ABSTRACT
No matter what cynics may say, in the final analysis, journalism is about truth-seeking. It is about presenting facts that have been properly researched and checked and put together in an attempt to present readers or viewers with a coherent factual story about an issue or event that will be of interest. This is not to suggest that every story in every media outlet is absolutely true or even accurate. Many stories contain elements that are wrong or made up for all sorts of reasons, but it must be recognised that journalism is about presenting facts and that anything in a news outlet that is not factual is not journalism, although it may well be entertainment masquerading as journalism. Journalism and the media that carries it will only be trusted by consumers if it is consistently truthful. A media outlet that produces factual errors, or misleads and does not correct the mistake as soon as possible will gradually lose the trust of consumers. A media brand that is not trusted might still sell, because its material is seen as entertaining, but it will only ever attract a smaller audience seeking pure entertainment. There are two main reasons why the journalism presented in a media outlet or broadcast might not be truthful: pressure of time or resources can limit a journalist’s ability to get to the story and a desire to increase readership can make it very tempting to present a story that is interesting, but not actually accurate or truthful. Both of these are serious problems, not only because individual journalists are faced with these dilemmas the whole time, but also because these are institutionalised problems. News organisations are businesses and the pursuit of greater profit leads organisations to cut costs, reducing resources and making it more likely that news desks will not have sufficient resources to follow up stories appropriately as they have fewer journalists. Inevitably, editors keen to increase circulation will then be more receptive to stories that interest readers and so will be likely to attract sales even if these stories are not entirely truthful. Of course, in order to minimise potential embarrassment, many of these stories are not about serious issues or events that could be quickly sourced and denied but are interesting stories about people in places that are not easy to trace, or concern events that are difficult to deny, of which the ‘World War Two bomber on the moon’ story in an early edition of the Sunday Sport is an extreme example. The truth is a difficult concept to pin down but nearly all commentators agree that the search for it is one of the main purposes of journalism. The popular TV show The X Files claimed ‘the truth is out there’ which implied that it existed, but that it was not something that any one person possessed. Truth by its nature is fragmented and it is unlikely that any one us will ever see the whole Truth. Those who believe in God consider him to be a major part of the truth, but atheists are not in a position to accuse believers of lying, merely that they are wrong or mistaken. Atheists do not believe, but have no evidence to support their viewpoint, any more than those who believe are able to show concrete evidence in favour of a deity, although there is plenty of evidence to show that religion exists; we only have to look at the disturbingly high number of people who have died defending their religion or because of religion to confirm that. It is probably the moral nature of truth that should concern us here rather than truth in the metaphysical sense. We can all understand the meaning of truth when it comes to telling the truth rather than lying and it is this level of truth that most people want from journalists.
