The Fake News Challenge - ‘If corporates can do it, why can’t you?’, they ask.

At that given moment, Edward Bernays gave his cue whereupon a group of rich debutantes in a parade walking down New York’s fifth avenue pulled out cigarettes from their stockings and lit up. They’re smoking torches of freedom, the PR guru would tell awaiting press and photographers. Freedom? Why yes, the fight for women’s liberation.

Edward Bernays, often cited as the father of PR, had successfully pulled of his first domestic fake news story (1929), in the process polluting the suffragettes movement by aligning it with a corporate sponsors urge to shift more cigarettes. It made headlines around the world. Welcome to PR, a name Bernays coined because it sounded good.

‘I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace and propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it…so we found a word, council on public relations. (see here: 8.01")

Bernays would successfully deploy other false news events, masqueraded as real news. When the Pork industry wanted to off load more of its product, but curated meat had limited outlets, Bernays paid doctors to tell the American public a bacon breakfast (with eggs) was good for you. They lapped it up and that diet which has stuck with us today has made its own indefatigable contribution to the cholesterol/fatty diet debate.

Today, a sizeable chunk of news will feature PR companies of one hue or another peddling their clients’ pov falsehoods to hike their profits — from chocolate is good for you, smoking causes you no harm, and nuclear fusion in a test tube will bring unlimited energy. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, in 1989, yielded one of the most torrent backlashes in the science community. Notwithstanding the duos impeccable credentials, even when other boffins doubted, the newspapers knew they had the equivalent of Freddie Star ate my Hamster. Incredulous, if not dubious, but it grabbed column inches.

‘If corporates can do it, why can’t you?’, perpetrators ask. In a world of limited news outlets, news producers were either culpable, or duplicitous, but that was fine because there was a sense it was manageable. The joke was on others. The deliberate attempt to smear football fans and family at the tragic loss of life in Hillsborough showed a malevolent deeply darker side. In 1992 at BBC Greater London Radio, a network television reporter describing the LA riots extolled how blacks were looting stores. ‘Hang on!’ said a producer, who promptly rang the network’s news desk to complain there were blacks and whites.

And now with a galaxy of sites purporting to be news producers, this thing, now given a brand name, ‘fake’ has ‘gotten out of control’. The BBC’s first director general Sir John Reith said almost 100 years ago, when confronted with the idea that news could be synchronous like CB radio, that you couldn’t trust the public to know what to do with this power. Whether knowingly misleading, or lacking the evidence in the first place, neither contributes to the good health of knowledge and beliefs we will use to make judgements.

Recently, Facebook weighed in with what it sees as a helpful address to fake news. Check the url, it says and a slew of other things , while staying in the wall garden of FB. Mike Caulfield in a riposte was having none of it. FB’s measure were cosmetic enough for anyone to code a bit here and there to shore up the “about us” page, or become more sussed spelling correctly.

The problem isn’t a set of listicles as a fact check, but a deeper critical cognitive awareness of stories examined via different methodologies. At the heart it’s detective work, which requires substantive cross referencing, and not necessarily trusting what your eyes and ears are telling you.

The problem with the screen generation, a journalist friend tells me, is few people want to go back to the source to find the origins of the story. Storyful, a digital agency launched by a former news correspondent, Mark Little, showed a blue print for how social media companies could verify news and its source.

In his book News, philosopher Alain de Botton makes an obvious point. We teach young people about Shakespeare and the classics, but not much in the way of media literacy to decode newspapers and television, he says. The Internet and social opens a new dimension where competition, the pace of story turnover, and the clicks monetised as capital (Bernays in the 21st century) is a toxic allure that isn’t going away any time.

Part of the behavioural problem is the atomisation of the news ecosystem. When once a team of people were responsible in a work flow to spot fakers or there was a corrective body, however toothless, today stretched news orgs rely on the solitary judgement of a journalist. PR and fakers with deep insights into story structure and agenda know where and when to set of a literary time ordinance. If you write it to look like news: grabby lead, W5H, quote in second para — job half done.

