Who in this room knows journalists?
Does any of you have journalist friends, a journalist in his family, acquaintances?
Please, raise you hands.
Ah, not bad! There’re a few out there.
If you know them, you might have noticed a surprising phenomenon:
when January comes,
French journalists are all feeling blue, a bit depressed ; they don’t feel good.
It’s neither due to the weather nor the winter in Clermont-Ferrand
which can be truly harsh by the way.
It has to do with a poll published by the newspaper La Croix since 1987.
This poll measures public confidence in the media and journalists.
In January, we are reminded
that about 50% of people reached by journalists,
reached by us,
50% of people have no confidence in what is said to them.
Radio broadcasting is a bit better: it rises to 60%.
However, if you work on the web, it is worse still with a drop to 30%.
Basically, these results aren’t very good.
The question I ask myself every January,
and maybe we should all ask ourselves is:
“How did we get there?”
“What have we done to bring about so much distrust,
such that journalists are rejected,
as are politicians, authorities and the elite in general?”
If you ask your journalist friend this question,
he would likely reply
that if people don’t trust them, it’s because they are bad.
If they are bad, it is because of external constraints.
These constraints can be the pressure from shareholders or from advertisers –
some advertisers say,
“We want such and such information to put our advertisement,
our screen or our advertisement page not such and such one.”
There’s also the race for audience –
journalists hate it and say they’re forced
to try to generate more clicks on the internet –
and media centralization,
which are more and more concentrated in big industrial groups
with ill-defined editorial strategies and editorial teams
that might be a little at lost in this universe of digital transformation.
These are the constraints; but in real life, there’re not only constraints,
there’s also what you do with these constraints.
This is what Sartre told us when he said,
“The important thing is not what people make of us
but what we shall do with what they make of us.”
That’s worthy of a tweet!
(Laughter)
What do we do with these constraints? How do we evolve internally ?
And how do we work as journalists within the constraints that I’ve listed?
A sensitive question arises here:
Generally speaking, do journalists perform their job well individually?
Do they exercise rigour, possess high intellectual requirement?
Do they have this satisfaction of a job well done?
These are questions professionals don’t like to ask themselves
regardless of the profession.
While preparing this talk, I discovered
that it was a question I had already explored
after several experiences which I’m going to share with you now.
I have been a web journalist since 2007,
and since then, I have been interested in what we call “data journalism.”
Data journalism is a new tool in the tool box of journalists
in the same way as are interviews, reportages, investigations,
and documentation work.
It consists of using networks and computers to work on figures and tables
in order to analyze the information that we call “data” or “big data.”
We analyse them, depict them,
create graphs and make classifications out of them,
and we try to tell stories from these data.
What I do regularly is to use data journalism to work on journalism itself.
Let me explain, it will all become clear.
One of the first think I did regarding data journalism on journalism
was to work on clichés, common expressions used in the media.
What I call “cliché” is for example,
an expression such as “the cherry on the cake.”
You also have “the cat among the pigeons,”
“the tip of the iceberg”, and all kind of stock phrases like these.
And generally, when you study journalism, you are told:
“Try to avoid these. It’s a little clumsy, and using clichés isn’t elegant.”
That’s what we learn usually; there are even courses
to write without clichés, and books on the subject.
Myself, I’d made a little robot which I’d connected to Twitter
and this robot was programmed to detect clichés,
the series of expressions like those I have shown you,
on French news sites.
So each time it catched one, hop! It tweeted it.
It has been functioning for years. As you see, it’s on top form.
It has found 72,000 of them.
Later, I was able to classify them
and determine which media was the most “cliché,”
that type of things.
It was a first experiment and a little unscientific.
It was funny, but it didn’t go very far.
A year and a half ago, I tried a different experiment.
I asked myself if the media was having a tendency
to distort our vision of the world.
If the media distorts our vision of the world,
how does it do it? How much is the distorsion?
Can we try to represent that world according to the media?
So, to do so, I created maps.
More precisely, I created anamorphosis.
What’s an anamorphosis?
You take a map with different countries, for example,
and you misrepresent the country according to criteria.
As it happens the criteria that I’ve chosen here
is the number of citations for each country, on a given media.
The bigger the country on the map, the more it has been cited,
showing greater media interest.
Whereas, the smaller it is, the less it has been cited
showing less media interest.
Here is the world according to the daily Libération.
As you see, it isn’t the map of the world as we know it.
So, the media do not have a neutral representation of the world.
