Since Emile Zola’s famous “J’accuse”, political journalism has tried to play the role of safeguarder of the public interest. However, with the advent of digital technology and social media, tables turned to make it necessary to develop new skills and a new mental framework to approach this matter. Zola’s famous “J’accuse” on the Dreyfus affair or the infamous Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon impeachment are just a couple of the most prominent cases in which political journalism played the role of “Fourth Power” meaning that of overseer of the legislative, executive and judicial power.
The engaged, hard-hitting or the investigative connotation of such journalism according to researchers is precisely what differentiates a “free” media from a “controlled” one in an authoritative state, where the media are on the opposite owned by the government. Conventional wisdom holds that, particularly since the late 1960s amidst the Vietnam War, civil rights movements, and political corruption scandals, in the U.S a new concept of journalism arose and started evolving to include in-depth or investigative reporting. So historically, the media has been acting as a watchdog for a quite long now, holding or at least trying to hold politicians, individuals and institutions accountable for their deeds and exposing them when they overtly misbehaved or try to deceive the wider public.
But how well does this kind of journalism really serve this function? More simply can watchdog journalism always protect citizens from power abuse by governments segments or individuals?. Today, watchdog journalism faces precisely an almost epochal challenge: will it succumb to the massive phenomenon of political communicative disintermediation caused by the explosion of social networks or will it adjust to it? In order to get their message across to voters in fact, politicians no longer need journalists, but instead exploit the enormous communicative power of social networks to spread their persuasions without anyone being fully able to challenge or discredit them a priory.
Is the model of watchdog journalism that we have been preaching and practicing since the 60s still relevant and functional or has it become too adversarial and polarizing leading to media driving conflicts rather than helping to resolve them? These and many other are the main practical and ethical questions that the modernity has been posing to watchdog journalism. If on one hand media and especially journalism play a vital role in enabling democracy by shaping more informed public opinions, I want to make you observe that the relation between journalism and democracy itself is bi-univocal since it is the latter, as a pre-requisite, the only state form that can provide and ensure media the space and freedom it needs to operate in this fashion.
In other words, democracy is a necessary ground for the watchdog function of media to thrive and the watchdog role of media is vice versa necessary for democracy to flourish; each one is basically essential and contributory to the other. So, the political environment is the most important factor which matters when it comes to ask media to perform the watchdog role which can in fact exist only in a state that resides on libertarian principles where usually the more informed you are the more capable of participating politically you become. Of course forms of criticism of this way of doing journalism still exist with the main objections stemming from the fact that that objectivity and watchdog role of media cannot go hand in hand; since there is the potential for clash in between them.
Among the most important constraints represented by watchdogs there is misuse of anonymous and confidential sources: Although being a global phenomenon that keeps gaining ground, it could represent a minefield that has claimed many casualties and also taken a toll of the public’s trust in journalism. The second repercussion that watchdog may have is that it lead to anonymity public order disturbance: The credibility of a report often rests on the source of the information and readers do well to look very closely at the sources used and sometimes, sources are anonymous which would cause a disturbance in the public order.
Lately most of us has become familiar with expressions such as “post-truth”, “alternative facts”. Numerous studies have tried to measure the impact of fake news on associated life, how hoaxes in politics risk to poison the electoral climate, what are the dangers associated with bad scientific information or even why fake news can damage companies. The results have sometimes been conflicting, but have always clearly shown responsibilities equally divided between those who make information and those who consume it.
Latest data published by the survey conducted by the Open the Italian pilot project for fat checking , point out that the majority of Italians who get information online do so through “algorithmic sources” such as search engines and social networks, while those who access information sites or apps directly are only a minority; in this perspective, the scenario in which echo chambers and filter bubble are at play might seriously jeopardize in the long run the democratic vivacious debate and pluralism of opinions in Italy.
In their turn, newsrooms and media outlets seem lately obsessed with the myth of real time and live coverage of as many facts as possible, which certainly leaves no room for verification of sources. If the question is “who killed journalism?”, the answer can only take into account typical newsroom biases such as thematization, sensationalism and the spasmodic search for human interest and the perception management. From this point of view, fact checking journalism might seem to be the rediscovery of slow journalism, in-depth journalism, finally dedicated more to the analysis of phenomena than to their simple coverage and mainstreaming.
Watchdog journalism seems to match what is theoretically defined as accountability journalism, a journalism that does not limit itself to trusting its own sources – not even if they are first-hand and official – but investigates them, is able to explain them in detail and, last but not least, assumes precise responsibilities towards the public it speaks to. In fact-checking journalism, there seems to be a sort of rediscovery of the public mission of those who provide information: therefore, it should come as no surprise that there are calls for the rise of a more ethical and deontological journalism in a world of information users that are starting to claim it as an activity of public service and utility.
The rediscovered importance of information verification also seems to be a sort of reaction of journalism to the unequal competition of the digital bigwigs within what has already been defined as a “fact-checking industry” (it counts hundreds of subjects and is worth several hundred thousand dollars, ed.): if Facebook, Google and almost all other digital platforms have been implementing functions for checking media content, journalism no longer has an excuse to shirk from this duty.