Then there's the inevitable, adduced by social scientist Gustave Le Bon in the 1800s. People in a crowd act irrationally and can easily be swayed to act upon their fears.

Furthermore, all it takes is for any social network to take a bite exposing themselves to the blue dye for the whole network to become tainted. You’ll hardly manage any blow back too when your upbringing has fed you with stereotypes and sensationalism . Yes! Father Christmas is real.

The panacea, or quick fixes are as illusionary as the items. The wisdom of crowds suggests if you talk to enough people for corroboration, the truth will out. But that depends on the crowd/network. Thankfully, pro agency websites e.g. Reuters can still be relied upon. But vigilance and a new raft of technological features may in the end kick this thing sideways, for a moment.

Fake or hoax news is never going to go away. Wasn’t it just over a 100 years ago that two of the US’ biggest newspaper tycoons Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal went to yellow journalism war? Same colour today just different actors.

More on medium or see what David is up to at www.viewmagazine.tv

Rewiring story telling - `journalism's Minority Report

Hello! We’ve not met. I hope we can after this. Because what I have to say works better in person. I’ve met a fair few people on my journey in the media, including some tech giants like Apple who wrote this flattering article about my work a decade ago when we were trying to figure out multimedia.

Then I spent six intense years completing a doctorate (PhD) — a global analysis that took me around the world, examining story form, people and identifying an emergent group of award-winning newsmakers. 

What it is, I asked, that draws our attention in stories? How do these award-winning newsmakers go about producing their work, and why are we drawn to them? What was the strategy behind their craft? And what influence did tech play in their work? 

These were just some of the questions in which I searched for answers. Madly, I video documented the journey, as well as producing a range of short films. 

I used multiple approaches:

• Deep interviews with experts (100 +).
• Tracking down and evaluating the work of the UK’s first videojournalists in the 1990s. [You can see a clip of the film I made on them here.]
• Deep interviews from tracking down 14 of the world’s new generation of newsmakers — known for their world expertise in something called videojournalism ( which might be different from what you know). They’re global award winners.
• Putting myself for scrutiny on the basis I’d won international awards and have been practising videojournalism over 23-years. Some of the experts who critiqued me were Mark Cousins, a critic, award-winning filmmaker and author the very popular, The Story of Film.
• And then a diachronic examination of film, art, video and photography and memory studies.

Those travels included: China, Cairo, the Turkey-Syrian border, Lebanon, India, Chicago, South Africa etc. And before then working with people like Lennox Lewis as his filmmaker fighting Tyson, Danny Glover in South Africa, filming Moby in France, and diving to examine WWI ships in Gallipoli for the BBC World Service. Each one of them yielded their own fascinating stories.

What I found out was both exciting and alarming.

Scene 1
Take this structure below. You’ve seen this before. In fact many times. You’re so familiar with it that you pay it no critical attention. Every news outlet is shaped around this, with variations. It is the universal model for news story form. The problem is millennials are non-plussed by it. Actually so was Generation X, from 1994 onwards in UK studies.

This is how it manifests itself on screen from one of my reports for ITV News.
 

Broadcast journalism outfits around the world use this formula, but why? To understand this, we need to go back to the time when the ‘news package’ as it’s called was conceived

The BreakThrough

When ITV, NBC and CBS refined the news package in the 1960s, it was a brilliant piece of story form engineering. But it came with conditions. It had to be short around 2 mins. News execs were terrified people would switch off. It had to revolve around a reporter. And, it would be framed by execs’ fab four framework: objectivity, impartial, balance and fairness.

But then in the liberating 60s new ideas arrived and pioneers such as Robert Drew, whose film Primary(1960) was picked by the Library of Congress for preservation at the United States National Film Registry because of its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.

Drew argued for different ways of news making, but the networks took little notice. They took my equipment he would say in this interview below, but not my ideas.

 Long story short. Execs loved the news package, and so did the public for a while but as generations became more tele-literate, they sought something else. Problem is, TV didn’t and hasn’t been able to find an alternative. Before NBC broke the glass ceiling appointing its first President of News Deborah Turness, I spoke to Turness about the news package. Her answer — she’s trying to find the holy grail — the next story form.

