By our Swindon correspondent:
From The Guardian
ITN, the maker of news for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, says the coronavirus pandemic has revealed both the importance of “trustworthy and reliable information” and the dangers to democracy of fast-spreading misinformation.
In a submission to a House of Lords inquiry into the future of journalism, seen by the Observer, it says internet companies should face the same penalties as broadcasters and other quality news providers from regulatory bodies, such as Ofcom, if they let misinformation slip through the net.
This really doesn’t pass the smell test. If in early 2003 a news organisation had published an article saying that Iraq definitely didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence information was at best dubious and at worst being manipulated to justify war, would it have received this kite mark?
That’s a good point. Of course, if you find someone who says this and just report his words, your reporting is entirely accurate: “Sid Bonkers says the moon is made of cheese”. Entirely true. That is what Sid Bonkers said. The problem beyond that is that you get OFCOM wading in on the accuracy of a source, which gets really dangerous. They probably would have passed Wakefield’s MMR rubbish as he was a doctor writing in the Lancet, and aren’t these people the experts? I’ve yet to ever see society undermined by crank internet theories. Most people don’t buy into… Read more »
I keep waiting with anticipation for these jobs as online content vettors to be advertised – it would be an ideal work-from-home job – but again and again it’s all lies.
Isn’t anyone looking West to the capitals of social media? There is no high-minded campaign to “improve the quality” of a forum that doesn’t rapidly turn into a set of rules to exclude posters who disagree with *me*.
PS–The Coronavirus neither increased the urgency nor provided grounds to ignore established rules of conduct, given that every “vetted fact” on which governments based their reaction (remember hospitals being overwhelmed?) was somewhere between false and maliciously false.
I think it is funny that Jon Snow thinks that he is a quality journalist. After his remarks about Brexit and never seeing so many white people before in one place – there were far more at Glastonbury, he is a bit of a joke.