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Commentary: Let’s fight fake news with good, effective journalism

If fake news is the Lord Voldemort of everything going online, then Indonesia is still grappling to find that bespectacled little boy with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead to save the world

Ika Krismantari (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, March 25, 2017

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Commentary: Let’s fight fake news with good, effective journalism

I

f fake news is the Lord Voldemort of everything going online, then Indonesia is still grappling to find that bespectacled little boy with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead to save the world.

Listed among the world’s top-10 social media markets, the nation of 250 million people is trying everything it can to stop the spread of fake news. The government’s latest move is by trying to resurrect the era of media control by introducing centralized policies, including website blocking, media verification and a bar code system.

Naturally none of those work because the internet’s power out there is just too great. Any attempt to block websites will end up in failure because new sites will keep appearing, no matter what.

Not only is it ineffective, the government’s decision to control cyber media may also backfire as it will put us two steps back from becoming a democratic country.

So, how can we fight the great power of fake news without dragging us back to the dark era?

American media pundit Ken Paulson states the most effective weapon against fake news is journalism — you fight the fake news with the real stuff.

His theory is based on his experience of watching the continuous fights between fake news and real journalism since the 1970s. In the end, good journalism involving all the process of fact-checking and verification always wins the battle.

Using good journalism to fight fake news is not only effective, the practice can also bring economic benefits for media organizations. This strategy involves seeing fake news not as a threat to journalism but instead an opportunity that can be monetized.

Many news organizations in the US have been practicing this strategy with their fact-checking systems, by which they run thorough verifications of claims and “alternative facts”, then determine where they are true or not.

With this fact-checking feature, these media outlets are not only engaging in good journalism but they are also capitalizing on fake news for their own benefits.

There is no reason why they should not do so. The media’s fact-checking features are quite popular because they answer the public’s need to find the truth amid massive flows of information in the digital world.

Figures from the American Press Institute have shown consistently how web traffic related to fact-checking content has increased significantly compared with regular news.

Fact-checking content on the US National Public Radio once got 7.4 million views from more than 6 million users, along with 16,400 content shares. Traffic to The Washington Post’s fact-checking updates during the recent presidential debates were more than double previous debates in the US election cycle. America’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website PolitiFact had more page views with its fact-checking content during the debates, passing 2 million page views and adding 18,500 followers in less than 24 hours.

The recipe behind this success is based on the notion that if fake news can attract so many viewers then good journalism responding to it may get twice more.

These amazing figures have become the basis of the significant growth of fact-checking journalism in the US.

Another study from the American Press Institute shows that fact-checking stories in the US news increased by more than 300 percent from 2008 to 2012.

Therefore, Jane Elizabeth of the Institute is on point when she says that fact-checking is the new black in today’s media. The popularity of this content has turned some journalists into fact-checking rock stars and among them is The Washington Post’s fact-checker columnist Glenn Kesser, who despite his controversies remains a popular figure in US politics.

Indonesia is not too bad itself. Some news media outlets have tried to apply this fact-checking strategy to boost their page clicks. Among them are detik.com with its “Hoax or Not” articles and Kompas TV with its “News or Hoax” section. There have been no figures to validate the popularity of these pages. However, by comparison, one fact-checking story on kompas.com received more than 150 comments from readers, while the media outlet’s most popular news piece only got 18 comments. This comparison shows the huge potential of fact-checking content to improve audience engagement.

Learning from the success of the fact-checking system in the US, it seems that not all news is worthy of being fact-checked. PolitiFact’s top-10 most-viewed fact checks last year showed that the most popular clicks were for items related to political figures and issues related to public interest, including state budgets and policy making. So, there is no celebrity gossip or personal scandals. This revelation actually reminds us again about the role of journalism, which only works for the public interest as the fourth pillar of democracy.

So, we don’t need sophisticated technology or massive government control to fight fake news, just plain good journalism. Not only is it effective, good journalism practices also bring economic benefits for media organizations.

In the end, the theory, the statistics and the US success story have reiterated that the weapon to fight fake news is actually right under our nose. That Harry Potter we have been searching for in the fight against the great power of fake news has been hiding in a room under the stairs. So it is really up to us to let him out and trust him.

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