The role of communication in a post-truth world

Emily Barrett, Managing editor at The Saturday Paper, shares her speech for the Deb Ganderton Oration.

First, I want to thank the IABC for inviting me to speak to you tonight, and to take a gigantic risk with a person so averse to public speaking that I might just spontaneously combust.

And perhaps to set you all a little more at ease, I should begin with a few words about the woman for whom this oration is named. I didn’t know Deb Ganderton personally. But I feel as if I did.

And that’s not just because of all the beautiful things I’ve heard from people who worked with her. People who described her, as David Imber did, with a twinkle in her eye, who delighted in telling people, when she became chief executive of the Greater Melbourne Cemeteries Trust, that she was “in the death business”, and whose loyalty and sheer determination and positivity shone through in everything she did.

It’s not just because of her vitality that I feel I knew her, but because when I was going through chemo myself two years ago, and I wasn’t sure if I could keep it together, my friend Suse told me about this strong, energetic woman with this unquenchable spirit, and the grace that she was bringing to her own battle.

Too many of us in this room have dealt with cancer, either ourselves or by helping loved ones, and I want to pay tribute not only to Deb and the life force that she has clearly been for so many, including in some ways myself, but to everyone touched by this particular kind of pain.

As for her legacy. Deb’s influence and views are well known in this room. She was ambitious for her industry, which she saw not simply as a mouthpiece, but as a shaper of views, a force for influencing and speaking up. For making a difference.

So let’s turn to this evening’s topic. The role of communication in a post-truth world.

What do we mean by a post-truth world?

Let’s gloss over millions of pages of philosophy by accepting that there is no simple definition of truth. Let’s say for now that it’s a shared reality of observed and objectively verified facts.

The phrase “post-truth world” conjures the dystopian visions of George Orwell’s 1984, or Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. But these weren’t acts of pure imagination. Orwell was inspired by propaganda news reports he read in 1936 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, when he said that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Atwood famously based the Republic of Gilead on clippings she collected over years, from reports on Ceaucescu’s Romania, to 1950s marriage guides in the US.

And we know it’s not just totalitarian governments – real or fictitious – that can bend facts to their own advantage. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1967, factual truth is vulnerable. It’s open to censorship and manipulation.

The parallels between today and Arendt’s concerns at the time are clear. She deplored the Nixon-era persecution of Daniel Ellsberg for his revelations of US policy failures in Vietnam. Half a century later, Julian Assange is in solitary confinement in London’s Belmarsh prison, and the criminal trial of former military lawyer David McBride is under way. Without their disclosures we might be oblivious to war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

If truth is partly about transparency, let’s start with language – all of us here tonight believe that words matter. Orwell invented the terms Newspeak and Doublethink as a warning about the evacuation of meaning.

Decades ago, Don Watson, the historian and speechwriter who crafted Paul Keating’s Redfern address, wrote about weasel words – words that evade meaning. In the Iraq War, we heard of friendly fire instead of soldiers killed by their own side, or collateral damage instead of civilians killed. In the Howard era we had core and non-core promises. In business there was staff attrition, and negative growth.

So in 2016 when Donald Trump won the US election, and we got “alternative facts”, the world didn’t exactly change. His inauguration – and that immediate lie about the size of the crowd -- put the presidential seal on what was already a terrible trend.

Further along that same continuum, we have seen powerful words emptied and reappropriated in dangerous ways. Anti-vaxxers have used terms like “genocide” and “fascist” to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

In the long weeks of the Voice to Parliament referendum campaign, opponents spread leaflets saying, “Vote NO to apartheid.” And a leading “No” campaigner said the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which invited Australians to “walk with us”, was “a declaration of war.”

Fifty years ago, Arendt wrote that not only is factual truth vulnerable, but it’s “infinitely more fragile than axioms, discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – which are produced by the human mind.” The post-truth world, if we are in it today, might be one in which those alternative realities have gained the upper hand.

So have they?

Well no, if you believe a recent study by researchers at the University of Miami – which suggested that the proportion of believers in conspiracies has held relatively steady, at least in the US, since the grassy knoll theories around JFK’s assassination.

