Question of Trust

Loss-making news organisations are being run on vanity and ego.

- Anant Goenka

Editors of newspapers around the world would sit in the evening with a list of news items filed by their reporters from across the country and decide which stories readers ‘should’ read. The underlying idea behind any editor’s selection of stories is balance.

For instance, in the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election,an editor’s attempt would be to provide you with arguments for and against both Trump and Clinton—this would ensure balance in reportage, and a reader would be better equipped to vote. Today, that scenario has changed.

Now, as we read our content on two algorithmically controlled platforms, Facebook and Google, editors no longer can give you that balance; in fact the opposite happens. So if you read a pro-Trump piece, an editor’s instinct would be to suggest you read a pro-Clinton story next. But an algorithm would suggest one pro-Trump story after the other. It increases your time spent on their platform based on their understanding of your worldview and feeding content that agrees most with you.

In my view, this is why many countries around the world are getting frighteningly polarised. We are not putting ourselves in the shoes of those we disagree with. We have lost that ability to listen to each other which is the mandate of good journalism: to provide all the sides to a story. To make you a well-informed and therefore a more responsible citizen.

At the Indian Express, we are seeing this clearly as we straddle both media ourselves. Today, despite a growing print circulation base,