We have a responsibility to stick to the highest ethical standards: Peter Greste #MediaLiteracyAUS

At this week’s Navigating the News conference in Hobart, journalist Peter Greste talked about the importance of journalists building trust with their audience.
 
But good reporting that builds trust is harder than ever in a media era that is saturated with fake news.
 
He told radioinfo, “the media landscape has shifted so much that it is almost impossible to navigate without having some sense of what’s going on behind it…
 
“Now all information appears equal, but just because it has the appearance of being equal doesn’t mean it is equal. People who consume the news need to have the literacy and knowledge to be able to distinguish for themselves.”

 
Journalists are human as well, said Greste. They have certain skills but are not immune from distorted and fake news.
 
“We need to stick to the highest ethical standards. New business models are forcing us into doing things that may raise questions about our integrity… the instinct is to create sensational headlines and generate clicks, but we should resist the urge to go sensationalist,” he told radioinfo.
 
Greste was arrested in Cairo with his Aljazeera colleagues at the end of December 2013. The interior ministry said the journalists were accused of news reporting which was “damaging to national security.” He was found guilty by the court, and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released and deported to Australia in 2015 after pressure from the world’s media and international governments.
 
What did his time in prison teach Greste about journalism?
 
“It taught me the importance of integrity… none of us in prison in Egypt had anything in our professional records that caused our work to be questioned.
 
“If we had been dodgy in the past or loose with the truth, the Egyptians would have trumpeted it from the roof tops, if they had done that I think the people who supported us would have started to doubt whether we had been operating as honestly as we claimed… if people had had that doubt then our support would have collapsed and we would have still been in prison.”
 Watch the full interview below.
 


 

A study from the Knight Foundation, titled Indicators of News Media Trust discusses the question of whether the media has lost public trust for good, or if it can recover.

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