Truthiness…

When you look at the 2015 RepTrak study of corporate reputations in Ireland by the Reputations Agency (download here) which showed that Irish media outlets ranked below Penneys and Lidl in terms of reputation and trustworthiness, it’s worth remembering Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite, the CSB night-time news anchor, famously used to close his news broadcasts in the 1960s and 70s with the catchphrase “And that’s the way it is”. Often cited as America’s most trusted man, Cronkite was generally regarded as an impartial and objective news anchor of TV News’ Golden Age, broadcasting to millions with unquestioned authority.

Times have certainly changed.

In America, polls have shown that trust in the media has dropped consistently since the 1990s. A 2014 Gallup Poll recorded that only 40 percent of Americans believe that the media reports the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” The 2003 war in Iraq is often cited as a major turning point in the decline in this trust.

Gallup said of the findings – “As the media expand into new domains of news reporting via social media networks and new mobile technology, Americans may be growing disenchanted with what they consider “mainstream” news as they seek out their own personal veins of getting information.”

For Americans, you can substitute humans. We are gradually becoming curators of news, and the more personalised the better.

Globally, technology has challenged trust and the notion of bias-free truth. The age of social media, hackers, wiki everything, augmented reality and internet trolls has taken its toll on the notion of objective facts. Who to trust and what to trust news-wise appears to have become increasingly difficult for the general public.

Which leads to the concept of “truthiness”, coined by mock news reporter Stephen Colbert in 2005 and described by the Oxford Dictionary as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true”. It seems there is science to back up “truthiness”, with research from the University of California indicating that the less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. Much political discourse may be infected with truthiness.

But back to Walter and a simpler time when contemplating the role of the media he said – “Our job is only to hold up the mirror – to tell and show the public what has happened”.

At least I hope he said this, I found it on an unofficial website of quotes.