 Around the world, the original fab four framework and the lattice of the package has become so porous from sustained assaults by public relation firms, businesses and politicians that you could drive a Boeing 747 through its idea of integrity. In fact if I were devising a new journalism course for the 21st century, I’d teach how the mind works from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology.

News makers haven’t helped themselves either. Take false equivalence as an example. Television news will interview 99 people who will tell you climate change is real, but if one person says it isn’t, exec feels compelled to give equal weighting to both views on air — shooting to bits the idea of fairness and impartiality.

The Last Leg

On the border of Syria, one of my last assignments, the data and patterns confirmed something, that whilst tech e.g. Snapchat, Facebook Vine etc. any social media seemingly frames new behaviours, the way we think, how our visual cortex works, how memory shapes us, is based around age-old philosophies, and aesthetics far more than were made to believe. I posted a trailer of that assignment yesterday to a warm response.

 

Where we are now

Unlike the sciences where new findings are eliminative, journalism is palimpsestic — it’s a strength and a weakness. Largely, given the costs and resources that goes into traditional journalism, rather than radically changing, it retains behaviours and workflows — some of which turn viewers off. And as a legacy this may well continue. We also have a problem explaining journalism as if it’s a unitary form, which I address here. [ And #Epicfail in Journalism and ways to fix it].

And what of all the new areas of journalism, such as Data, Drone, Mobile, Social? There are an amazing array of articles and authors that cover these a in illuminating ways. Paul Bradshaw @paulbradsha on data, Glen Mulcahy @GlenBMulcahy for Mobile, and Sue Llewellyn @suellewellyn on Social.

However, my focus while respectful of sci-tech (I’m a maths/chem grad) mines areas we tend to ignore, cognitivism and meaning making.

 Hence, whilst video below is made on a mobile phone, for a £500K project, it’s not the mobile that excites me, but our ingrained, as well as changing perception to aesthetics to stories, news, docs and otherwise.

I’ve posted the ff that continue my journey:
And #Epicfail in Journalism and ways to fix it and Journalism’s #Epic Failure and more whys — Redux. and How 12 Years a Slave is an exemplar for journalism

Not the end

Dr David Dunkley Gyimah has been a journalist for more than 25 years working for some of the biggest brands in journalism e.g. Newsnight, Channel 4 News. He is the recipient of a number of international awards including the (US) Knight Batten for Innovation in Journalism. He currently leads the Digital Interactive Story LAB at the University of Westminster and is a juror for the Royal Television Society Awards. You can contact David ( ff @viewmagazine)at David@viewmagazine.tv or through his site www.viewmagazine.tv

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What if Stephen Soberbergh did journalism? Apple talk by Knight Batten Winner David Dunkley Gyimah

What if Stephen Soberbergh did journalism?

If the evidence of his involvement in Citizen Four is anything to by, it would be memorable, perhaps entertaining, and above all cinematic.

With a 100 hours of video being uploaded to Youtube every minute, there’s good reason to do cinematic video — you stand out from the crowd.

Ask a focus group of young people, as I have done through academic research, about any piece of video/film they remember and invariably they’ll name a fictional film.

There’s something about cinema.

Journalists coil with opprobrium at the thought. At the least it’s naive — cinema is fiction and once we fictionalise journalism we’re in Alice in Wonderland territory.

At best, the two are immiscible. Good heavens is this a real journalist writing this gumf.

At Apple in a week and a bits time I’m looking to push this gumf out with a supertanker. The popular manifestation of cinematic journalism is Vice.com, and there’s a health warning attached.

Vice will joined by many others — lining up in new academies and the corridors of Youtube readying themselves for online dominance. It’s a warning to traditional broadcasters. [read How Vice became the voice of a generation].

Existing, somewhat antiquated, theories around journalism are feeling the squeeze as a pragmatism in digital that’s shaping new provisional theories soars.

The issue of cinematic has been a perennial one, eschewed by the news establishment in the past in defence of their industry. The web changed all that. Journalism can still berate this pretentious cousin, cinematic journalism, but it’s the audience, er, steward!

