Politicians and corporations are walking away from the table

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Politicians, corporate representatives, and some others have been increasingly difficult to interview in the last decade. I’ve experienced this both in my own work and in the news media I consume. Some politicians have started to decline interviews with professional media altogether. While nobody is legally required to talk with reporters, not having a reporter delivering the news is a troubling and serious issue, and not just for “the mainstream media” and their bottom line.

Some people are eager to talk to reporters. They’re looking for attention on their event, product, or project and happily engage with reporters as the gatekeepers to audiences of hundreds and thousands. Small businesses, newly launched charity events, and volunteer-hungry organizations all welcome reporters and the audiences they bring.

This used to include politicians, protestors, and public relations people but often we’re now met with reluctance to engage, or even silence. Because while a reporter may bring a large amount of attention to a topic, they usually also bring fact-checking and balance to a story. This isn’t good for salespeople looking to bend the truth or outright lie. And let’s be real — ultimately, PR flacks and politicians are all salespeople trying to sell us on something, whether it’s their company, their products, their policies, or themselves.

Going through professional reporters kept these motivated sellers honest and meant their message only reached you after being filtered through an editorial process designed to catch falsehoods, but the shrinking of local media outlets, re-emergence of national partisan media, and the advent of social media has turned that on its head.

This is particularly troubling in the case of politicians.

Now, a politician can send a message to thousands, even millions of followers who are pre-disposed to agree with them — based on the fact that they follow the politician in the first place. Reporters have no chance to intercede (or even ask questions), and biased information goes straight to an audience who’s ready and willing to believe it.

If a reporter wants to check one of these statements, they can, nothing stops them. But the issue is distributing the truth once it’s uncovered. The truth is at a disadvantage, both because people have already accepted a possible lie and because it doesn’t have access to the same audience. The politician isn’t going to lend their audience to a reporter, so the reporter is left to use their own social networks and platforms to share the truth. The problem is that the politician’s audience and the reporter’s audience don’t necessarily overlap much.

This is why Facebook and Twitter fact-checking politicians and other public figures have become so important, and divisive.

It’s not easy or quick to do, and that’s why social media companies have done everything possible to avoid having to do it. It would be expensive for them. But the simple fact of the matter is that if they’re going to take the role of the news media and give a platform to politicians and others, then they have to take the responsibility of fact-checking, too.

If they don’t, we’ll continue to have a country built on the shifting sands of lies instead of the rock of truth, and I think we all know where that will lead.