In a year marked by dwindling public trust in key institutions and heralded by the theme “Rebuilding Trust” at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos assembly, Emma Tucker, the Wall Street Journal’s Editor in Chief, has called for a reevaluation of how traditional media operates. Recalling a point when the mainstream press was the chief adjudicator of information and facts, she highlighted its demise that came with the rise of alternative media platforms.
Tucker, during a Davos panel supposedly dedicated to the preservation of truth, offered a lament for the era when the press held exclusive dominance over news and facts.
“If you go back not that long ago, We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” Tucker said.
“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”
Not only do her comments reveal a lot about how mainstream media figures see their role in society, her comment painted a clear picture of the power shift that has marked the recent history of the media landscape.
“So it’s no longer good enough for us to say this is what happened, or this is the news. We almost have to explain our working. So readers expect to understand how we source stories, they want to know how we go about getting stories,” she continued.
“We have to sort of lift the bonnet as it were in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing, and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news,” Tucker added.
How about starting with investigation into issues and not writing two paragraphs based on a tweet?