That doesn’t necessarily mean the audience is right, even if they’re dragging the advertisers with them, but academic research shows they’re onto something — particularly from a creative movement within videojournalism.

If you can make it down to Apple, I hope you won’t be disappointed. Some of the definates so far include short films on what NBCs President of News makes of cinematic videojournalism.

How Robert Drew created Cinematic journalism in the 1960s. And an interview with one of the UK’s fiest videojournalists Steve Punter — who sadly passed away last year.

BTW When film journalism was first conceived it was cinematic, then something happened ☺

David Dunkley Gyimah was one of the UK’s first official videojournalists. His worked for the BBC and Channel 4 News. He’s a recipient of several awards. His doctorate, a six year global study covers the impact of cinematic journalism. You can find out more about his talk here.

The Art of a New International VideoJournalism - A Brit, US Social Scientist, and Syrian Talent

EPILOGUE

By 3 O'clock in the afternoon, it dawned on me the magnitude of the story. We're holed up in a hotel near the Turkish-Syrian border. That's me standing on the bed.

Young Syrian journalists in the room, fifteen in all, have taken huge risks to cross over. Their stories are powerful, yet untold, and international businesses regularly lift or take parts of their report with no remuneration.

We're trying something called cinema journalism - an artistic form of news making. The story really starts here, almost thirty years ago... Five minutes of the film can be viewed below...

Nineteen eight-seven

Looking across the auditorium at some of the US’ most respected educators, Donald Schön presented a simple yet powerful tale he had recounted several times.

Its impact was no less emphatic for professionals who were not educators, such as designers, health workers, and for that matter journalists.

You’re riding a bike and you begin to fall to the left. How do you quickly regain your composure?

Turn Right
Turn Left
I don’t know
It’s an irrelevant question

The answer, the MIT social scientist said was to turn into the left. It has to do with the bike, which acts like a gyroscope, re-finding its centre of gravity. Racing car drivers braking around a bend at 200kph know this. But what about those who might say turn the other way? In practice, Schön continued you don’t fall off so what’s going on.

Often, we might know what to do, without necessarily being able to put this into words. This phenomenon Schön called reflection-in-action.

Doctors will sometimes detect an illness, not based on a clinical diagnosis but a hunch. Designers make use of reflection-in-action to ponder a new design, like the Stata Center in MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the concept appears impossible, and journalism?

Well, swathes of journalists have creatively thought through the process of compiling a report against a deadline when the odds have been stacked against them — but there’s a catch.

Schön’s address poked at education on the one hand and the professions on the other. There is an enslavement to the packaging of knowledge in academia he said, and the rigid modular form students are taught does not give rise to what he called reflection-in-action, or reflection-on-action. One is an ongoing process, the other occurs over time.

Here, students should have the artistic freedom to experiment, to develop new forms, to ‘make it up’ within a framework and assess their work thereafter. The idea caught on with many US educators doubling as action researchers who incorporated Schön’s teaching into their classes.

But arguably and generally television journalism has been in stasis.

A case in point, students undertaking television journalism or documentary will often work through how to create news and documentaries based on a rationale of the way things ARE done.

Not by what could be done, which is in stark contrast to visual or graphic designers who employ wide discursive methods to reach their goal.

News, we’re told, requires the use of one camera. You can’t use music, and the narrative has to be ‘he said, she said’ assuming total knowledge from the journalist. Often, it’s worth asking the lecturer or practitioner why?

Schön called this condition technical rationality. In one of several books,The Reflective Practitioner, published four years earlier from his 1987 AGM talk to the American Educational Research Association, Schön elaborated.

Technical rationality confines many professions to be rooted in a scientific norm of practice, what’s called positivism where data is derived from logical and mathematical reasoning.

It leaves little room for much needed artistry in experiments that would expand knowledge in ways that are unpredictable. A popular way to look at the two systems, postivism and reflection-in-action based on artistic methods, is the Apollo 13 near disaster.

