Journalists in this new media era have gone from being information suppliers to information recyclers. The opportunity for manipulation is now much greater than it used to be.
Traditional news outlets, such as print media and broadcast journalism, has been transformed in the past few decades, following the trend of 1960s New Journalism. New Journalism is a media style that involves subjective reporting, with a conscious intention of relaying specific messages, as opposed to neutral and objective journalism. In other words, the New Journalist is not just reporting news and transmitting information, but is also expressing his own personal opinion. This trend is especially prevalent in political reporting.
ChatGPT, based on artificial intelligence and brought into the world by genius billionaire Elon Musk, has already made us long for New Journalism. The chatbot is a digital computer program that enables reporters to receive immediate information and answers, by tapping a key on a keyboard, without having to be on the scene at all.
AI collects information in any realm and on any topic and prepares it for reading (and reporting). With the press of a button, reporters can receive stories without any investigation required before publishing it. This process has made journalism obsolete — and it might even cause it to disappear. Chatbot use might even lead to articles and broadcasts without any connection to reality, their source being the internet and not reality itself.
This process might make us look back nostalgically at the good old times, when reporters actually went out into the field to collect information and bring back real first-person reports. Today, few journalists do this – instead, using online media information without verifying whether it is true or false or agenda-driven – thus confirming that the era of mass communication is over and is being replaced by a new form of media: that of AI.
Furthermore, chatbots that retrieve online material in Israel will be mostly anti-right wing, as traditionally, the Right hasn’t known how to make use of the media and deliver it according to its views. Instead, the Right prefers to simply ignore it. The Left, however, understands that the media is an important and worthy weapon in the political world, and so the internet is now filled with pro-Left and anti-Right articles, which will be dully used by the bots against the Right.
Will AI be capable of overpowering humanity? (credit: Wikimedia Commons)IN OTHER words, since the chatbot can use only online articles, media coverage of the Right in Israel might appear worse than it is. This situation compels the Right, and the government elected by a right-wing majority, to attempt to flood the Internet with its own media, which reflects reality from its point of view.
This effort in the era of chatbots must be worldwide, not just in Israel, in these days of rising antisemitism. It must take place in the US, Europe, and Latin America, in order to cope with the new reality and the latest technology-media challenge.
The human factor in the media is changing: AI chatbots are here
At the same time, today we are witnessing a change in the human factor in the media. The age of reporters and anchors is decreasing, since young people can be paid less and they remain in the profession for only short periods, eventually moving on to more lucrative professions. Media organizations will thus turn to chatbots to minimize costs and receive accessible material quickly.
The era of searching for real and accurate information sources is over; digital bots are much easier to process. Fifty years ago, reporters would go into the field to verify stories and information. Then they’d go downstairs to the newspaper archives and read the clippings that had been collected on the topic in the past, building their articles upon them.
Nowadays, in the Google era, this process is unnecessary. The new New Journalist uses Wikipedia and other online sources, without searching on the scene for what is or isn’t there.
If, in the past, a reporter could stand behind his article and say, “I spoke the truth,” today’s reporter can only say, “I (data) mined the truth.” Journalists in this new media era have gone from being information suppliers to information recyclers. The opportunity for manipulation is now much greater than it used to be.
Dr. Ron Schleifer is a senior lecturer at Ariel University’s School of Communication. Dr. Yehudit Yehezkely is a journalist and analyst of political communication.
