Journalism faces challenges of AI, misinformation, declining trust
AMMAN — Facing challenges in a form of artificial intelligence (AI), economic turmoil and social dynamism, the journalism of 21st century strives to find a way to avoid all these pitfalls and remain relevant.
Columbia Global Centres Amman recently organised a talk titled" Fault lines and Deadlines" where issues related to problems of the modern journalism were addressed by Jelani Cobb, a writer, journalist and professor of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City.
The profession of journalism is experiencing tectonic changes and challenges of scale that is very difficult to find historical comparison, noted Cobb, adding that it has been the steady decrease in the media trust.
"For the long time, I had one understanding of this as a dynamic that was related to very particular, very specific and partisan dynamics in the US and its politics. But in time, I came to observe as have many scholars and people who studied that question about the extent to which this is in fact a global problem that we see a decrease in trust in media across the board," Cobb underlined.
The journalist noted that Reuters Institute conducted studies a few years ago in which only 38 per cent of people in 40 different countries trusted news.
The research was completed before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contradictory news, misinformation and systematic spread of panic, conspiracy theories and blatant lies, which characterised that period-contributed to even lower trust in printed and online media.
At the point where calibre of the information on the pandemic could be a decisive factor to whether people survived or die from a virus the number of people who trusted media further dropped.
This problem is exacerbated not only by the growing distrust in news organisations but in the growing trust the people and outlets in which public bestowed its faith and given trust to, and the questionable nature of much of the information that is produce in these other kinds of outlets on the Internet and social media and so on, Cobb elaborated.
The writer added: "We can see always present possibility of violence becoming much more prevalent."
Last year, we saw, according to the Committee for the protection of journalists 98 journalists were killed around the world.
This trend is progressive as each year the higher number of journalists, war reporters and editors lose their life while being on duty.
Gaza Strip, West Bank and Lebanon have been places where around 160 journalists were killed and wounded by IDF since October 2023.
"I want to point out that these are not distinct crisis; the escalating number of journalists who have died while conducting their work is connected to the declining trust and faith that the public places in media."
"The less people trust us the more vulnerable we are," Cobb underlined, noting that it is easier to discredit journalists and to make it seem that deaths of reporters have occurred in a course of conducting some nefarious practice on behalf of some questionable policy, but certainly in pursuit of particular agenda.
Another problem is the emergence of artificial intelligence as it greatly enabled the capacity of people to produce misinformation and disinformation at scale.
"AI has brought many challenges aside from gigantic quantity of misinformation and disinformation," Cobb said, adding "as we saw in June last year, the conflict between AI and Forbes Magazine. Forbes Magazine spent months to put in two of its best reporters into a story about Eric Schmidt, a co-founder of Google and his initiative to create a military-grade drone.
"Within the moment of this story being published perplexity AI machinery had generated a lookalike story. A complete paraphrase of all the language, including the quotes but without the reference to Forbes Magazine."
The story was spun into social media posts which gained a great attention, more than the original story from the magazine.
It created also the conflict over copy rights, Cobb underlined, adding that investigative reporting is the most expensive undertakings in any new outlet, however, due to AI investigative reporting may become financially unsustainable.
"AI will cost us jobs. Most certainly in the media landscape and in other landscapes we cannot escape a reality that the emergence of these technologies will result in jobs that are currently filled with human beings no longer being necessary," Cobb underscored.
It is a reality and media employees should deal with it now before it is too late.
© Copyright The Jordan Times. All rights reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
21 hours ago
- The National
Mahmoud Khalil: US won't release Columbia protester despite successful appeal
The Trump administration on Friday said it has no plans to release Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil after successfully appealing a recent court ruling. A federal judge this week had ruled that the White House could not use US foreign policy interests to justify its detention of Mr Khalil, whose supporters hoped would be released on Friday. "The Court did not order Respondents to release Petitioner Mahmoud Khalil," US Department of Justice lawyers wrote in a last-minute appeal, implying they could detain Mr Khalil on a different basis. "An alien like Khalil may be detained during the pendency of removal proceedings regardless of the charge of removability," they added, explaining that in their view, Mr Khalil had to convince the Department of Homeland Security to release him, and that he had failed to do so. The DOJ also asked that if federal District Judge Michael Farbiarz insisted on releasing the Columbia University student, they could pursue other legal options to keep him detained. The judge acquiesced to the DOJ's arguments. "The Respondents have now represented that the Petitioner is being detained on another, second charge," he wrote, adding that Mr Khalil retains the option of requesting bail through an application to an immigration judge presiding over his case. On Wednesday, Judge Farbiarz said Mr Khalil's legal team had shown that his continued detention was causing irreparable harm to his career, his family and his right to free speech. Mr Khalil, who played a prominent role in pro-Palestine campus protests last year, is being detained in Louisiana after his March arrest. The State Department revoked his green card under a little-used provision of immigration law granting the Secretary of State the power to seek the deportation of any non-citizen whose presence in the country is considered adverse to US foreign policy interests. The White House has accused Mr Khalil of disseminating Hamas propaganda during the protests. A judge in Louisiana previously ruled that the US government could proceed with efforts to deport him. He was denied furlough in late April to attend the birth of his first child. His arrest was part of a Trump administration crackdown on so-called anti-Semitism on university campuses. The administration has deemed pro-Palestine protests to fall under this umbrella. Mr Khalil has described himself as a political prisoner and said his arrest was indicative of anti-Palestinian racism in the US.
