this is where the de-institutionalization starts to bite: online, every article, in a sense, is on an equal footing. In the great democracy of the world wide web, a URL is like currency. Anyone\u2019s URL is as good as anyone else\u2019s. The comparison with currency, and the broader analogy between counterfeit news and counterfeit money, is actually quite deep, and the similarities suggest a possible route towards an effective policy-based solution to the problem.<\/p>\n

Re-institutionalizing journalism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many people are familiar with Gresham\u2019s Law<\/a> \u2013 the idea that in a situation where counterfeit currency is circulating widely and trading at par with the authentic form, \u201cbad money drives out good,\u201d and the more valuable, genuine, currency will disappear from circulation.<\/p>\n

Not as well known as Gresham\u2019s Law, but more interesting for our purposes, is a phenomenon called Thiers\u2019 Law.<\/a> Thiers\u2019 Law states that when the bad money becomes so debased that it\u2019s effectively worthless, there is a flight to value, no matter how marginal, and people seek out the authentic currency. The flight to good money drives out bad, and Gresham\u2019s Law starts to work in reverse.\u00a0 For Thiers\u2019 Law to work, though, there must be a way of distinguishing good money from bad, and they must not trade at par \u2013 good money must have a value premium.<\/p>\n

The question then is whether it\u2019s possible to make fake news run similarly backwards. Could we make it so that trafficking in the fake news business becomes effectively worthless, while the production and consumption of real news is rewarded, and has a value premium? The trick is to figure out a way of re-institutionalizing online journalism in a way that will mimic or rehabilitate the trust-building character of pre-internet media outlets.<\/p>\n

The simplest method would be for the government to institute a top-down, state-enforced licensing or accreditation system for journalists or media outlets. It\u2019s the simplest but also the most problematic, for any number of fairly obvious reasons having to do with the role of a free press in a democratic society.\u00a0A related proposal would be to have giant platforms such as Facebook and Google take charge of dealing with fake news through filters, or their own licensing or accreditation protocols, but this would suffer from the same difficulties, only worse for being in private hands.<\/p>\n

Any viable approach to nullifying the Gresham\u2019s Law impact on news, and re-institutionalizing real-news journalism, has two definite requirements. It will have to be both organic and open, in a way that allows any media outlet \u2013 from large legacy outlets to digital-only startups and citizen journalists \u2013 to become voluntarily institutionalized.<\/p>\n

Second, real news has to be made more valuable than fake news to all the relevant stakeholders \u2013 the producers, publishers, advertisers and consumers.<\/p>\n

One promising line of attack is something called The Trust Project<\/a>, founded a year and a half ago and based out of Santa Clara University. With 70 or so media partners, its goal is to develop \u201ctrust indicators\u201d<\/a> that will signal to audiences that a given article is real, as opposed to fake, news. These indicators include things like the posting of an institutional ethics policy, a clear mechanism for editorial accountability and error correction, transparency regarding the identities of editors, reporters, and sources, accepted fact-checking rubrics and so on.<\/p>\n

What makes this approach so promising is that it\u2019s aimed primarily at building trust in the audience. The genius lies in the fact that adherence to trust indicators can be embedded in a story\u2019s meta-data, which can then be picked up by filters at any level of distribution or consumption \u2013 search engines, social media platforms, apps or browsers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this meta-data can be identified and used by advertisers or ad-serving networks.<\/p>\n

If the government is looking to assist in the battle against fake news, it could offer subsidies or tax breaks to companies that advertise with outlets that adhere to specified trust indicators. Ultimately, by sending appropriate value signals to every link in the chain of news production and consumption (i.e., consumers, producers, publishers and advertisers) and making sure that authentic news has a value premium whatever the context, the embedded trust indicators could help turn Gresham\u2019s Law of news into Thiers\u2019 Law, and quite quickly chase fake news from the field. Journalism would thereby become virtually re-institutionalized, and we would be well on our way to restoring credibility and integrity to online news.<\/p>\n

This article is part of the special feature\u00a0The Future of Canadian Journalism<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Photo: Shutterstock.com<\/span><\/p>\n

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