If it was logic that got the crew nearly to the moon, it was lengthy periods of reflection-in-action, tearing up the rule book, shown in the film by Gary Sinese’s character that got them safely back to earth.

Gary Sinise in Apollo 13 Copyright: © 1995 Universal Pictures

The Reflective Practitioner has since become one of the most cited and talked about books for researchers talking about their practice.

Whilst journalism is not included in Schön’s book, the similarities are clear. The way television journalism is, and delivered by experts, has been fixed for the last fifty years. It’s based on a positivism, so issues such as objectivity, balance, trust are thrust before student journalists by professionals as absolutes.

New Journalism
In 2001 when Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel published Elements of Journalism, a book synthesised from several industry meetings from conversations started at the Harvard Faculty club in 1997, issues such as objectivity were finally being jettisoned.

Kovach and Rosenstiel listed ten essentials of journalism, writing that:

Some readers may think items are missing here. Where is fairness? Where is balance? As we researched journalism’s past and looked to its future, it became clear that a number of famililar abd even useful ideas associated with news were to vague to rise to the level of essential principles of journalism. Fairness, for instance, is subjective a concept that it offered little guidance in how to operate.

While Schön is not, and neither am I, criticising the many hard-working educators and journalists who ply their craft, Schön’s reflection-in-action advocates change, not as a cosmetic procedure, but to advance our knowledge and profession. He states:

Our systems need to maintain their identity, and their ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them, but they must at the same time be capable of transforming themselves.

Television news is a Porche, often presented in a Skoda body. It embraces a language system that is so vast, so rich in expression, but has confined itself to a scientific norm of practices.

The camera needs to be placed here — inevitably leading to the rule of thirds. The reporter’s job is to voice-over bits of the film where an interviewee isn’t speaking, and a report needs to be 1.20’.

All of these have specific reasons for how and why they were brilliant at the time and why they would work when NBC news pioneer Frank Reuven popularised the news package.

If reportage is the skill and knowledge of articulating complex issues to an audience, then even in these video-utopian times there is still a vast terrain that videojournalism is reluctant to enter.

The artistry derived from experimenting and peeling back from technical rationality lies within a journalism that embraces Schön’s reflection-in-action. Sadly, such artistry is not taught.

Call it an artistic form of videojournalism or even a hybrid form of cinema — which this author has spoken about at the International Festival of Journalism in Perugia, Apple stores in London, and CUNYs Reinvent TV in New York, in which Jeff Jarvis and Hal Straus convened a gathering of twenty professionals to examine the future of TV.

That Syrian film mentioned earlier...

Young British Artists
In the UK an attempt at a new journalism happened twenty years ago to this day with the UK’s first officially recognised videojournalists.

Thirty British youngsters, many of whom were picked because they had never worked in television, were trained by the father of videojournalism Michael Rosenblum in an intensive three month regime.

The group made a serious stab at reworking television journalism though as yet there’s little evidence of their reflection-in-action being adopted by UK journalism.

I was one of them and over the years have become more familiar with reflective practice. But here’s the catch mentioned earlier. You can reflect, but you can’t affect change unless

a) You’re willing to step out of the conventions that so powerfully hold you

b) You are in possession or are seeking to find this non conventional solution.

In my case I have looked to cinema and art for these, which would lead to incredible journey’s, such as becoming an artist-in-resident at the UK’s illustrious Southbank Centre, or travelling to near the Syrian border to make a film.

Channel One folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.

The company folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.

Today, social networks and the impact of the Net have finally forced institutional journalism to rethink its practices. They’ve been dragged here screaming.

But the field, at least in video, is still wide open. When Adam Westbrook, part of a new generation of videojournalists and writers enquires about new artistic forms on the Net, he invokes a spirit of journalism, a reflection-in-action, that I believe became conscious amongst audiences 20 years ago and is now, finally heading to critical exposure.

@viewmagazine

www.viewmagazine.tv
David is a Knight Batten Winner in Innovation in Journalism and an international award-winning videojournalist. His journalism career spans 27 years working for outfits such as Channel 4 News, ABC News and Newsnight. His PhD looks at the future of videojournalism.