But in reading this, sceptically, I was impressed by some of the things the researchers described as conspiracy theories. “The 1% of the richest people in the US control the government and the economy for their own benefit?” 52% of Americans believe that, and it doesn’t sound that wacky to me. The dangers of genetically modified food are being hidden from the public? Not sure I’d discount that, either, and nor do 40% of Americans.

What if people are just less inclined to believe official stories? Consider that we now know companies like Exxon were publicly rejecting the concept of global warming for decades while conducting internal research on its impact on their business. That PwC was advising its corporate clients on how to avoid the very taxes it was working with the government to legislate? That Qantas was selling tickets for flights that didn’t exist?

The more we are misled by corporations and governments, the less faith we can have in them. Abuse of power begets conspiracy theories – because if it can be true that tobacco companies were hiding the disastrous effects of nicotine for decades, why wouldn’t it eventually emerge that 5G is rotting our brains?

To be clear, I’m not saying this is the case. I don’t think 5G is rotting my brain, though it may not matter. Because in my background reading for this speech, I found that there’s a 50/50 chance that I’m in a simulation anyway, according to Scientific American. I couldn’t find the odds that I’m a simulation.

Anyway. There’s another factor driving the appeal of conspiracies. Clinical psychologists at Emory University conducted a recent one finding that a prime motivation for turning to conspiracy theories was to “make sense of distress and impairment.” For believers, the driving force is a need to understand and feel safe in their environment .. as well as a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.”

Given the range of distressing events in the world today – climate change, wars in Ukraine and now an escalating crisis in the Middle East -- it’s not hard to imagine that some might find unifying theories – no matter how farfetched – consoling. Or, on a darker level, why the base elements of prejudice and suspicion might be easier to mobilise. And research on the use of social media during the pandemic shows exactly this.

Macquarie University, with funding from the NSW government, found a "statistically significant" increase in far-right extremist language on mainstream social media platforms over the two years to January 2021. Let’s have a look at some of their findings:

“Far right extremists have used COVID-19 to reinforce inclusion / exclusion agendas resulting in rising anti-Semitic and anti-Asian sentiment.”

“A growth in conspiratorial thinking during the pandemic has allowed far-right extremists to access and mobilise novel audiences.”

“Online moderation, while necessary to fight spam and illegal content, is slow and insufficient to respond to ideas and beliefs.”

And this seems a neat segue to the role of social media.

Most of us who grew up in a pre-internet world would probably say we are more than ever surrounded by bullshit. It’s in part a function of our hyperconnectedness, the accessibility of the half-baked hot takes of whichever writers, commentators, communicators, friends or frenemies are swirling around in our personal bubbles. We also have the rise of AI, and deepfake technology which Defence Chief Angus Campbell recently warned would “make it impossible for the average person to distinguish fact from fiction.”

I don’t want to be yet another person piling onto the evils of social media. We’re on the platforms, we need them for our work. This is how we reach new generations. As one student who joined us at The Saturday Paper for work experience told me, the last time she bought a newspaper was to line her rabbit cage.

And social media hasn’t always been such a mess. Most of us can probably remember what seemed like a heyday of the platforms, when we saw a globally unifying potential, and a new age of transparency. There was the Arab Spring in 2011 and the post-GFC energy of Occupy, when people took to Twitter as an extension of the town square. And videos of police violence were live-streamed onto YouTube when the body-cams were switched off.

But that initial unifying impulse began to reverse about a decade ago, according to Jonathan Haidt, writing in the Atlantic, thanks to the “like” and “share” functions that now feed the platforms’ algorithms.

In 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on the platform’s vast geopolitical reach. He promised a new tipping point, that would “rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” Facebook would allow people to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

But instead of strengthening our collective spirit, Haidt argued, it created individual platforms, from which you could go viral. People began spending significant chunks of the day attempting to monetise their personal brands. Too many of us today are seeking seratonin rewards of attention from platforms that are designed to spread the most compelling – typically negative, outrageous, and unfactual -- content.

