By Branko Brkic, Founder, Project Kontinuum
You’ve read, felt, considered and debated this scene many times already. You know it when you see it. Years of upheaval in the media space have taken their toll globally. Media market failure, caused by the countless currents of the last 30 years, and, alarmingly, often with the participation of the media, has led to the demise of established business models and, with them, our ability to deliver on our reason to exist — our mandate to inform our fellow citizens, reliably and fairly.
Unfortunately, there’s much more trouble on the horizon. Multiple threats are hurtling our way, and each of them on their own could be the Chicxulub asteroid to our dinosaur class. Together, they are the greatest threat we have faced in many generations.
Some, but not all, of these threats are:
- A globally resurgent, and growing, authoritarianism;
- The transformation of Big Tech into robber baron-styled rogues;
- An incoming alliance between Big Tech and autocrats;
- The seemingly unstoppable march of generative Artificial Intelligence as both a business/media tool and a weapon of war; and,
- A real, dystopian crisis with our planet’s climate that’s now well and truly upon us.
We, the news media, have much to be afraid of and little to look forward to, or up to. As I say in my many pitches to media colleagues it is very difficult to feel positive when you are staring down the barrel of a gun -financial, real, or both — a reality that many of our friends face daily. For the overwhelming majority of media leaders around the world, a successful year will be the one in which we don’t need to retrench journalists, shrink our operations or downsize our ambitions and the scope of our reach. It’s a tough ask to feel hopeful when we are generally mistrusted by large swathes of humanity, and often hated. In most countries, the profession whose job is to report truth is today gasping for the air of trust and belief.
The desertification of media space appears to be a global affliction — even our colleagues from a prosperous, literate and circumspect part of the world called Scandinavia have complained to me about the visible fall in journalist numbers, declining prosperity of their industry, and diminishing capacity to deliver.
We can cry ourselves to sleep every night just thinking about these issues, there is just so much to consider. Perhaps the all-important question at this moment is: What are we, the news media, going to do? How can we grab and hold the reins of our own future once more?
Let’s remember what we are for
But before we talk about what should be done, we need to go back to some basics. We need to discuss our own role in society — what we actually do for it. The classical Fourth Estate approach, in which our intentions and methods are clear of any bias and where we see our job as delivering perfect and neutral information, every time and on time, is truly a beautiful ideal.
The legend Walter Cronkite ended Lyndon Johnson’s dream of a second term when he exposed the real failure, atrocity and pointlessness of the Vietnam War in 1968. It happened only because of the unshakeable trust the US audience had in him and his journalism. Cronkite was seen as more trustworthy than the government itself. So was Edward Murrow, able to save America’s soul as it was being torn apart by a Trump prequel, Joe McCarthy.
That trust was, of course, financially underwritten by media giants making so much money on their programming that they could afford rich news-gathering that was not commercial in its nature and was rigorous in its methods. On their side, the print news media were printing money through classifieds and had near-total control of the brand advertising space.
But it was not out and out utopia, unfortunately. Even in the best of times, bias could happen in different ways, sometimes through passive-aggressive moves, such as limiting coverage of certain topics.
Quite crucially, this classical approach was based on the functioning of the first three estates, and the consequent or (subsequent) taking of action after media reports. An article in a national newspaper in many a country could end a prime minister’s career or alter a president’s agenda. Exposes would shame public figures into resigning, prompt investigations change laws — remember the role Harry Evans and his team at The Sunday Times played in the development of the modern United Kingdom?
Changes, developments, consequences could happen, because for every meaningful news media breakthrough, there was someone in the first three estates who listened and acted. This arguably golden age could happen only because of the nexus of society’s estates inspiring and delivering. But today is different.
One could argue that the news media’s main weapon is the precise and correct delivery of shame, the deadliest of damages since ostracism was invented in ancient Greece. Shamelessness, however, is shaping up to be a superpower of the 21st century.
