ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 News in crisis: Digital disruption: The digital revolution has created a series of new contradictions affecting how the news business is organised and how journalism is performed. There is also a strong relationship between trust, ethics, technology, and ideology engendered by the fake news crisis. This chapter explores these contradictions using the original framework of the ‘techno-legal’ and ‘techno-ethical’ ‘time gap’. This time gap is the delay and dissonance between technological capability and the ethical and/or legal frameworks that govern how the capability is deployed. Journalists and the news industry cannot afford to ignore these issues, but both have often struggled in their attempts to overcome them. This is a fraught area caught up in what we describe as the ‘techno-ethical time gap’ and at the cutting edge of machine learning and robotics. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is firmly entrenched in the news business; Associated Press is the leading global exponent of machine-written news and research in this area. However, there are many remaining doubts, not least of which is the problem of teaching AI to be ethical.
