Most people know about the six essential questions journalists should ask – and answer – Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?
They help us understand events and issues and allow us to present the answers to our readers, viewers and listeners in a logical, comprehensive way that makes sense of the world.
But there’s another, slightly longer question that journalists – and everyone with an enquiring mind – should also always ask.
“Says who?”
It’s called attribution – the stating of who said something.
It has been the bedrock of journalism for hundreds of years but has never been more important than today, in the age of fake news and everywhere media.
(Everywhere media is a term for the information soup in which we all swim in the digital, interconnected world of the 21st Century.)
As we explain in The News Manual chapter on ‘Fake news and trust chains’, the soup is made up of almost everything anyone says on almost any issue one can imagine … and some beyond our imagination. Much of the information is true but an awful lot of it is false, either deliberately or by accident or carelessness.
The truth can be powerful, but fake and false news can be poisonous. Truth is interlocked, interconnected and gives structure to the universe. Fake and false news is mainly random, fragmented and based on personal self-interest that tears apart the bonds that hold things together, from the universe to our individual lives.
So, it is important we can tell the difference between the truth and falsehoods.
We do this by either discovering the truth for ourselves – as scientists might by research and experimentation – or by sharing truths, swapping them like currency with people we can rely on.
Thus, the critical importance of the question “Says who?”
Of course, journalists are not the only people who should be questioning the reliability of information. Everyone in a society should be doing it, to test the reliability of what we are told.
We take short cuts by trusting people we know as honest – and we trust those people to only share information on which they themselves can depend.
But it does no harm to check whenever the information is critical to our safety and wellbeing or when it seems strange, novel or unlikely.
If we were driving through a mountainous pass and came upon a sign saying “Road closed due to falling rock”, we might just want to trust the sign and turn back, especially if it looked official. But if someone walking by said “Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s quite safe to go on.”, would we take the risk or would we ask “How do you know?” If the answer was “I was told”, wouldn’t we all ask the next question “By whom?”
And wouldn’t we keep asking until we were satisfied that information about the safety or otherwise of the road was verified as reliable?
We talk more about attribution – the “Says who?” – in Chapter 9 of The News Manual, from principles to detailed journalism practice
If we are lucky, we begin to learn “Says who?” from an early age. Once we are old enough to realise that the world is more complex than simply believing everything our parents say, we begin to cross-examine them, to check the things they tell us.
It should be a habit we develop and utilise for the rest of our lives. And in older, simpler times it was easier and maybe less important. There was less information swirling round in the soup, fewer requirements for us to pay attention to it and to make decisions or take sides.
In the interconnected, ever-on age of digital communications it can become overwhelming, so much so that many people fall back on listening only to those things they already think they know; they live in “information bubbles”, paying attention only to those sources they have used in the past to feed them information that fits in the world they have made around themselves, that confirms those things they think they already know. This is “confirmation bias”.
They stop asking the question “Says who?”, partly because the answer might undermine the structure they have already built around themselves and partly because, well, there’s so much information around already it’s a simpler, less tiring way of living. They have believed something in the past, so – they tell themselves – they can accept this new information because “it fits”. Problem solved. Move on.
In reality, it is tiring to constantly verify the truth or otherwise of information swirling in the soup served out by media and social media or manufactured by artificial intelligence.
But if we are to build a safe and stable personal universe that fits into the greater world around us, we must make the effort.
And if the human race is to have a future, it is something we must teach our children, so they can use it and pass it on to generations to come.
Of course, the task cannot be left to parents alone, for numerous reasons. Some parents struggle with identifying truth from falsehood themselves or have little interest in the issue. Some live in their own information bubbles they hope to bequeath their offspring, like rundown real estate. Some children learn from their parents by opposition. Some parents are just poor teachers or communicators.
So the task falls yet again to schools, though many are barely equipped to teach their basic syllabuses let alone subjects like media studies or ethics. That’s why specialist courses and programs are so important, such as the Special Education in Ethics programs for Australian primary schools that both teaches young children basic ethics and gives them skills to navigate ethical issues.
Countries like Finland and Estonia – overshadowed by the misinformation manufactory called Russia – have made media literacy education part of the primary school curriculum for almost 20 years while California last year introduced mandatory media literacy lessons for all K-12 students in all public schools.
In Australia, Journalist Bryce Corbett has created Newshounds, a media literacy program for primary school kids, one of a growing number of programs being offered to schools and other educational bodies.
Importantly, he has recognised that courses for children need to be simplified without being dumbed down. Every hour they’re awake, children are constantly learning about the world expanding around them, trying to understand the principles that govern the growing toolkit of behaviours they are mastering. Thinking is not something strange to them, but remembering and structuring what they learn are still challenges, as they wade further and deeper into the information soup.
Corbett has created a cartoon detective dog called Squiz-E, a Newshound who teaches kids to “Stop, Think & Check before believing everything they see, read or hear online”.
While his efforts are admirable, the slogan might still be a bit cumbersome. Snappier and more memorable is teaching the two-word question that will serve them well throughout life, whether they pursue journalism or almost any other career: Says who?
It is worth noting finally that the answer to the question “Says who?” is often not the last word. Just because we know who said something doesn’t necessarily mean that is proof of trustworthiness, although if a world-renowned climate scientist speaks on global warming that is very trustworthy.
But just as journalists are just part of a relay of information running from the initial source (perhaps the person who did something or was a victim) through to your reader, viewer or listener, so too are those people between the journalist and the initial source. A good journalist wants to know how trustworthy those people are too.
For example, person A is robbed, person B witnesses the robbery and tells C, who tells the police (D), who tells you, the journalist. Even if you trust the police source, how trustworthy are the other links in the chain of information, people A, B and C? You need to be satisfied that the information you are going to publish can be trusted, so a good journalist needs to be able to trust the whole chain – the Trust Chain.
We talk more about Fake News and Trust Chains in The News Manual, but for now we leave this discussion of the “Says who?” question with an open question of its own.
As a journalist, you obviously cannot know or check the absolute trustworthiness of every person in a Trust Chain, so when you have done all the checking you can, when you have confirmed the integrity of each link as far as possible, you have one more question to ask yourself: “How confident do I feel that what I’m reporting is true?”
Only you can answer that question. But if the answer comes back “not enough”, then in all conscience you must either not publish at that time or you must go back and check the Trust Chain again until you can answer, hand on heart: “Absolutely”.