Indeed, that’s not very surprising.
But it’s a confirmation and it’s very visible, thanks to those maps.
Now here is the world according to Le Monde Diplomatique.
You can see that the map of the world has changed once again.
South America has grown a lot, the Maghreb as well.
This newspaper clearly doesn’t have the same geographical priorities
as Libération.
Here’s the world of Radio France Internationale,
which is widely listened to in Africa, so the African continent is huge.
Those of you with good eyesight can see
that the West Indies are bigger than the original.
And here is the world according to BFM TV which is very different from that of RFI
since the information is more focused on France,
the neighbouring countries, Europe, a little on the US,
but not really on southern countries.
This summer, I wanted to go a little further.
I wanted to be a little more analytical, somewhat naughty.
So, I found a new subject to investigate,
that which I called: “Fake information.”
What is fake information?
It’s information that circulates on the web or social networks
which can sometimes be picked up by the media,
even by responsible media, as we shall see.
I wasn’t necessarily interested in the origin
or the circulation of those fake news.
There is already rather interesting research work on this.
What interested me was to know
what happens when the media fall into the trap,
publish a fake information,
and realize, several hours or days afterwards that the information was false.
Do they correct the articles? Do they ban them?
Do they inform the readers? Do they change the title?
Do they add a footnote, an addendum,
the type of update that you usually learn to do at journalist school?
So I needed a sample, a base line.
So I headed for five stories, more or less eccentric,
but all false.
To give you an example of such a story, there was this Quebecer teenager
who pretended to have discovered a new Mayan city
unknown to archaeologists,
by looking at the stars and I believe, the constellations on Google Earth.
This info had been taken up by the media across the world
and a great deal in France – it had fascinated the French journalists.
Unfortunately, several days later, more reliable archaeologists were asked
whether it was possible to discover a new Mayan city this way,
just by looking at Google Earth or Google Maps.
Very quickly, they replied, “No, it does not work that way.
It’s very unlikely that there’s a Mayan city in the designated area.
This teen has done this in good faith and is definitely passionate
but archaeology doesn’t work like that.”
Another example that amuses me is that of the dwarf strip-teaser.
It’s about a future wife that might have fallen pregnant
and given birth to a dwarf baby
because nine months before, she got married and at her hen party
there was a dwarf strip-teaser.
She’d have supposedly slept with him and nine months later,
given birth to a dwarf baby.
(Laughter)
None of this is true!
Well, strip-teasers exist, as well as hen parties and dwarves,
and perhaps dwarf strip-teasers, but it stops there.
You see, nevertheless, the news is on Le Point,
more precisely, it was on Le Point.
You’ll understand, I’ll come back to this.
It is a reliable paper nevertheless.
Third example of fake information: it was a video as it happens.
A snowboarder was followed by a bear
while she was filming herself coming down a piste
or a snow covered slope.
We could see the bear charging towards the snowboarder,
a very impressive clip ; it was a raw image, scary…
This video is interesting because it is part of a series of eight
produced by an agency called The Woolshed Company.
They find it funny to do these rigged videos,
very well rigged.
It isn’t easy to see the special effects used in the video,
that the bear, for example, has been added to the image.
Perhaps a special effects specialist can see it
but most people would be fooled.
They did this one and also a video of a lion huntress
who posed in front of the dead body of a lion she had just killed on safari.
Suddenly, another lion arrived and threw itself on her.
And again, this video is as striking.
There’s also a guy who enters a tornado
while filming himself going into the tornado.
So, eight “viral” videos as we say, that circulate easily.
The Woolshed Company agency assessed what happened to these videos.
Once on YouTube, what happened to them?
Are they adopted?
Are they taken up by the internet surfers themselves via social network?
Are they taken up by the media?
The response, sadly, is yes,
since a huge amount of televisions has taken up these fake videos.
In fact, some of them said, “This video might be a fake,
but we are showing it to you anyway;”
this included the French media that I studied.
It’s the tactic of one who hides: we pick up the video, but….
This also, in terms of journalism, we don’t do it.
Usually, we’d try to go back to the origin of the video,
to learn about the snowboarder,
and perhaps would go to interview the bear, if we are very brave.
(Laughter)
Or, at least, we would try to find the original media
or the people around the material
in order just to check it before publishing it.
So, I had five stories. Five stories.
Then, I selected 30 French news sites among the most popular,
among those you probably watch every day
or at least once a week –
thirty news sites, national and local,
reliable sites, and not so serious ones, a varied sample of this kind.
Five stories and 30 websites makes 150 searches to do
to verify if the information had been taken up
and what had become of the articles involved, the contents,
when the information had been proven fake, when they had learnt it was false.
I honestly did not expect to find very much.
I told myself, “Here we are in 2016, the web is no longer that young,
journalists have been duped many times with crazy stories
that they have shared too quickly without paying attention.
And especially, we’ve learnt that on the internet,
it’s possible to correct an article after its release.
You can add a warning and change the title.
This is what some do anyway.
So I said to myself, “Maybe you’ll come to naught.”
Well, in 41 cases out of the 150 researches,
41 times, I bumped into those fake news that had been refuted
and nothing allowed the reader to be informed
that since the release of the article in question,
they learnt from another source that the information was false.
41 out of 150, that’s almost a third.
As a result, I contacted the chief editors of some of the sites involved.
It was difficult conversations:
“Hum … There’s a problem on your site, because …”
I gathered their reactions and put them in my article.
They’re more or less convincing.
They explain how the info is fabricated
and why they occasionally choose not to modify an article that’s already online.
They didn’t give the real explanation.
They didn’t explain that it is a form of resignation from the journalists.
In a nutshell, people tell themselves when they’ve done this silly thing,
“Well, It’s not that bad; it’s old news, nobody has died.”
When someone dies, then they correct it.
For example, when AFP announced the death of Martin Bouygues,
lots of sites shared AFP’s information.
AFP is a recognized agency, strong, which rarely makes mistakes.
So, when AFP announces something, it’s shared on all sites.
When AFP said they were mistaken, all sites removed the articles involved
for it was then a very important issue.
So, there’s a form of resignation that you can sense from certain editors.
Personally, this resignation drives me mad.
I believe it drives mad all the journalists
who struggle to keep on performing their work
and circulating accurate information and who think, in addition,
that those are important in a modern democracy
where we vote and have to select those who are governing us.
It drives me crazy because for me, it explains people’s lack of trust.
It explains it not entirely but partially,
Journalism is a distinctive profession.
You may meet amongst journalists,
people who are two weeks away from retirement
and still have a fire in their belly.
They’re ready to leave for Syria to cover the war.
They’re ready to investigate to pull out a scoop
because they’ve had wind of something …
They’re ready to produce the best paper on Earth
with the best photos and the more powerful headings.
They still have a fire in their belly.
On the other side, you have people who came out of school
just two months ago and are already a bit cynical or blasé.
I have two good news for them.
The first is that while performing this study,
at the point of publishing it and a little afterwards,
some reporters and chief editors reacted,
among them France Bleu for example, which has taken down the relevant articles
which is not necessarily the best thing to do.
I would have preferred them to keep the article and modify it.
Anyway, it’s good to respond as did France Bleu.
You are feeling less alone when you can see
that other journalists out there have that high level of requirement.
More recently, Rue89 published an article to explain
that they have been scammed by a fake information.
As it happens, it was about a teen girl
who had lodged a complaint against her parents
for photos of her shared on Facebook.
Maybe you’ve heard about it; this teen girl wasn’t happy
and it’d been shared everywhere.
And it was fake. There was nothing true about it.
Rue89 had been fooled and what did they do?
They published an article explaining that they had been fooled.
Furthermore they apologized to their readers
for having shared false information.
It doesn’t happen that often that’s why I mention that story.
The second good news which I’ll leave you with
is that it isn’t necessarily difficult to improve information.
A message is sometimes enough to induce a response from editors
who you think are somewhat apathetic or disillusioned.
For example, to prepare for this TED Talk, I’ve made some screenshots.
You remember the screenshot of Le Point with the story of the dwarf strip-teaser.
The day before yesterday when I fell back on this story,
and saw that it was still online although I had called them
and published my article;
then I tweeted for fun, a little naughty tweet.
What happened last night, when I tried to post this article?
Well, it no longer exists. It had been taken down.
See? It just took a single well shared tweet
for someone somewhere at Le Point to wake up
and say to himself, “Enough of this dwarf strip-teaser story. Let’s remove it.”
(Laughter)
And this brings me to the idea I’d like to leave with you this evening.
It is the idea that you must be demanding with journalists.
You must notify them when there are errors.
You must put a friendly pressure on them so that they do their job better.
The more the public are active, the more journalists will react,
and the better the information will be.
Because it is through your demands that we’ll be able to rebuild confidence.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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