Who will preserve our journalistic integrity?

KAMLOOPS — I get an e-flyer regularly called Trends Journal. This small piece was one of several items offered in the first publication of the new year. It speaks volumes. It is reprinted by permission.

RIP: The Fourth Estate: The daily newspaper is on its death bed. Will the mainstream media at large live or die? No longer the people’s protectorate, tanking public trust and shrinking financial resources have limited traditional media’s influence on the public. The Fourth Estate — the unofficial fourth branch of government designed to hold powerful people and institutions accountable — is no longer the domain of the mainstream media. What will replace it?

In Kamloops, we have seen our daily newspaper close. A tri-weekly continues to publish — how it is doing financially, I have no idea. Traditional media is working to find the best way to deliver, and web-based services are also trying to carve a niche in the delivery system.

The one thing we know is that change is inevitable. It could well be sooner than later that we find new ways to deliver information on a multi-platform basis, totally changing the way news is delivered and consumed. More and more people are looking for news on demand. Major networks in Canada and the U.S. are putting more and more resources into specialty channels that cater more to news on demand. Much of the news content delivered on the CFJC-TV Evening News is also being delivered online on CFJC Today, and that trend will definitely continue. Radio listeners are looking for less length and more bits of quick information. Times are changing. And the Fourth Estate has to find new ways to stay relative.

The issue as I see it is that this change of consumption is relying more and more on social media to deliver the goods, and therein lies the rub. Journalists in the traditional sense have been the guardians of the public trust, but on social media, more and more people deal in journalism that is, at the very least, untrustworthy, and at worst, inaccurate, libelous and destructive. Stories are written by people with no training, no integrity, no honesty. These people pass themselves off as journalists, but in fact, they are simple hacks passing on inaccuracies they may have heard in a coffee shop or bar. As we found out in the last U.S. election, there were so many inaccuracies and boldface lies passed off as legitimate fact that social media became a scourge rather than a benefit.

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If traditional media collapse, there will be few sources we can trust for legitimate information. That will be a catastrophic blow to our society, more so than we might ever imagine.