An equally dangerous ingredient in this modern maelstrom is an organised attack on truth itself. As the Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa and I wrote for World News Day earlier this year:
“Truth itself is being relativised daily; what once was a common understanding of material reality today is often supplanted by interpretation that’s fact-free. In many instances, the very form of the word Truth carries the meaning of Lie. These are not random, accidental attacks. These are all part of the crusade against our system of values, our basic understanding of what is good and bad. Without our system of values., if we can’t distinguish right from wrong, we have no civilisation either…”
Our modern civilisation’s epoch-defining information revolution was matched by our failure to distribute the benefits even remotely fairly. Within this swirling tech paradise, we’ve created an emotional hell for billions who are left on the margins and often fully behind. As a result, a global crisis of trust and faith in our own societies weakened the three estates significantly in the majority of countries.
Now, here is the question we, the media, must ask ourselves: does the nature of our Fourth Estate-ness change when the first three estates are wounded, sometimes mortally? Almost in every country, the three estates are under pressure, at different levels, of course. Are we to continue to behave like we’re still in the 80s? These days, the already mentioned shamelessness, that modern-day superpower, enables the targets of our investigations to market themselves, even fundraise on the back of it. We, the media, got hacked.
The generation of super-rich routinely has so much money at its disposal that it can buy states, police, judiciary and lawmakers, all the while harassing media organisations investigating them. SLAPP — the “strategic lawsuit against public participation” — has become a proper noun, properly. I can tell you many stories of such developments from my days as editor-in-chief of Daily Maverick, South Africa, and literally every one of my colleagues has a full cupboard of similar stories, examples where news media’s hard work simply does not translate into demonstrable action being taken — at least not at the same rate as in previous eras.
This imbalance of might, where the soft power of shame is all but lost, must be taken into consideration while discussing our role in modern societies. As we enter this big tech-dominated age that is now armed with AI too, we have to accept that we are moving from the mighty, influential and profitable organisations that we were yesteryear. Instead, we have become a sector that is afraid of its own future.
The ‘fake news media’ houses have a devastating influence
Into this badly overcrowded maelstrom, we need to add the extra weight of our own shortcomings, some of them inextricably linked to the organised attack on news media by many entities, state and private. The devastating influence of the injection of old KGB-style propaganda, this time in the form of “news media” houses, cannot be overstated. They have spread disinformation with abandon while fouling the reputation of bona fide media houses.
State actors are paying billions of US dollars to construct and maintain this universe of falsities.
Still, we cannot place activist media and fake news factories in the same spot for the sake of both-sidedness. Activist media rely on real fact sets to weave their interpretations and narratives, while disinformation houses’ work is not based on reality. Their main purpose is to weaken the ties that bind traditional media brands and their audiences. Are we certain that the classical Fourth Estate approach is good for meeting the challenges of this moment — our moment, and those facing our societies and communities? Even if it is indeed still the only way we can deliver on our journalistic mandate, shouldn’t we at least debate this new reality we have found ourselves in?
I do not believe that “activist media” is a solution either, even as it, in some ways, could be a more honest approach, where journalists admit their bias upfront and inform audiences who are in the same mind space. Sometimes even we at the Daily Maverick admitted to each other that we were all activists for truth. By its nature, activist media is limited in its scope as it, essentially, is preaching to the converted. This is not a recipe for growth in influence and it can quickly turn into an extreme version of itself, where informing about reality is sacrificed to satisfying audiences’ and communities’ confirmation bias.
What probably is true is that in our media universe we need both classical and activist media. But it is also true that we need to broaden our minds. We still have time and space. We can still restore our positioning and adapt to modern times without losing all that was good about the classical Fourth Estate concept.
But in the activist v classical debate, we are blinded and do not see a central plank that we should have occupied in the first place: leadership. It is upon us to provide leadership, if necessary, when societies around us are weakening, when value systems are undermined, and democracies are eaten from within.
I am not arguing for this in a vacuum. During the dark Jacob Zuma years of State Capture in South Africa, it was the media and parts of civil society that pulled the country out of that crisis. We were relentless in exposing President Zuma, his top allies, the Gupta brothers, local and international consultants, banks and businesses that, at best, were quiet and, at worst, participated willingly in industrial looting of South Africa that went on for almost a decade. The government and parliament were captured, the courts were brave but ineffective because police and prosecutors were in the service of Zuma and Co.
