Artificial Intelligence: Another layer of crisis for journalism and democracy
Aidan White
It is impossible for journalists and people concerned about information and democracy to talk about artificial intelligence without considering the context in which it has become a central force in our daily lives.
Today, a mix of political, economic and professional challenges has made the world of news more chaotic and uncertain than ever before.
While AI is a part of our future, and for the most part has the potential to be of great benefit to humanity, in the wrong hands and without the security of human oversight, it can become another layer of crisis for journalism and for democracy.
AI is changing the way journalists work and is having an impact on almost every aspect of public life, which is why it is more important than ever for editors and journalists to actively engage with our audience and with the public at large.
AI is the most challenging development in the communications revolution of the last 25 years. We already know how in the first phases of that revolution it became easier to manufacture and spread messages of hate, violence, and abuse. The algorithms programmed to promote “user engagement” create an environment, through social networks, that encourages conflict, polarisation and disinformation.
We know also that the people behind destructive acts of communication are not obliged to be ethical and not minded to distribute truthful information. Their algorithms and business models are not driven by a vision of improving people’s lives or serving public interests.
As time passes we witness how attempts to rein in the excesses of online abuse caused by global tech giants have failed to clean up the information ecosystem and, in just recent days, how the billionaire leadership of social media hold in contempt even voluntary efforts to improve the situation.
The decision by Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, to dispense with fact-checkers and to weaken moderation of the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump to the White House, and to do so the name of “free speech,” is shocking. It strongly suggests we face a new and malicious world information order rooted in political populism and deceptive handling of the facts.
That’s why we need now, more than ever, to support truth-telling and ethical journalism, which is central to creating societies that are cohesive, pluralist and informed.
But how do we defend and promote journalism while enabling citizens to play their part in a new information ecosystem that is both reliable and reinforces democracy?
It’s a hard question but there are a number of efforts to support this direction of travel. I want to mention two that the Ethical Journalism Network is supporting.
The first is an initiative based in Lithuania, the EU-funded DIACOMET, run by a network of European universities, which is pushing boundaries in the area of digital media literacy, is re-shaping ideas of media accountability, and is building models for civic resilience and moral awareness against the misuse and continuing abuse of the information landscape.
This project is preparing a ground-breaking Civic Code of Good Communications Conduct and developing new strategies for more accountability, not just for journalists and media, but across the whole landscape of public communications.
This work shows that it’s not just journalists and academics who have responsibility for good communications. There is a wider civic and moral responsibility in which everyone has a stake and has a role to play. Bridging the gulf between theory and practice in this area is not easy, but this is a brave project with courageous objectives.
And, secondly, last year the Ethical Journalism Network helped launch of the Paris Charter on AI and journalism, the first international ethical benchmark for AI and journalism.
This charter highlights the four core principles for the use of AI in newsrooms, which all journalists, owners and editors should follow:
Transparency: The media must help society to distinguish between authentic and synthetic content with confidence;
Human oversight: Human agency must continue to be central in editorial decisions;
Ethical standards: Ethical values must govern all technological choices within the media and at every stage in the development and use of AI;
Regulation: News media must participate at all levels of AI governance, from defending the viability of journalism when negotiating with tech companies to joining with other partners at local and regional level to create sound structures for review and self-regulation.
Without sticking to these principles, it will be impossible for anyone to say with confidence that the use of AI remains under our control. Most news media are rightly cautious about AI. For years, AI has been useful as an editorial assistant, routinely used for sports and financial listings, the weather and prosaic regulars such as horoscopes and quizzes.
But for reporting and editing, it is rarely used. Most news leaders recognise that technological innovation doesn’t inherently lead to progress: it must be steered by ethics and a human hand to truly benefit the work of newsrooms.
But it is not going away and the temptation to innovate with AI “journalism” remains.
This may be a time when, to safeguard the right to quality information, journalists and news organisations must join forces to ensure ethics guide the governance and use of the most transformative technology of our time.
The need for reliable journalism has never been greater. The deepening crisis facing news media has been sharply heightened with the election of Donald Trump.
The Trump presidency began with a number of legal actions against dissident media in the United States and, in a startling intervention in Munich in February, Trump’s Vice President J D Vance launched an all-out attack on the European approach to free speech.
With independent news media under siege in Russia, Turkey, China and in many other countries where populists are in power, there is genuine uncertainty over the perilous future for independent voices in the media.
And when owners, like Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, who ordered the paper’s editorial leadership not to support any candidate in last year’s presidential election, it is clear that once sacred notions of editorial are being abandoned.
The media capitulation to politics is not the only immediate threat. A decades-long financial crisis over funding news media continues to reduce the scope for sustainable journalism that can hold power to account.
The introduction of AI adds to the crisis, but there is no reason why this should not be a moment of opportunity for media to strengthen their role in society.
Perhaps we should return to that well-worn cliché about the role of journalism – that its purpose is to educate, entertain and inform.
In this era perhaps we must put more focus on the educational role of media, to show how journalism, in partnership with the audience, can become a force for the restoration of values and public trust in public communications.
We should begin inside journalism and embrace digital media literacy as an important tool for meeting the challenges of AI. Media literacy is about deepening our understanding of media messages and understanding what tools and technologies, including AI, are used to produce them is one piece of that picture.
Making media literacy part of our editorial process will equip journalists and managers with the skills and knowledge they need to understand the power, purpose, audience, and agenda of the messages they are dealing with in the world of AI.
Media literacy must be woven into the culture of newsrooms. This requires streamlined revisions to editorial polices, new approaches to training, opening up the news and editorial agenda to more activities that engage with the public, and, of course, more funding.
None of this will happen automatically. It requires a community effort, media leadership and new alliances between employers, editorial managers and working journalists and, of course, it requires a new politics and fresh institutions. But if we start now, by building new bridges into the community, we can yet make ethical journalism the foundation stone of a more thoughtful and informed information landscape.
This speech was delivered at the Association for the Ethics of Public Information meeting of media leaders, editors and journalists held in Vilnius on 20 February 2025
Photo by m. on Unsplash