Writers’ festivals are events where you would normally find a lot of journalists. Sometimes interrogators, they’re in the enquirer’s chair, questioning authors about their latest tome. At other times, they’re in the hot seat, being peppered with questions, which more often than not is an uncomfortable position for them to be in. This year at the Byron Writers Festival there was a significant focus on news media and the growing problem of information disorder – mis- and disinformation – and as a result, there were quite a few journalists put on the spot to account for some of the more worrying developments in the news media business.
What I sensed from the panels I sat on was an increase in the usual levels of mistrust from audiences towards news media. There were the commonly heard expressions of mistrust born of disagreement over the interviewing of politicians people don’t like or agree with. That usually takes the form of ‘Why does the ABC even interview Coalition politicians’, or ‘Why don’t you give the Prime Minister a hard time for not having brought about world peace?’
However, there was another level of mistrust on display this year at the festival of words. Many who spoke with me felt they weren’t getting the full story from news reporters. They suspected selective omissions or inclusions to skew narratives one way or another in order to deceive them. In other words, they thought journalists were lacking objectivity and balance in their reporting. This is hardly a new complaint, especially for those of us who’ve worked at the ABC. But at this festival, it was surprising that when people came to chat after each panel, these were complaints directed at news media across the board, not just the ABC. And along with that, there was concern that news media had become a captive of social media groupthink and political messaging.
On another panel discussion, this one on information disorder, there was concern about how to define mis- and disinformation: that what one person calls misinformation is what another would call either fact or their sincerely held opinion. Given that the Byron region is, broadly speaking, concerned about the health implications of Covid 19 vaccinations, it was no surprise that definitions of misinformation and the right to have personal opinions and concerns would be topics of interest.
The concern about making sure free speech isn’t negatively impacted by any regulatory action to reduce or eradicate misinformation isn’t confined to the people of Byron Bay: as Derek writes in this newsletter, the federal government is currently grappling with how to protect free speech and at the same time create an unpolluted information environment, as it refines new laws to provide the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, with new powers to combat online mis- and disinformation. Journalists were at least united in their desire to see more and better on-the-spot fact checking, a traditionally necessary part of the process of producing public interest journalism to help mitigate the problem – and in the process make journalists a smaller part of the problem.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director
This was featured in our fortnightly newsletter of 25 August 2023. Subscribe here or download it to read it in full: