Factual reporting in the age of fake news

Anyone who is in the habit of passing the time with a little doom scrolling on Facebook may have come across a little write-up about Robert Irwin.

Yes, that Robert Irwin — the son of Steve Irwin, the Australian wildlife expert who died in 2006 from a stingray injury to the heart while filming in the Great Barrier Reef.

His son, Robert, who has in many ways followed in his father’s footsteps as an Australian conservationist, zookeeper and wildlife photographer, has also been drawn to reality television. Just recently, Robert became a celebrity contestant on “Dancing with the Stars,” and entertainment news organizations like People.com and E! Online have been following his every dance move.

Why are we talking about the Irwins? Simple. A page called “Irwin Generations” on Facebook posted a story on Oct. 16 with the tagline, “Robert Irwin Sues Pete Hegseth and Network for $60 million After Shocking On-Air Clash. No One Saw It Coming.”

The “story” recounts an interview between Irwin and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that quickly devolved into a hostile conversation, with Hegseth publicly ridiculing Robert’s environmental stance and accusing him of being a “scripted eco-celebrity living off his father’s name.”

According to “Irwin Generations,” Robert defended his late father’s legacy and then proceeded later to file a $60-million lawsuit against Hegseth and the television network that aired the interview.

Except, this is all a lie. No one “saw it coming” because no one saw this interview take place. There never was an interview between the two, and Robert Irwin has not filed any multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

But it’s presented as “news” on a social media platform that has no ethical consideration for the truth. A quick search for the story online proves it doesn’t exist on any actual news-media platform.

And this is hardly the only example. A scroll on Facebook at any time these days is bound to come across fake news and artificially generated content — material that is becoming more and more difficult to discern from the real thing.

Never mind that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has banned Canadian news media from publishing on its platform because it doesn’t want to pay news organizations for using their material. All that does is make it even more difficult to find facts about your home community that have been investigated by local news reporters.

But it’s hardly just Facebook that is the problem. Other social media are flooding their platforms with opinionated hot takes that take the place of vetted and properly edited news articles. Sites like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads are sucking all the oxygen out of the public discourse.

While social media feeds have been littered with this kind of bile for years, the sheer amount of it is surging with the rise of AI and the continued use of bots to push public opinion into an ever-darkening spiral. And that is dangerous for a democratic country like Canada.

In a recent conversation I was party to, a few people around the table were bemoaning the state of news today and how nothing they see or read can be trusted anymore. For evidence, they pointed to the fact that so much of TikTok is AI-generated, and untrustworthy nonsense, along with so many other social media sites.

They’re not really wrong on that point, but I suggested that they take a look again at news websites that have a policy of correcting the record when published information turns out to be incorrect.

Here in Manitoba, there are still several organizations that are dedicated to factual reporting, including those owned by FP Newspapers — The Brandon Sun included — as well as The Canadian Press/Associated Press, Reuters, the CBC and so many small-town papers that dot the landscape in an increasingly difficult industry.

For example, the Sun is a proud member of the National Newsmedia Council, an independent organization that was established to determine acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. Whenever a reader or a community member has a problem with concerns about editorial content, you can reach me on my email or here in The Brandon Sun office. And if you’re still not satisfied, you can contact the National Newsmedia Council.

When we make a mistake — and it does happen from time to time, no matter how much we try to avoid them — we do two things: we make a note of the correction or a clarification on Page A2 of the newspaper as needed, and we make a change to the story that appears on our website, with a little history note at the bottom of the article stating what changes were made and why.

This is what being accountable to the public looks like.

You may not always like the news you read, but ethical news demands that we are accountable to our readers and that we’re honour-bound to print factual information — whether that be about city hall, health coverage, provincial taxes, local sports and everything in between.

While that means our stories aren’t always clickbait-worthy, like the Robert Irwin farce, at least you can count on them to be factual.

» Matt Goerzen, editor