More than a journalistic exercise. Today is a systemic need to get away from an increasingly widespread practice of hide the truth
by Emanuele Bonini
Truth, truth, nothing but truth. Apparently the real world is lost in fakes. There is no other explanation for the new season of fact-checking exploded all across Europe and beyond. Newspapers, newswires and websites are more and more focused on searching for truth. In normal times and normal conditions, normality foreseen that journalists verify what they have to write before publishing it. Checking before publish is an obligation linked to the fair activity of every single reporter, but here something is wrong. But we don't live in normal times. Distortion and misinformation are the new practice. There's nothing wrong in journalist, apart from being part of this corrupted system.
In the internet era getting a clear image of what world is about is today more and more complex and complicated. Thousends of thousends of websites flourish in number and actvity, promoting and stimulating debates on everything. Most of the times negating the truth, and here we come to the true big issue: in web we trust. If the internet becomes the community of virtual information, the real world becomes virtual, too. Internet is the place where people get informed. But internet is an unsafe space. Fake news are our every day meal, and media are obliged to follow the rules of a game radically changed. People are finding in the so-called «alternative» source of information their main landmark. Real information producers have lost in confidence and credibility, and have been forced to work in order to regain a missing trust by verifying the supposed reliability of the «alternative truths».
Media finally started a counter-campaign of professional journalism to protect themselves from the internet. Traditional newspapers have been put in question by unidentified bloggers, suddendly become the only credible source. On the other hand, journalists have been called to show how often politicians tell the false. The most striking example here is the full list of all Donald Trump's lies. Nobody could believe that the president of one of most important country in the world - perhaps the most important - be such a liar, but that's it. A huge work has been done in order to verify the value of every single declaration, and the outcome makes readers speechless: we live in times where leaders base their power on the imaginary world they create. Fake news are reported by media because one of their daily activity is also about reporting declarations. In practice, the press world has the duty of typing institutional speeches. The big issue is that if official statements are untrue, they turn real even if they are, in real, lies of State.
In some cases newspaper are owned or controlled by the same lying decision makers, becoming the legal instrument for pushing the poisoned truth. In some other cases, immediately after having reported the statements pressmen start unveil fabrications. This happens not only in America, but worldwide. Another example in this sense is the fact-cheking conducted over Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome. These are just two examples, but the fact-cheking phenomenon is spreading. That means a war has started, and democracy is fully involved, of course. No surprise. When liars attack the liebusters with the aim of discredit them, it's because they want to destroy a constituted order, in our case democracy. As long as systemic fact-checking will be needed, our society will be endangered. So what basically is a fact-checking? The index of the failure of our times.
Truth, truth, nothing but truth. Apparently the real world is lost in fakes. There is no other explanation for the new season of fact-checking exploded all across Europe and beyond. Newspapers, newswires and websites are more and more focused on searching for truth. In normal times and normal conditions, normality foreseen that journalists verify what they have to write before publishing it. Checking before publish is an obligation linked to the fair activity of every single reporter, but here something is wrong. But we don't live in normal times. Distortion and misinformation are the new practice. There's nothing wrong in journalist, apart from being part of this corrupted system.
In the internet era getting a clear image of what world is about is today more and more complex and complicated. Thousends of thousends of websites flourish in number and actvity, promoting and stimulating debates on everything. Most of the times negating the truth, and here we come to the true big issue: in web we trust. If the internet becomes the community of virtual information, the real world becomes virtual, too. Internet is the place where people get informed. But internet is an unsafe space. Fake news are our every day meal, and media are obliged to follow the rules of a game radically changed. People are finding in the so-called «alternative» source of information their main landmark. Real information producers have lost in confidence and credibility, and have been forced to work in order to regain a missing trust by verifying the supposed reliability of the «alternative truths».
Media finally started a counter-campaign of professional journalism to protect themselves from the internet. Traditional newspapers have been put in question by unidentified bloggers, suddendly become the only credible source. On the other hand, journalists have been called to show how often politicians tell the false. The most striking example here is the full list of all Donald Trump's lies. Nobody could believe that the president of one of most important country in the world - perhaps the most important - be such a liar, but that's it. A huge work has been done in order to verify the value of every single declaration, and the outcome makes readers speechless: we live in times where leaders base their power on the imaginary world they create. Fake news are reported by media because one of their daily activity is also about reporting declarations. In practice, the press world has the duty of typing institutional speeches. The big issue is that if official statements are untrue, they turn real even if they are, in real, lies of State.
In some cases newspaper are owned or controlled by the same lying decision makers, becoming the legal instrument for pushing the poisoned truth. In some other cases, immediately after having reported the statements pressmen start unveil fabrications. This happens not only in America, but worldwide. Another example in this sense is the fact-cheking conducted over Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome. These are just two examples, but the fact-cheking phenomenon is spreading. That means a war has started, and democracy is fully involved, of course. No surprise. When liars attack the liebusters with the aim of discredit them, it's because they want to destroy a constituted order, in our case democracy. As long as systemic fact-checking will be needed, our society will be endangered. So what basically is a fact-checking? The index of the failure of our times.
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