And as we know, platforms have made less and less effort to distinguish between reputable and discredited, or uncredited sources – thanks Elon. In this flattened structure, with memes sitting alongside verified reports, extreme views and platitudes are elevated to the level of any other content. The right’s attacks on the media as the enemy of the people, and “fake news” have worked alarmingly well because the rigours of reporting and factchecking aren’t widely appreciated. Many people, whether we like it or not, don’t understand how the media works.

I’m in a bubble. I believe that everyone in this room cares about facts and accuracy, so I hesitate to say this world is post-truth. It’s a slippery term, like post-modernity or post-feminism. What’s clearer is the danger that a loosening grip on the facts might pose.

Because even if the proportions of people tumbling down rabbit holes hasn’t increased, the stakes certainly have.

So what’s at risk?

First, there’s public health and safety. The few cranks telling anyone who would listen in ’69 that the moonlanding happened in a movie studio weren’t really hurting anyone. But the minority who believed Covid-19 was a hoax and vaccines part of a vast plot, were building communities that could mobilise against simple public health measures, and taking their anger to state legislatures. Quite apart from the risk of radicalisation we discussed earlier, as we know, the “freedom” fighters refusing to wear masks -- and punching horses -- were helping to spread a disease that was a threat to everyone, and especially for those among us with compromised immune systems.

There’s also the danger of political opportunism. Throughout his presidency Trump used lies and hyperbole as key tools for moving the Overton window, that is, turning a radical idea considered outside the realms of possibility, to become an electable platform. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and ranted about Mexicans and drugs and rapists, he sounded extreme. But he was exercising a strategy as old as haggling – start with an outlandish proposal, and even if people reject it, slightly less extreme ideas will seem acceptable. And so, before long he was separating the families of asylum seekers and putting their children in cages.

Our record is no better. One low point was then Prime Minister John Howard’s claim in 2001 that asylum seekers in a boat intercepted by the ADF had attempted to throw their children overboard. Coming just after the 9/11 attacks, the insinuation that terrorists could be among the refugees helped Howard to an election victory. The legacy was the Pacific Solution, which enabled indefinite offshore imprisonment in appalling conditions – a bipartisan policy that has made Australia a pariah in the eyes of the international community.

And then there’s the sheer lost time, for urgently needed solutions.

It’s great that fewer people now believe climate change is a hoax. But what has the last decade of politically-driven climate wars done? How many years of work have we lost to prevent a rise in global temperatures that could be catastrophic for our planet, our biodiversity, the future of our civilisation?

And what about the truth of its past? How long do we have to wait to see another referendum that allows us as a country to acknowledge a more than 60,000-year history of First Nations people as owners of this land? How long before we have another chance to put the structures in place to properly consult Indigenous communities on the issues that directly affect them?

As for the risk we foreshadowed earlier: Are we seeing a loss of trust destabilising our institutions?

Here I can defer to a couple of helpful market surveys.

The latest from Roy Morgan says Australia’s most trusted institution is Bunnings. The prime minister’s credibility ranks several orders below that of Uncle Toby’s.

I have enjoyed the mental picture of spin doctors in Albanese’s office, trying to raise his personal magnetism levels above that of a muesli bar.

Further insight comes from global PR firm Edelman. Its latest Trust Barometer says Australia is “on a path to polarisation, driven by a series of macro forces that are weakening the country’s social fabric and creating increasing division”.

According to this data, the biggest force of division is the rich and powerful (72% say this), but roughly half of respondents say journalists and government leaders are the biggest problem. And only 38% of people trust the media — that’s fewer than last year. Interestingly, as was the case with the 2022 Trust Barometer, Edelman says “business remains the only institution seen as both ethical and competent – creating a significant burden of responsibility for business leaders to navigate the way forward in their ability to be a source of truth, restore economic optimism and address world issues”. Qantas and PwC may have upset this applecart since. But since we’re talking about truth and transparency, Edelman’s not exactly a disinterested party. Edelman’s clients have ranged from ExxonMobil to members of the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma, the opioid manufacturer. The Guardian reported early this year that Edelman has signed deals worth almost $10 million over the past four years with the government of Saudi Arabia and companies it controls, at the same time as urging businesses to stand up for human rights.

Edelman’s work for the American Petroleum Institute has earned the firm nearly $440m since 2008. Energy Citizens, an astroturf group that Edelman helped launch for API, contributed to the defeat of climate efforts in Congress. And Edelman received a PR industry award in 2019 for developing the “We Make Progress” campaign for American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), a fossil fuel lobbying group so destructive that Shell and BP cancelled their memberships, as reported by BuzzFeed News. So here we have research that purports to gauge levels of trust in our society, by a company that actively undermines its own principles. I can’t wait for next year’s barometer.

So how can we uphold the truth in our work, and make a difference? Here I have some calls both to contemplation and to action.

First, call it out. I said that we will talk about our role as media professionals in upholding the truth – this is our first duty. Call a lie a lie. In the Voice referendum, so much airtime and so many pixels were given to discussing the multiple dead cats that the “No” campaign was throwing on the table – from denying generational disadvantage among stolen generations, to the idea that the Voice would advise the RBA – that there was less time for addressing legitimate concerns and uncertainties.

As distinguished Indigenous professor Marcia Langton told a press conference back in March, warning journalists not to parrot the lies of the No campaign. “You know when you’re being told the truth, because the truth burns.”

We must strive for that illumination.

One of the few good pieces of news over the past week is a survey from The Australia Institute showing that almost nine in 10 Australians support truth in political advertising laws. Majorities of voters on both sides of the referendum debate are overwhelmingly concerned about “lies and misinformation” during the campaign. And we will see draft legislation, this government has promised, before the next election.

Second, we should try to a mindset of curiosity rather than certainty. NYT publisher AG Sulzberger wrote in a recent essay that certitude is dangerous in journalism. Proper reporting requires “a commitment to describing the world as it is, not the world we may wish it to be… A

posture of searching rather than knowing.”

That doesn’t just apply to journalism – it’s all forms of communication. If I can put in a plug for

our friends at The Monthly magazine – Eleanor Catton, the author of Birnam Wood, says in her interview with Michael Williams for the Read This podcast: Certainty is a state where you stop listening. As communicators, we need to keep open ears and minds, to get the full story – just as we hope to reach open ears and minds.

One of the recommendations from the Macquarie University study of far-right messaging

during the pandemic was to keep open the lines of communication to people concerned or

confused about policy, rather than leaving them to further alienation, or ripe for recruitment to

radical causes. One way to do this, is to remember to respect our audiences. Are we addressing all their questions and concerns? Are we avoiding anything? Our readers will know and not appreciate it. Aim for transparency, tackle the difficult questions and avoid the weasel words.

Have conversations, discuss issues widely, find out what people think. And read widely. A varied diet of news and information is healthy so our bubbles don’t make us irrelevant.

Read The Saturday Paper. I hear it’s good.

Third, though this might as well be first, Diversity is essential. I was fortunate to work at some of the foremost financial establishments in the US and globally. I have been the only woman in a boardroom full of men and seen firsthand why we shouldn’t leave them to their own devices.

When people of different cultural, socio-economic, gender and body perspectives are in the room there’s just an expansion of ideas and viewpoints and crucial questions that are asked, bringing challenges to complacent thinking. And if that’s not your boardroom, it’s important to try and consider who is being omitted or erased by its actions and messages.

I mentioned that our professions aren’t well understood. I don’t know what to do about this. In our industry we are not great at describing our process. We like to talk, but not about the mechanics of what we do. We should do more of that.

Perhaps we need a strengthened industry representative – perhaps one that’s not funded by the publisher with the deepest pockets -- that fights our corner to shore up public perception. Perhaps we also need an industry body to hold more strictly to account those in the media who violate the integrity of our mission.

And finally, we can try to move the Overton window. If this is a post-truth world, then we should seize the opportunities it presents for change. Not by altering or rejecting the facts, but by grasping a truth beyond them. One that appeals more to our hearts than our brains? Can we create a powerful positive vision?

After all, the far right isn’t the only group with its eyes on the Overton window. We saw what was possible with the Marriage Equality bill.

It’s our ability to unshackle ourselves from the way things actually are and imagine something better that must drive our best efforts to a better world. As Hannah Arendt wrote in Crises of the Republic: The deliberate denial of factual truth – the ability to lie – and the capacity to change facts – the ability to act – are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.