Journalism Today. 16 Dec 2024

By Eduardo Suárez and Matthew Leake

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. What Assad’s fall may mean for journalists in Syria. Lina Chawaf the CEO and founder of Syrian independent radio station Radio Rozana, which has been operating in exile from France and Turkey. She is now a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and spoke to her colleagues about how she sees the future of journalism in her home country in a conversation summarised by our friends at Nieman Reports. | Read

• A key quote. “[The rebels who took power] are Islamist. They don’t believe in freedom of the press. They don’t believe in women’s rights. But we know that we are able to fight with them. [When they] arrested some journalists, we were able to negotiate with them, bring them [out]. With the [Assad] regime, we could not do this. When they took somebody, they disappeared forever.”

2. CNN is investigating Clarissa Ward’s viral interview. US news channel CNN is investigating Clarissa Ward’s recent viral interview with a “hidden prisoner” after Syrian fact-checking outlet Verify-Sy published that the man was an intelligence officer from Assad’s Syrian Air Force who may have killed and tortured civilians in Homs. “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed,” Ward tweeted about her interview before this new reporting emerged. | Read 

• The prisoner’s background. Verify-Sy, an organisation that’s been deemed compliant with the IFCN fact-checking principles, found no public records for the name the prisoner gave in the interview. Its team found that his real name was ‘Salama Mohammad Salama’. According to local sources, he was involved in theft and extortion. His brief, recent incarceration, they said, was due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer. | Read the original Verify-Sy’s report

3. How to report on a CEO’s murder. A new piece by Wired former editor GIdeon Lichfield looks at how American mainstream media has (and hasn’t) covered the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the movement against the health insurance system it has sparked. Lichfield compares this coverage with the kind of reporting big news outlets did on Donald Trump’s first term and finds both wanting in similar ways. | Read

• A key quote. Lichfield thinks the news media has treated both communities as “an aberrant fringe group worthy of either laughter, horror, or fascinated study”. Here’s what he would like to see much of: “Taking those people seriously. I don’t mean sharing their glee at Thompson’s death. I mean reporting on them as if they were mainstream, rather than in the way a lepidopterist studies some freakish new butterfly.”

📊 Chart of the day

Many people have negative views about journalists. According to survey data from four countries that we collected in 2022, many people hold negative perceptions of journalists. Around half of our respondents in Brazil, India, the UK and the US think that journalists care more about getting attention than reporting the facts, and try to manipulate the public to serve the agendas of power politicians. Almost half believe both that journalists are sloppy and that they “are only in it for the money.” | Read the report

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☕ Coffee break

ABC News has agreed to donate $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation case following on-air comments by broadcaster George Stephanopoulos. | Read

• New York Times’ reporter David Enrich writes that this is just the latest sign that the incoming administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. He’s about to publish this book on the weaponisation of libel laws in the United States. 

“There is evidently an appetite for spaces in which reasonable people can disagree politely and constructively,” writes Jemima Kelly on the appeal of podcasts such as the UK’s Rest is Politics whose live show filled London’s 15,000-seat O2 Arena. | Read

Despite fears to the contrary in a mammoth year of elections, AI “has not fundamentally changed the landscape of political misinformation,” write Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, who analysed every instance of AI use in elections around the world. | Read

BBC News has complained to Apple after one of their new AI-powered news summaries suggested that a BBC report claimed Luigi Mangione, arrested for the killing of a health insurance boss, had shot himself. This new feature has also produced false, incomplete or irrelevant headlines for notifications of other news outlets. | Read

WhatsApp has become vital for journalists, humanitarian organisations and refugees alike in disaster and conflict zones to share and receive important and life saving information, according to a new report from Rest of World’s John Beck. | Read

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📚 One piece from our archive

A different kind of sports news site. Strategy is about being different. In a country with so many legacy sports outlets, Spanish website Relevo created a different product for a different audience. It built a younger newsroom, covered women’s sports relentlessly, hired investigative journalists and pursued younger people on their own terms. These early bets paid off when covering the story of Luis Rubiales, the football chief who kissed a player from Spain’s national team without her consent. In November 2022 we hosted a seminar with Relevo’s Marta Caparrós and Fermín Elizari, who spoke about the outlet’s mission and how they are trying to accomplish it. | Read or Watch · Read our piece on Relevo’s big scoop

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