We Media part 1: ‘who do you trust?’

At the front end of last week’s We Media Conference in London, the BBC radio show ‘World Have Your Say’ posed this question for audience response: ‘Who do you trust to provide accurate, truthful information?’

Before moving on into the meat of this post it might be prudent to offer context. The We Media Conference was, ostensibly, commited to furthering ‘the power of us’. Hosted by The Media Center, Reuters, and the BBC, the intent of the conference was to: 

‘foster collaboration through conversations, connections and shared knowledge; organize conversations with individuals and organizations who are using the Internet as a collective force of unprecedented power; create a setting to talk to them and to each other - a day for learning, sharing, ideas and opportunities. We Media is about how we create a better-informed society by collaborating with one another.’

Much of what I overheard, in bits and pieces, seemed to have championed ‘bottom-up’ approaches to structuring ‘new media’ -putting more power in the hands of us by promoting the proliferation of the tools and skills necessary for news and narrative production. This can only be accomplished by cooperatively constructing a structure of de-industrialized news and narrative production process, a de-centered and inter-subjective news, a news where sender and receiver roles are more reciprocal and the number of senders and receivers greater than now and growing. Podcasts, blogs, wikis, and mash-ups are the formats and models most referenced as exemplary potentials. However, we are off track. Suffice to say, AV will take a close look at what information The Media Center has made available (which is a lot) on the conference to see if their activities measure up to their aim (we hope so!).

But first the preface! The question of the day, ‘Who do you trust to provide accurate, truthful information?’

While it is clear people will have particular information sources they trust and others they trust less, the problem I have with this question is that it presents the concepts of ‘accuracy’ and ‘truthfulness’ in objective terms. That is, the question is framed in such a way as to make the issue of blog versus traditional ‘news’ as merely a matter of which media structure is able to adhere to present and popularly (though this may be changing) held ethics of ‘objectivity’ in news production.

The question assumes, as does the objectivist ethic, that there is THE truth out there to report on and that if the reporter distances themselves from the events in question the news will be free of subjective bias and therefore truthful. The problems with this are many, but essentially it boils down to two things: a) is it possible, in the first place, to ever entirely free one’s self of subjective bias? In an industrialized news production process this question takes on additional implications in terms of the many structural influences and directives placed upon the reporting. b) to what extent is ‘objective’ news dehumanized news, a news that silences the voices of the many people effected by the events being ‘objectively’ reported? In the case of Iraq, for example, while the ‘objective’ media focused on explosions and political power plays, it was bloggers who were able to provide subjective context by ‘broadcasting’ their own narratives to the world -or at least the world wealthy enough to purchase access equipment (which were the world members whose governments were causing all the ruckus in the first place -and I’m not just talking about the United States - Europe does imperialism too). 

This is, of course, not even addressing the extent to which social assumptions and presuppositions of news organizations as institutions of truth and its distribution inadvertantly (or perhaps even cynically in some cases, i.e. Fox) both create and mask bias in the news business.

While news institutions are blogging, blogs et al are largely de-centered and generaly cannot pretend to offer ‘objective’ views, i.e. THE truth. It is generally evident to a reader, one would suspect, that the views and information offered are the views and information of and from a partiuclar person with a particular agenda which, in many cases, is explicitly stated. I suggest that such a contextualized subject as provider of information of interest to them is more ‘truthful’ than their counterparts constrained by hierarchy, credentials, and a veil of ‘objective’ ethics.

In light of this, the whole question of ‘who do you trust?’, at least in terms of ‘popular press’, i.e. blogs, podcasts, etc., is largely irrelevant. As one of the respondents to the question said to much applause (and I praphrase heavily since the BBCs online radio player has no ‘rewind’ function) ‘There are over 50 million blogs all run by different people; all offering their own information and perspectives on different or related discussions. Some blogs I trust; others I do not trust, in much the same way there are some journalists I trust and others I do not trust. Therefore this question of whether or not I can trust blogs as a whole means nothing to me’. Can we trust a populated media? Can we not trust ourselves?

http://www.mediacenterblog.org

(See Wed, May 3rd): http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldhaveyoursay/