Australia’s two largest legacy media organisations recently announced big cuts to their journalistic staff. Many editorial positions, perhaps up to 120, will disappear at Fairfax Media, publisher of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and News Corporation announced the sacking of most of its photographers and editorial production staff.
Both announcements were accompanied by corporate spin voicing a continuing commitment to quality journalism. Nobody in the know believes it. This is the latest local lurch in a crisis that is engulfing journalism worldwide.
Now, partly thanks to Donald Trump, many more people are turning their mind to the future of news, including “fake” news and its opposite.
How, in the future, are we to know the difference between truth, myth and lies?
One morning last May, Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist, was standing outside an Istanbul courthouse, waiting for a judge to reach a verdict on his guilt or innocence, when a man rushed toward him with a gun. A year earlier, Dündar’s newspaper, Cumhuriyet, a daily favored by Turkey’s secular left, had published video footage of truckloads of weapons being smuggled to Syrian rebels by Turkish state intelligence agents. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government had denied that it was supplying the rebels, was outraged and vowed that Dündar, then editor-in-chief, would “pay a heavy price.” Dündar was arrested and charged with aiding a terrorist organization and with espionage, among other crimes. “Traitor!” the gunman shouted as he fired two shots in Dündar’s direction. Dündar’s wife, Dilek, along with a member of parliament, grabbed the gunman, and video of the scene shows the three in an odd, lumbering half-embrace until the man is ordered to drop his gun. After the shooting, Dündar looked a bit ruffled but was uncannily composed. “I am fine. I am fine,” he told reporters. “Nobody should worry. Please be calm. There is nothing wrong. My wife jumped on him. So I want to congratulate her.” Glancing at Dilek, he smiled. “Thank you. Thank you.”
When the court reconvened, a short time later, one of the judges apologized to Dündar for the shooting and then sentenced him to five years and ten months in prison for revealing state secrets. Dündar appealed the conviction and, free, pending the outcome, left for Barcelona to work on a book. At that point, Dündar was hopeful that he could get a fair trial in Turkey and intended to return. But, last July, his plans changed. President Erdoğan declared a state of emergency in response to an attempted coup, leading to a crackdown on ostensible opponents: he eventually fired more than a hundred thousand public workers, jailed opposition politicians and journalists, and arrested judges, two of whom sat on the constitutional court. Convinced of the utter impossibility of a fair trial, Dündar took up an offer to come to Germany to write a column for the German newspaper Die Zeit. He arrived in Berlin with little more than a suitcase full of summer clothes.
“Made in Tito’s Veles” is the trademark you may find if you turn over a dainty porcelain dish in any ex-Yugoslav country. Emblazoned alongside the initials of Yugoslavia’s chief economic planner, this was a trademark that proudly belonged to the golden era of Yugoslavia’s rapid industrialisation. It was a hallmark of reputable, tangible goods, the genuine article. Now known simply as Veles, the city that was once an industrial hub in the heart of the Republic of Macedonia recently became infamous for manufacturing a very different and pernicious product for export: the "fake news" stories being peddled by some of its digitally literate teenage population.
While older residents nostalgically recount the days when they were proud to see Ivanka (Mrs Tito) wearing silk spun in their factories, their tech-savvy grandchildren achieved a sudden notoriety last autumn, having capitalised on the lucrative media storm surrounding Donald Trump. In turn, the brief flurry of media coverage on unrepentant “adolescent kingpins” assaulting Western politics with their burgeoning empires of misinformation propagated its own distorted representations of an unfamiliar city and its inhabitants. By spotlighting the experience of disenchanted teenage boys, the media cast the whole city in the unflattering light of conventional eastern European stereotypes. Veles became a quintessentially bleak, impoverished vacuum out on the “Balkan hinterlands”, begetting amoral profiteering. Such images ignore the multifaceted reality and belong to a long tradition of Westerners seeking out what historian Larry Wolff called the “half-barbarian” at the “unpolished extremity” of the continent.
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