Gulf Today
a day ago
- Gulf Today
Trump's curveball at Japan tea giant's US expansion
Kentaro Okasaka and John Geddie, Reuters Top Japanese tea brand Ito En's latest push to win over health-conscious US customers with its traditional unsweetened brew has hit a new road bump: President Donald Trump's trade tariffs. The company, which splashed out on a tie-up with Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani and launched a less bitter tea to capture a bigger slice of the lucrative growth market, is now debating whether to hike prices or move some production across the Pacific, executives said in interviews with Reuters. The dilemmas facing Ito En can be found across Japan, the biggest foreign investor in the United States, as Tokyo's trade negotiators return to Washington this week to try and strike a deal to cushion the blow to its fragile economy. Makoto Ogi, Ito En's general manager of international business development, told Reuters the company may raise prices of its products in the US to compensate for Trump's 24% levy on Japanese goods set to come into force next month. The problem is their retailers and distributors may resist for fear of losing sales. "We may not be able to ask them to raise our prices despite what Trump is saying," he said. The last time Ito En raised prices in the US - by approximately 10% in 2022 - sales dropped by around 5%. The company said the decline reflected the price hike as well as factors such as COVID-19 that affected market conditions. The company is also considering making tea bags in the United States, and bottling drinks there rather than in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand as it does presently, Ogi and other executives explained during interviews in Tokyo. These details of the firm's potential plans to counter tariffs have not been previously reported. The executives did not disclose the costs of such moves. In its latest results released this month, Ito En reported its profit shrank by 8.2% in the year to April, but forecast an 11% jump this year. It set a modest 3.7% profit growth target for its US tea business, versus 20.7% growth achieved last year, an outlook partly related to tariffs, a company spokesperson said. Its shares rose to nearly a four-month high in the wake of the results, with its president later telling investors the forecasts were "conservative". Many Japanese firms have set up war rooms to chalk out plans to restructure supply chains or cut costs to offset tariffs and keep their US growth plans on track, said Mizuho Bank analyst Asuka Tatebayashi. A survey of 3,000 Japanese companies by export promotion organisation JETRO late last year before Trump's tariffs found the level of interest in US markets at the highest in nearly a decade, with food and beverage companies like Ito En the most enthusiastic. "When you talk to companies in Japan, the US comes first," said Tatebayashi, adding that they face shrinking domestic demand and are generally cautious about expanding into riskier emerging markets. For Ito En, the US has long been a market it is eager to crack. Five years ago, Joshua Walker, the newly-appointed head of U.S. non-profit Japan Society, hosted Ito En's North America head Yosuke Honjo in his New York office. Honjo gestured to the green-coloured bottles of their flagship 'Oi Ocha' brand lining the shelves and said he wanted them to spread around the world like Coca-Cola's red bottle. "It was refreshing. Japanese companies would not normally have ambition of that type of grandeur," said Walker, recounting the executive's previously unreported remarks. Honjo, via a company spokesperson, confirmed the remarks. Founded in the 1960s by Honjo's father and uncle, Ito En has grown to dominate Japan's tea market, using around a quarter of the country's total crude tea production. Since expanding into the US in 2001, it has dabbled in selling sweet and flavoured tea varieties familiar to Americans. But more recently it has focused on the unsweetened tea popular in its home market, hoping to tap health-conscious customers and a boom in Japanese food and cultural exports. Honjo said growth has also been aided by a sharp rise in Asian Americans, estimated at nearly 25 million in 2023, or around 7% of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center. Japan's exports of green tea surged 24.6% to 36.4 billion yen ($251 million) last year, with nearly half destined for the United States, official data showed. Some equity analysts like Jiang Zhu of Tokyo-based rating agency R&I have highlighted the high marketing cost of Ito En's international push at a time it faces tough competition at home from tea brands such as Coca-Cola's Ayataka. The company said it has around a 2% share of the US market for tea beverages, ranking eighth largest, with Unilever's Pure Leaf leading the sector. But it has a long way to catch up with the 3.9 billion gallons of Coca-Cola's trademark Coke drinks sold in the US last year, at only 3.1 million gallons by comparison, according to research firm Beverage Marketing Corporation. "Kikkoman's soy sauce is probably in every American household now, but it took about 50 years for it to become a part of the culture," said Akihiro Murase, Ito En's public relations manager, referencing the Japanese food manufacturer as a template for success. "We are not there yet but we would like to make unsweetened green tea a part of the food culture," he said.
Middle East Eye
a day ago
- Middle East Eye
Israel blocks access to Al-Aqsa mosque after Iran strike
Israel has completely blocked access to Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. Local sources told the Palestinian Wafa news agency that Israeli forces stormed the mosque after dawn prayers on Friday to clear the area of any worshippers. The Israeli military then sealed the doors to Al-Aqsa and banned worshippers from entering the mosque before sealing its gates, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Wafa. This shutdown means Muslim worshippers will be unable to conduct Friday prayers at the mosque, revered as the third holiest site in Islam. The closure comes as Israel issues a complete lockdown across the occupied West Bank following the wave of attacks it launched on Iran. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Earlier on Friday, Wafa reported that Israel had closed dozens of military checkpoints and gates across the West Bank, blocking several secondary roads between Palestinian towns, villages and cities with dirt mounds. Al-Aqsa: Israeli incursions have increased by more than 18,000 percent since 2003 Read More » The Allenby Bridge, also known as the King Hussein Bridge, and the only exit point for most Palestinians in the West Bank to travel abroad, was also shut down by Israeli authorities on Friday. Al-Aqsa, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, has long been a source of tension resulting from frequent raids by Israeli settler groups, backed by Israeli troops, into the complex, which is reserved for Muslim prayer under a longstanding agreement. Far-right Israeli groups have increasingly pushed for access and control over the site, which is known to Jews as Temple Mount, a move Palestinians view as part of a wider campaign to alter the status quo and assert Israeli sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory, and the closure of a major religious site raises serious concerns over violations of Palestinians' rights to worship and freedom of movement. Human rights groups have long condemned the use of mosque closures as a form of collective punishment and political pressure.
