Summary

This paper discusses the possibilities of digital literacy within the news. It focuses on the current media context, in which a scenario of hyperinformation and infoxication predominates. We argue that audiences still lack abilities to distinct legitimate journalistic content from different forms of disinformation. Inspired by Tom Rosenstiel's concept of news fluency, we point out that journalistic transparency can be an efficient media education tool. Embedded in the structure of journalistic productions, transparency strategies – such as description of sourcing, ethical decisions made as part of the reporting, explaining fact-checking and how information was collected, how the news was constructed, the questions answered within the news and those that are yet to be answered – can bring journalistic work closer to its audience. We sustain that enhancing a culture of transparency, making the profession's technical and ethical procedures explicit to readers, can help rebuild the credibility of the professional media.

Keywords

media education; transparency; misinformation; infoxication; credibility.

1. Introduction

The new coronavirus pandemic accentuated a paradoxical scenario regarding the consumption of journalism. Several surveys indicate that people turned to professional journalism to obtain information about the disease, giving it greater trust than content published on social media. According to Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2020 global report, media trust in the covid-19 coverage was double the rate of social media, video or messaging platforms in the 40 countries surveyed (NEWMAN; FLETCHER; SCHULZ ; ANDI et al., 2020). However, as the health emergency dragged on, the survey registered phenomena such as news avoiding and hostilities - a significant part of society (32%) believes that news coverage has aggravated the coronavirus crisis.

Media habits changed during the isolation period. If, on the one hand, more people have returned to TV journalism and trustworthy websites, many others have, for the first time, joined the online environment, participated in live streaming activities or joined public groups in messaging apps such as WhatsApp – on many occasions, without proper digital skills.

DNR 2020 indicated that fewer than four out of ten people (38%) said they trust most news most of the time – four percentage points less than in 2019. In Brazil, the rates are better (51%), but trust in the media has also declined over time. The country is one of the leaders in terms of people saying they are concerned about misinformation (84%, against 56% of the global average), but it also leads among those who prefer news that confirms their points of view (43%, against 31% of the market average). The country experiences the effects of political polarization in the public sphere (ORTELLADO; RIBEIRO, 2018), with political actors deliberately working to discredit the media and expert systems such as science and university, offering alternative forms of information and supposedly direct communication with the leader – the phenomenon of disintermediation (CESARINO, 2020). Oliveira (2014) indicates the loss of journalism's monopoly on the reporting of reality. Scarce journalistic credibility and low social trust in news appear, therefore, as relevant contemporary social problems.

2- Hyperinformation, misinformation and infoxication

Internet Live Stats Monitor displays superlative numbers about the web and its applications. On October 12, 2020, the service had 4.7 billion Internet users worldwide. The total number of sites reaches 1.8 billion, active Facebook users add up to 2.6 billion, daily Google searches were 6.4 billion, the same number of videos watched on Youtube in the last 24 hours. We live in the era of hyperinformation, in which the amount of circulating content far exceeds the human capacity to process it (ROMERO-RODRIGUEZ; DE-CASAS; PEDREIRA, 2018).

The infinity of information, in turn, does not have a homogeneous quality. Legitimate and trustworthy content mixes with various types of questionable content – fake news, fraud, false controversies, biased or hyper-partisan content, humor (understood as news), opinion (understood as information), decontextualized information, journalistic error, rumors, rumors, conspiracy theories, publicity or political propaganda disguised as news – which are sheltered, as Wardle (2017) suggests, under the umbrella of misinformation. As we have shown elsewhere (PRAZERES; RATIER, 2020), we believe it is necessary to consider the dimension of reception in the co-construction of misinformation, including in the concept audiences’ misunderstandings. Such is the case of the definition proposed by Pinheiro and Brito (2014, online): misinformation is information of low cultural value or usefulness, which “would not supply the individual with the necessary knowledge to participate in the political process and make the decisions necessary for the progress of his own life and that of his fellows.”

Neologisms arise to name an information ecosystem in which reliable content and misinformation circulate side by side, often hard to distinguish. In 2016, Aviv Ovadya, head of technology at the Responsibility Center for Social Media, anticipated the crisis of false news with the term infocalipse, a reference to an upcoming “information apocalypse” in which the real and the fake would be indistinguishable (RIBEIRO, 2018). Created by Alfons Cornella in the 1990s, the term infoxication (junction of intoxication and information) suggests the difficulty of digesting the excess of information in the digital environment and also of distinguishing fundamental characteristics of what will be absorbed: quality, veracity and relevance (KWIECINSKI; DE CASTRO BERTAGNOLLI; VILLARROEL, 2020). Infodemic (junction of information and epidemic) was the word used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to designate the difficulty of finding reliable guidance on covid-19 in a context of overabundance of information (ALEIXANDRE-BENAVENT;CASTELLO-COGOLLOS; VALDERRAMA- ZURIÁN, 2020).

