Mark Zuckberger, CEO of Meta and founder of Facebook, was no doubt sucking up to incoming President Trump when announcing the end of most fact-checking of his organisation’s social media content.
Mark Zuckberger, CEO of Meta and founder of Facebook, was no doubt sucking up to incoming President Trump when announcing the end of most fact-checking of his organisation’s social media content. In future it will be moderated by everyday users through so-called Community Notes, a system popularised on Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter).
The decision has generated plenty of hand-wringing in certain quarters because it is regarded as opening the floodgates to more misinformation. That really is a moot point given how many different uncensored social media platforms, messaging apps, podcasts, influencers, etc are out there. You could argue that Zuckerburg is upholding the principle of free speech in a democracy, however disconcerting not to mention threatening this may be.
What we are really witnessing is the breakdown of the traditional way information is mediated for community consumption. The implications reach into every corner of society, including the siloed worlds of energy and geoscience. It boils down to a question of trust. We may feel comfortable that sufficient knowledge about the activities involving the EAGE is accessible and an accurate reflection of what is going on. However, as we all know, the public perception of the oil and gas industry is increasingly unfavourable as concerns over climate change escalate. Uninformed social media chatter, lies, conspiracy theories, etc simply add fuel to the fire, so to speak. This makes it particularly challenging for professional societies like EAGE to promote understanding of its mission to promote a society founded on sustainable energy deploying the best of science and technology.
Although not often acknowledged enough, everyone has to base their opinions, world view, etc on partial information, even scientific knowledge only represents the best evidence available and is always open to further research.
It is public discourse around our consumption of everyday news which is especially problematic. We assume, or in some way suspend disbelief, that news is factual. But that of course begs the question of what constitutes a fact. What is History by E.H Carr (1961) provides the classic takedown of relying on historical facts as the whole truth. Rather they are the arbitrary selection by historians influenced by the period they lived in.
So it is with news. There are countless academic studies describing how news is a social construction. For just how obvious this is, go no further than the observation by comedian/actor Jerry Seinfeld: ‘It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.’ It gets more sinister. One of the first press magnates William Randolph Hearst (model for Orson Welles in the classic movie Citizen Kane) said ‘News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising’. But most damning is the shadow cast over any thought of ethical reporting by Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corporation and Fox News. ‘Journalism’, he has said with stunning hypocrisy, ‘is a public trust, a responsibility to report the truth with accuracy and fairness. Journalism is also a business, and like any business, it has to attract customers.’
The business imperative is not the only factor distorting news coverage in traditional media (TV, radio and print) although there is no getting away from it being a ‘manufactured’ product. If you start with what makes news, you soon get the idea of the limitations. A popular summary adapted from Shoemaker et al., 1987 recognises these mainly self-explanatory factors in choice of news, e.g., timeliness, proximity (closer means more relevance), importance, impact, or consequence, human interest, negativity (conflict/controversy sells better), prominence (focus on public figures), and novelty, oddity or the unusual.
The type of media matters. For example, TV news is incredibly limited in the number of items it can cover in a news cast compared with radio and especially print. An overriding criteria is having film. With the exception of live events, such as Californian wildfires, almost all TV coverage is old news, post happening. There is also a bias towards how accessible any potential item is for camera teams, usually based around big cities. How many times do you hear TV anchors introduce some hapless correspondent reporting ‘live’on location’, hours after the actual event simply to show some film. In passing, this is why local TV media love having animal/pet stories, entertaining and easily planned for a photo shoot/interview.
The decision-making process is of course another whole issue in which journalists are only one consideration. Not just news but all editorial content in conventional media is constrained. Articles have to meet the varying interests of the owner/stakeholders, advertisers, and editors, thereby immediately introducing bias into the coverage which journalists have to go along with often requiring an element of self-censorship.
As a product, media coverage is also subject to business principles. Traditional newspapers are in serious if not terminal decline through lack of advertising and falling circulations, and the support for television programming is ebbing in favour of streaming. This affects the depth of news reporting more than many probably realise, and draws attention to one of the major vunerabilities of all news presentation that is rarely addressed, namely the source of news.
You can definitely forget the deep-throat style reporting of the Watergate scandal by Woodward and Bernstein. Media investigations these days are extremely rare: they are costly in resources and staff time, also vulnerable to litigation once published making such exercises an unwarranted risk. A much cheaper option is just to wait and see what comes in, and then have journalists follow up. And this is where reader beware should kick in: just ask yourself how news organisations can start the day with a news agenda already, i.e., anticipating what’s going to happen and planning how it can be reported, no crystal ball needed.
The answer is that much of the material generated to fill news quotients, be it TV, radio or print, comes in without any inquiry needed. If you take news routinely reported such as activity in government, business/financial, entertainment and indeed science/technology worlds, you can be confident that the first approach to the media was via an annoucement, press release, briefing, direct contact with a journalist, etc. The common denominator is that the source has provided the information and arguably has control of the ‘facts’. Of course the obvious exception should be reporting on an ongoing big event such as a war. But in fact we only get the filtered information that the warring participants allow. In any sensitive incident such as industrial accidents, oil spills, etc, an immediate response for companies involved is to set a PR crisis-handling operation. Furthermore, when reporting journalists tend to provide the view from the top, as more authoritative, i.e., confirmation from a CEO is valued over any old employee, unless it is a rare whistleblower!
This is a topic where Crosstalk can input some personal academic research to verify how sources can influence the media in a manner that has certainly not changed.. A key finding from a study published in the Scottish Journal of Sociology (Nov 1978) entitled ‘The North Sea Oil Story: Government, the oil industry and the press’ by Andrew McBarnet (based on research funded by the UK Social Science Research Council) was that in 1976 at the height of the excitement over North Sea oil, ‘only 14 items received anything like comprehensive coverage in the UK quality and popular national papers … The most striking point about these news columns is that they are all stories which depend on oil industry or government sources making announcements to the press. The press has investigated nothing. In a whole year less than 30 stories were even covered by the four quality papers and of those reports it is difficult to find one which was not prompted by a formal announcement, press conference or some other pre-arranged highly formal, controlled event with the source of newsmaking literally in command of the facts.’
For any organisation such as the EAGE with a credible story to tell, for example, about the value of geoscience in the energy transition era, this media landscape has become even more daunting. It is not a story easy to package to meet conventional media’s news criteria as described here. Plying specialist publications and oil industry news aggregators with information still presents an option. But this is not the audience that the Association would ideally like to tap if it is to accomplish the task of attracting new generations into the geosciences.
Ironically the rise of social media may provide an unexpected opportunity. Pew Research Centre reporting in 2023 showed that in the period 14 April to 4 May 2023, 95% of teens reported using YouTube, 67% TikTok, 62% Instagram 58% Snapchat and only 32% Facebook. The figures in themselves may well have changed and reflect only the US population, but it is known that 59% of EU individuals use social networks, and that in India and China the vast majority of the population engages in some way with social media.
Given this trend, the potential audience of a younger generation may be there for EAGE and others to reach. There are no serious protocols to follow, and no entrenched gatekeepers. Optimising use of social media to get a message across obviously needs research and resources to maintain, and outreach has not in the past been a priority for EAGE or other professional societies. One can imagine the major challenges will be how to stand out from the bewildering number of social media offerings on so many platforms. The biggest followings for podcasts, for example, depend on charismatic individuals. For EAGE to seriously compete outside the cocoon of the geoscience network may require the emergence of an as yet unidentified Mr Geoscience figure!
Breakdown of the traditional way information is mediated
Rise of social media may provide an unexpected opportunity
