Journalism and the Truth: More Complicated than it has Ever Been

When former New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane asked earlier this year whether reporters for the paper should be “truth vigilantes,” the response was immediate and decisive: of course they should, readers said — after all, wasn’t that what journalists were supposed to be doing in the first place? It clearly is, but as Clay Shirky and others participating in a Poynter Institute forum pointed out, that job has gotten infinitely harder as the number of information sources has increased thanks to the web and social media. Checking specific facts may have gotten easier, now that anyone can do it, but is reaching any kind of consensus about the capital T truth even possible anymore?

The forum, entitled “Journalistic Ethics in a Digital Age,” was a co-venture between the Poynter Institute and CraigConnects — a project created by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to increase public trust and accountability in journalism — and included a series of panels involving Shirky, Digital First Media CEO John Paton, Microsoft social researcher Danah Boyd and others, as well as an invitation-only audience of media industry luminaries such as author Jeff Jarvis and digital-media veteran Dan Gillmor. The event was livestreamed, and Poynter also created a live-blog of the session in Storify.