HOW CAN JOURNALISM FIGHT PROPAGANDA?

Mass Media Against Totalitarianism

How Can Journalism Fight Propaganda?

Enrique Castejon-Lara

@ECastejonL

Abstract

Usually, certain government representatives and political leaders use their public relevance to impose through press their ideas in people, although some or all of them do not fit to real facts. Systematically, they use the journalism credibility on audiences and its news techniques for their own ideological benefits.

Historically, journalism has privileged government and other relevant public news sources because of their assumed reliability. Reason? Their prominence. However, this standard practice has become through time a double-edged sword for truth —an Achilles’ heel, indeed.

Totalitarian governments and some political leaders, largely, have been using that journalistic practice for their own benefits. They know that independent reporters always repeat “objectively” what they say, and audiences tend to believe them. In other words, propaganda promoters frequently include fake or altered facts press declarations in their ideological strategy’s campaigns. In addition, propagandists are experts offering “attractive” declarations and “scoop traps” to increase reporters’ interest in covering them.

For that reasons, journalists have to increase their fact checking task to avoid divulgation of fake news. At the same time, they have also to place propagandist declarations on the real news context and continuously clarify to audiences that the ideas exposed are responsibility of that news sources. In other words, reporters have to rethink some traditional journalistic criteria.

Constructing liar source barriers is the only way to stop —and, maybe, defeat— propaganda, which is trying constantly to use press credibility for your own ideological benefits.

IMPACT OF SILENCE IN JOURNALISM

Abstract

Sometimes, the omission of certain sources’ information can be the best way to combat fake news and propaganda. However, some reporters involuntary are helping liars to spread false information and ideological commentaries with their news. Is it really an obligation of journalists to report everything provide for a clearly deceiver spokesperson?

Enrique Castejon-Lara

Major studies in Mass Communication recognize noise as a perturbation of message transmission. Noise, in this case, is any external content element that affects message comprehension. So that, noise is not the same thing than silence. An omission in a news chain may be part of the meaning of the own messages.

In that sense, in certain occasions, quietness can have stronger connotation than any word that journalists can write or pronounce. For that reason, reporters have to decide when omit sources’ quotes that can contribute to create an interested confusing information environment. He or she, ethically, cannot become a diffusion agent for fake facts promoters.

However, constantly we can read stories on newspapers, hear on radio or watch on TV broadcast reports about false facts only because they were announced by “important” sources. Today journalistic principles reject that old fashion rule. Prominence of a spokesperson is not a guaranty of truth.

Therefore, the major strike that journalist can do against information manipulators and propaganda agents, is introducing a deep gap in their deceiving communication strategies no reporting their false news. Only in that way, fake-fact promoters will understand the huge strong meaning of silence in journalism. A blocked liar source has, definitely, a big impact on honest journalism.

Furtive Press as the Last Defense of News Freedom

Venezuelan case

Furtive Press as the Last Defense of News Freedom

Enrique Castejon-Lara

Abstract

The increasingly worldwide press restrictions by intolerant regimes —including those called “democratic”— are forcing journalist to use social media as new report trenches, but using prudently semantic writing strategies to evade political and illegal reprisals. That is the specific case of reporters in Venezuela.

When a government rules out constitution and laws, and does not respect citizen rights, journalistic mass media have the moral obligation of acting against it. That is the main principle stablished by Press Social Responsibility Theory (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, 1984). But, many times, as in the case of Venezuela, journalists do not have the possibility to accomplish efficiently that ethic command, because their lives are on risk and the media’s owners have been menaced by the regime. Usually, the unconstitutional governments, like that one in Venezuela, not only manipulate law and justice institutions, but also control printing paper, ink supplies, and broadcast frequencies. So, the “combat sceneries” for contemporary newsmen are really “asymmetric”, and deeply difficult.

That is the reason why Venezuelan reporters are increasingly using social media as alternative means for reporting true facts. At this moment, in that country, those online resources are their trenches against censorship and political reprisals. However, they even so are exposed to government officers’ aggression. In the last three years, many domestic journalists have been jailed without previous arrest warrant, and, in some occasions, their passports have been “confiscated” when traveling out the country. Similar things have been happened to some international reporters, especially those working for news agencies like Reuter, AFP, and EFE, and television networks like CNN and NTN24. Some of them have suffered Venezuelan government aggressions and censorship.

In that sense, social media are not effective enough for Venezuelan reporters, and, of course, for Venezuelan people. The arbitrary acts of the government are invaded those “freedom spaces” where citizens hope find the truth of what is really happening in their country. A regimen “mercenary army” of false users (bots) of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social media are virtually flooding them with fake news and psychological messages to undermine people hope to demoralize them. However, not all is good for the regime. Fortunately for freedom, opposition and so active people on line are helping journalists to spread the truth. In that case, the government strategies are not obtaining the results they want. Maybe, the Venezuelan regimen never expected a persistent and huge amount of spontaneous citizen reporters acting together to unveil their traps and propaganda.

That is today situation of press in Venezuela. Newsmen are trying to disclose true information from social media trenches, but using alternative writing methods including semantic strategies to evade regimen reprisals. They, now, are practicing a new way to report, a kind of “guerrilla” journalism that can be named “furtive press”.

Sources:

CASTEJON LARA, Enrique. Interpretative reporting. CreativeSpace (Amazon), 2015.

SIEBERT, Fred S.; PETERSON, Theodore, and SCHRAMM, Wilbur. Concepts of what the press should be and do. University of Illinois Press, 1984.