<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/22/can-we-still-handle-the-truth-journalism-alternative-facts-and-the-rise-of-ai>
"We all have moments in life when we know something big is happening, that we
are stepping into a new and consequential experience, and our mind takes a
mental Polaroid, an intensely clear snapshot of what that moment looks like and
how it feels, and then stores it away in a file marked “important”.
Well, my mind does anyway, and in my professional life so far there have been
three.
It’s late 1987. I’m nearing the end of a cadetship at the
Canberra Times and
it is finally my turn to work in the newspaper’s press gallery bureau at Old
Parliament House. I had chosen the
Canberra Times over other opportunities
because I figured it would be the fastest path to being a political reporter,
the only kind of reporting I was really interested in; and here I was, on a
sunny spring morning, walking past the roses and straight in the front door of
that white building I’d seen every night on the news, because I worked there. I
had to pause to calm my nerves. All I could think was: “Now I can start.”
It was more than a decade after Watergate, but like most reporters of my
generation that investigation was an already mythologised touchstone for the
power of journalism to effect change. I absorbed that quote from Woodward and
Bernstein: “All good reporting is the same thing – the best obtainable version
of the truth.”
From the starry-eyed perspective of an excited cadet, that idea seemed simple.
Over the next 36 years, I came to understand how slippery and difficult it
could be. As the waves of financial and technological change battered and
shifted how and what we did, when the very concept of truth as the foundation
of public debate was challenged, achieving the best obtainable version of the
truth became very complicated indeed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
