SEARCH
Justinian News

Class action against pro-Palestine academics at the University of Sydney ... Toltz v Riemer; Toltz v Keane ... Federal Court file >> 

Politics Media Law Society

My Role in Gough's Downfall ... Reporter-at-Large … Scoops that flushed out the deceit behind the Dismissal … Big anniversary chinwag in Canberra on November 11 … The combined forces of Kerr, Ellicott and cousin Garfield … Constitutional manipulation … Maurice Byers to the rescue ... Read more >> 

This area does not yet contain any content.
Free Newsletter
Justinian Columnists

Knit one, purl one ... Iron Lady of legal rectitude endorses Gageler ... The chief justice wants judges on the straight and narrow ... The cardboard cutout model of legislative supremacy ... The evils of judicial activism ... Procrustes on the dance floor with the Legislative-Judicial Foxtrot ... Read more >> 

Blow the whistle

 

News snips ...


Justinian is taking a short break ... Normal transmission resumes on Monday, October 6, 2025 ...

Justinian's Bloggers

Berlusconi's dream world ... Revenge politics in Italy ... Independence of prosecutors under attack ... Constitutional assault ... The years of lead ... Investigations reopened into old murders ... High drama at Milan's Leoncavallo ... Rome correspondent Silvana Olivetti reports ... Read more >> 

"If we’re only picking people who have got completely lily-white records then we’ll be missing out on a lot of people that can contribute to public life.

NSW Premier Chris Minns, endorsing Mal Lanyon, his pick for Police Commissioner, whose contributions to public life include shouting drunken obscenities at a paramedic who came to his aid, and commandeering a police launch for private entertainment on New Year's eve ... Read more flatulence ... 


Justinian Featurettes

Schmoozing and betrayal ... Judge Water Softener rides into Integrityville mounted high on his horse ... Judicial review of corruption finding ... Intriguing submissions ... Unprecedented assistance to morals monitor ... The scale of the sub-rosa intrigue ... Plenty to think about ... Ginger Snatch reports ... Read more >> 

Justinian's archive

News Desk Special ... Angelic death notices from the bar ... Soapy slips on FOI changes ... Unusual interlocutory costs order for Chris Dale ... Judge ticks off Abbott in letters' page ... Knock About's festive salute to the coppers ... January 19, 2015 ... Read more >> 


 

 

« A pop star comes to campus | Main | Back to law school in the first week of Trump's America »
Tuesday
Feb072017

Veritas in trouble

The Future of News - Journalism in a Post-Truth Era ... Big chinwag at Harvard with luminaries from the print and online worlds ... Truth now out-of-fashion ... Journos grapple with what's next ... No immediate solutions ... Hannah Ryan's Letter from Cambridge 

Jefferson: Trump on his wavelength

"Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle," wrote Thomas Jefferson of the newspaper, in 1817.  

In this respect alone, Donald Trump might be described as Jeffersonian. Two hundred years since the third POTUS put his derision of the press to paper, the 45th POTUS is proving to be equally as scornful, thrashing about on Twitter with wild cries about 'FAKE NEWS' and the 'failing' New York Times.  

The swelling suspicion of facts is bad news for the press, of course, but it's also no good for institutions of higher learning. It's particularly annoying for a university like Harvard, whose one-word slogan is Veritas. How was John Harvard to know that four centuries into the university's lifespan, truth would go out of fashion? 

And so it came to be that hundreds of Harvard ID-holders lined up outside the university's impressive Sanders Theater last Tuesday afternoon (Jan. 31), waiting in sub-zero temperatures and falling snow to get their bums on seats. The occasion was a special event hosted by the University's President Drew Faust, a talkfest - dubbed The Future of News: Journalism in a Post-Truth Era - so popular that students were turned away from the door by the dozen. 

The array of journalistic heavyweights present to share their wisdom proved that while Harvard's motto might be falling into disrepute, its ability to attract a star-studded line-up has not diminished: envoys were sent from the New York Times, HuffPo, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Chicago Tribune, and local rag The Boston Globe 

Talking head and editor of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol kicked off discussions with a trio of D-words. 

Disintermediation: the media, he said, had been disrupted by social media and now no longer mediated the way it used to.