We, the news media, were not thinking about our work in theoretical terms — the situation was too grim, dangerous and urgent for such introspection. But with the passage of time, it is clear to me we went out of our way to provide South Africa with a way out of the crisis.
There are many ways global news media can provide leadership in these boiling times. Here are just two examples where the other estates have failed us and we have but no choice to act:
One: A massive media literacy campaign is a screamingly urgent need. The internet was supposed to make us all much more clever, insightful, and considerate — and with matching media literacy skills. And yet, and yet. These are the days when we are perhaps more vulnerable to disinformation, hoaxes and a plain old lack of basic understanding. Social media erected walls between us, and while being made of bits and bytes, these walls appear to be stronger than Pink Floyd’s.
Around the world, media people are bemoaning the low levels of media literacy. Populations are struggling to discern good from bad media sources, distinguish good from bad journalism, or even understand the difference between a report and an opinion piece. The problem is massive, and it sits right in the centre of journalism’s disaster set.
But are we to expect that in today’s polarised spaces, there will be a choice of non-media organisations ready and willing to fix the problem? Governments? A few of them, maybe, but governments around the world see the media as an unelected competitor. It is just not realistic to expect such action, especially not at the level needed to address the core dilemma.
So I need to pose a simple question here: what can we, the news media, do about it? And the response is: a surprising lot. We need to move past the projects that culminate in a single day of slogans and chest-beating. We need to do this relentlessly, but it is doable.
Two: What are we going to do about the climate crisis?
News media must take a lead on climate
So, are we just going to continue reporting on the climate apocalypse coming our way as if it is just another event? Is it still just our job? The COP gatherings are held in one oil-producing country after another. The pace of action is badly lagging behind the burning reality of climate problems getting ever more serious. Even when faced with irrefutable evidence, politicians are running away from urgent, expensive and politically costly action.
We can all continue as we do now, and I am sure that when the end of the world comes, we will execute our reporting duties precisely, fairly and dispassionately. But the idea is for the world not to end. We can’t just throw our hands in the air and declare that we’re just doing our job. In these days of leadership vacuum in the face of certain dystopia, news media will need to lead.
These are but two of many ways we can provide leadership when it is badly needed and nowhere to be found. It will also help repair our frayed relationship with our audiences. News media can do this. I believe in that so strongly that, after 40 years in news publishing, 15 of them in Daily Maverick, I still feel the need to push the pedal to the metal and get even more serious about our future. The fight for news media survival is the fight for our own civilisation.
Recently, I started a non-profit named Project Kontinuum, with a mission to get us organised. Our introductory effort was part of the 2024 World News Day. Our nascent Choose Truth campaign attracted more than 800 publishing houses from 103 countries. The giants, including Reuters and The New York Times took part, as well as more than 60 publishers from Brazil.
And that is just a start. To get into the space where we can be effective, we also need to reconsider two major parts of our mental set-up that’s been afflicting us for ages — arrogance and cynicism — and realise that, against our every instinct, we can’t do much on our own.
We must gather around good, meaningful projects and see how we can join forces towards our common goals. The beauty of this effort is that it does not require us to change what we do in our everyday realities and doesn’t stop us chasing scoops and racing against deadlines.
For hundreds of years, the media has minded and refreshed our civilisation’s information ecosystem. We were far from fateful guardians, and God knows, we failed in our duty way too many times. But if we hand it to social media, big tech and totalitarians, it would be a disaster. The work towards recovery needs to start now. The road back to trust and belief will be long, slow and difficult. My friend Beadie said just the other day: “There is no project that’s too bold or too crazy at this moment.”
And she is so right. The problem is indeed just so big and so menacing that we will all have to work hard. One thing we cannot forget: together we’re stronger, much stronger.
About the author: Branko Brkic created Yugoslavia’s biggest privately-owned publishing house before he moved to South Africa, where he has launched four magazines and the Daily Maverick, an online daily with a readership of around 10 million monthly unique visitors. @brankobrkic
This article was first published in the British Journalism Review and is republished with permission.