3- Journalistic transparency
Initiatives that allow audiences to know how news is built are still timid. Christofoletti, Villegas and Vegas (2019) point out that professional journalism has been resistant to accountability, but that it cannot avoid discussing it due to the public interest and its potential for strengthening democracy. The authors argue:

Some of the most emerging challenges for journalistic ethics are related to the ability of professionals and the media to adopt good accountability and transparency in their methods and procedures. In addition to creating instruments that facilitate a closer relationship between information producers and their audiences, it is also necessary to challenge local professional cultures (CHRISTOFOLETTI; VILLEGAS; VEGAS, 2019, p. 89).

The authors rank transparency as one of the three dimensions of accountability. Along with self-regulation and participation, transparency would combat the culture of secrecy. However, Christofoletti and Becker (2020) also warn about the idealization of the concept, which in Latin America would have turned into a magic solution, a universal panacea because the history of the subcontinent is marked by corruption, corporate opacity, economic inequality, political instability, military tutelage and scarce citizen participation (CHRISTOFOLETTI; BECKER, 2020, p. 3).

4- Media education and journalistic transparency: some experiences

The changing journalistic context has taken advantage of the digital ecosystem to expand the possibilities of accountability for its activities. Regarding transparency, Christofoletti, Villegas and Vegas (2019 list the possibilities opened up by online communication for accountability as a whole. Internally to companies: newsroom blogs, journalist blogs hosted on media outlets, online ombudsmen, chats and digital meetings with readers, user contributions in content creation, error notification buttons, social networks and comments. Outside media groups: observatories and electronic publications of media criticism, websites of professional institutions and associations, private initiatives such as blogs by journalists or communicators, blogs by citizens or academics, social networks and other instruments led by citizens.

Some recent editorial transparency initiatives have moved more consistently towards media education. With global reach, the Trust Project has developed eight trust indicators presented on hundreds of news sites: policies to ensure honesty, accuracy and fairness, commitments to correct mistakes, details about ownership, bio information about journalistic team etc.

In a similar path, Trusting News project advocates active work by media organizations so that audiences understand the mission, ethics and processes behind journalistic work. The program offers online courses for newsrooms and investigates opportunities to demonstrate credibility by explaining news processes, coverage objectives and journalism ethics. There are also media vehicles developing their own initiatives, such as the Washington Post. The publication's current editorial director, Martin Baron, has encouraged what he calls media literacy in the news, especially regarding the identification of journalistic genres. Information, opinion and analysis are clearly indicated and defined in a hyperlink in the online version of the newspaper (LAKSHMANAN, 2017).

5- Tom Rosenstiel's news fluency proposal

Co-author of the classic Elements of Journalism (KOVACH; ROSENSTIEL, 2004) Tom Rosenstiel says that the new informational scenario, in which misinformation and hyperinformation predominate, is structural rather than episodic. According to him, transparency has always been the best way to tell the truth (KOVACH; ROSENSTIEL, 2004). In recent works (ROSENSTIEL, 2016; ROSENSTIEL; ELIZABETH, 2018), Rosenstiel has developed the concept of news fluency. The idea of fluency is derived from language learning: it is possible to be fluent in the “language of news” as well (“literacy”, in the authors point of view, is a term excessively identified with schooling).

The authors' claim that news should be constructed in a way that clearly indicates to the audience the difference between good journalism, bad journalism and forgery. The strategic would be to think about what doubts the public might have about the investigation, the content, the technical and ethical procedures in every report. Then provide those answers explicitly, for example, in a billboard within the news. Some examples that can be addressed:

Imagine, however, if more journalists were to raise and answer these questions in an element placed at the top of the narrative — in boxes, billboards, rollovers, annotations, popup windows or other treatments. Questions such as “What’s our evidence?” or “What is new here?” or “What is unknown?” would be answered quickly and would make key details of reporting easier to see. We believe they would also pull more audiences into the story text itself. Just as important, consumers will become familiar with and begin to ask these questions themselves naturally or “organically” as they encounter news (ROSENSTIEL; ELIZABETH, 2018, online).

The authors conclude the defense of the “organic fluency” model in news by listing three advantages: 1- its educational character, since the public would refine its media skills by consuming news; 2- raising the quality of journalism, as productions would be more transparent to public scrutiny and would need to improve their quality controls; 3- rebuilding the credibility of media organizations, as transparency builds trust. In times of skepticism, the authors argue, the old models are no longer enough.

6- Conclusions

An important content in the media literacy process is explaining how news is made. Understanding that, in professional journalism, the construction of news involves strict technical and ethical procedures can be an important way to differentiate quality journalism from other types of content – hyper-partisan, biased or simply false – in the media ecosystem.

Such proposals are already relatively common in media education initiatives. Its application within the news itself, however, remains timid. By seeking frank and open dialogue, journalists would be sharing technical and ethical procedures with the public. By voluntarily putting their work under close scrutiny, they could raise their own quality standards and bring their work closer to audiences, who would have a clearer idea that professional journalism, unlike other forms of content less committed to objectivity, it is fair and honest work and deserves social credibility.