Demagoguery: "analytically it's a pretty precise term," to describe the Donald, he argued.

Debility (it can be hard to think of D-words): the media was not as all-powerful as it had always thought it was, he provoked. Recent times had exposed the media's weakness. 

It was a bleak sketch of present times, but perhaps Kristol's most memorable remark was his unwelcome reminder to the audience that the devil on Trump's shoulder, Steve Bannon, was a Harvard alum. Embarrassed laughter ensued.

Baker: people can choose their own factsKristol's speech was just a warm-up for the afternoon's piece de resistance: a panel discussion with WSJ EIC Gerard Baker, newly-crowned HuffPO EIC Lydia Polgreen, and venerable Times columnist David Leonhardt. 

"God knows what is happening while we're sitting here," began the moderator and head honcho of Harvard Nieman Foundation, Ann Marie Lipinski. 

"Those of you on your phones, just shout if if something major happens and we'll try to incorporate it."

The three Ds were to come back for the rest of the afternoon. Was disintermediation a bad thing? Not necessarily, suggested Leonhardt, preferring a fourth D-word: democratisation. Maybe it was a good thing that Americans could watch Trump's announcement of the new SCOTUS appointee that night on Facebook Live? And the correction of dodgy facts in articles has certainly sped-up. But one might be forgiven for thinking these are relatively poor consolation prizes. 

Diagnoses of journalism's current ills flew thick and fast. "What we're seeing right now is a collapse of empathy in journalism," per Polgreen. 

The problem with election coverage "wasn't that we didn't write about the working class," she said. "It was that we didn't write for them." Journalism, Polgreen said, needed to reclaim its roots as a blue-collar profession.  

Polgreen: journalism needs to go back to its blue-collar rootsThe decidedly white-collar Baker from the WSJ saw the press' stormy waters as symptomatic of a broader erosion of trust in key institutions in civil society. Big business had been done no PR favours by the GFC and Enron. The Catholic Church was also not drowning in popularity.

"Only the military enjoys the trust it enjoyed fifty years ago," Baker bemoaned. Nowadays, "people can choose their own facts and ignore the facts that are inconvenient to them".  

While Leonhardt argued that the media had an unfortunate bias towards negativity, Baker (a Pom by origin) countered that sometimes the American press was not negative enough, showing a "tremendous amount of deference" to the government. 

"Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" was his description of a British journalist's thought process when interviewing a pollie. There was not enough of that across the Atlantic, he claimed. 

Amidst the chatter and chin-stroking, genuine solutions to the mistrust in journalism were scarce. 

Looking forward, Polgreen urged her colleagues to renew their commitment to civic engagement. 

"We thought we could outsource the management of our democracy to the professionals and everything would be OK," she said. No longer.

Baker's outlook was measured. "I continue to see the glass as one tenth full rather than nine tenths empty," he said. "So I remain optimistic." 

And Leonhardt's motto: subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. 

The closing remarks of the afternoon belonged to CNN's media commentary guru Brian Stelter, who spoke of the opportunities in a post-truth society. After all, "this is the moment journalists live for," he said.

"This week, this month, these four years, maybe these eight years." People want information, he argued, and audiences were increasing - his own show, Sunday morning's Reliable Sources, had cracked one million viewers that weekend. 

Rezaian: Post's man in a Tehran prisonBut Stelter also sounded a word of caution, encouraging his colleagues to stop and imagine just how bad things might get. 

"This is the time to anticipate and plan for worst case scenarios," he cautioned.  

Perhaps Stelter didn't know it, but there was someone in the audience who knew a thing or two about worst-case scenarios for the fourth estate. Looking on from the seats was Harvard Nieman Fellow and Washington Post journo, Jason Rezaian.

Rezaian was heading up the Post's bureau in Tehran when he and his wife were arrested and sent to the clink. 

All up, Rezaian spent over 18 months incarcerated on charges of espionage - a very human reminder of what can happen when Jefferson's attitude is taken to extremes. 

Hannah Ryan is an Australian law graduate studing at Harvard Law School 

Here's the whole show ... 

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.
Member Account Required
You must have a member account on this website in order to post comments. Log in to your account to enable posting.