Some of the most important media outlets in Colombia published this week the false story of a woman from Barranquilla who claimed to have been the illustrator of
The Boy and the Heron
, the winner of the Golden Globe for best animated film.
El Heraldo
de Barranquilla published, in its printed edition on Sunday, January 14, a glowing review of the non-existent work of Geraldine Fernández:
The Barranquilla talent that won the Golden Globe
, she titled.
Infobae
, a portal with millions of readers in Latin America, went further:
This is the Colombian illustrator who won the Golden Globe with an animated film
.
The newspaper
El Tiempo
, the most read in the country, published:
The Colombian illustrator who worked on The Boy and the Heron
.
The Caracol Radio station:
A Barranquilla station at the summit of animated cinema in the world
.
Dozens of small digital portals and content aggregators published the news.
No one contrasted Fernández's story.
It was social media users who hours later revealed the lie that the young woman recognized this Thursday morning on Caracol Radio, and with a press release in which she stated that “there was never participation in the illustration and design of the film.”
A few weeks ago something similar happened with an alleged study, replicated by many media outlets, which stated that pork rinds were healthier than vegetables.
It was false.
Scientific research didn't even exist.
Months earlier, many media outlets published that a child had been recruited by the ELN guerrilla.
The EFE Agency's data verification team demonstrated that the video, the only source of the information, was an action coordinated by a digital content creator.
In these and other cases, the reaction of the media upon discovering the error was to delete the articles.
Many times they also deleted social media posts that promoted them and even redirected URLs to other content.
Ricardo Corredor, director of the Center for Journalism Studies at the University of Los Andes, explains that in Colombia fake news is becoming more common, and that it is more common to find it in large and prestigious media: “In recent years it has been evident an increase in failures in the editorial processes of many media outlets.”
For Corredor, the problem comes from the economic crisis of the media.
“They have had to greatly reduce their staff, their equipment and the level of professionals.
“The newsrooms are getting smaller and younger.”
Before, he says, a story could go through an editor, a journalist or even a
fact checker
.
Now, in many cases, an editor writes, edits and publishes.
He must make many more notes in a short time, and not only in text, but in video and audio.
“This has reduced the quality of the editorial processes.
“That leads to more mistakes being made.”
Jonathan Bock, director of the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP), tells EL PAÍS that, in the face of the crisis, many media outlets have chosen a business model that reinforces the dynamic that Corredor describes.
They bet on publishing “a very high number of daily news items” to position themselves on social networks and in Google searches, have more users and clicks, and with that negotiate advertising.
“It is common to find many more notes with minor errors, such as misspellings, dates or data.
But a lot of unconfirmed, unverified information is also published.”
Wrong information ends up “impacting citizens' trust in the media,” says Bock.
If news that is not true accumulates, people do not find reasons to differentiate between network content and that of serious media outlets.
In fact, the report from the Reuters Institute, a leading think tank on journalistic issues, from 2023, reveals that only 35% of people in Colombia trust the news, a figure that has been falling from 40% in 2021. the first year in which that report included the country.
Yolanda Ruiz, a member of the Gabo Foundation's ethics office, believes that the problem transcends the media and includes the entire society.
“There is a very large market for misinformation.
There are audiences eager to consume emotional, not rigorous, information.
It is a kind of vicious circle in which we all lose.”
The media replicate and amplify social media trends, audiences pursue those stories, and opinion-makers and
influencers
take up the trend to ride the wave.
“It's like the dog that bites its tail, a chain that is very difficult to break.
Along the way, the rigorous craft of journalism is lost.”
The quest to add visits, the dictatorship of the click, as Ruiz calls it, has meant that good journalism is often relegated and little read or shared.
And the media publish viral and trending content on networks without verifying.
“Sometimes we don't do source verification and publish something because it appeared somewhere else.
“We are making mistakes.”
For this reason, she insists that readers have to ask themselves “about the veracity of the facts even if they are published in serious media.”
An additional problem, she says, is that in the same medium there can be a great report, a very high quality investigation, commercial information disguised as journalistic content, another with biases and a false one.
Bock sums it up like this: “The fact that the media is in this ruthless race to attract the largest number of unsuspecting people so that they do better on the traffic indicators means that they are leaving aside the most important thing: the essential meaning of journalism to provide reliable, supported information.”
This loss of meaning is reflected in the fact that citizens increasingly question the exercise of the media.
The Invamer Gallup survey, which has been carried out periodically in Colombia for 20 years, reflects this discontent.
In 2019, for the first time, negative media perception was greater than positive, a trend that has increased in recent years.
Ruiz, Block and Corredor agree that credibility is most affected when the media does not recognize failures in a transparent and honest manner.
“We all make mistakes, but one would hope that there were protocols to recognize and correct them.
Almost no media in Colombia does that,” says Corredor.
An example of public and open self-criticism are the videos
The Naked Editorial
in which Fidel Cano, the director of
El Espectador
, recognizes and explains the mistakes of the week.
“That should be a general practice, but no,” Corredor continues.
“What the media often does is change the part where they were wrong and that's it.”
The same day that the Geraldine Fernández case broke out, the newspaper
El Tiempo
published an article titled:
Prosecutor's Office will charge the former mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero, for embezzlement
.
A couple of hours later, at Quintero's demand because the information was not true, they changed the title to:
This is how the investigations against Daniel Quintero and several of his files in Medellín are going
.
Nowhere is there an acknowledgment of the error.
This same thing happens every day in many press articles.
For Corredor, the standard should be to correct and include a statement of errors explaining the change and its reason.
“I wish the media had clear policies, public quality commitments, manuals of styles and principles that readers could easily access, in which it was clear what to do after making a mistake.”
Block explains that before there were more tools for defending hearings.
In the newspapers and on television channels there was the reader's defender, a figure that has disappeared due to the same economic crisis.
“It is important to make visible the errors that occur in the media, it is important that they respond by making corrective measures.
Not hiding the dirt under the rug, but with a more direct and transparent relationship with the audiences,” says the FLIP director.
And he concludes: "Otherwise, what we are going to see is the dynamics of recent years: dissatisfied and dissatisfied audiences that end up distancing themselves from the media and seeking information from other sources."
In addition to the absence of these internal protocols, Bock explains that in Colombia “there is no instance, an organization or an independent journalism college where these cases of disinformation can be treated and studied.
In other countries yes.”
He finds this absence of a space for dialogue unfortunate: “I am not saying that it is a State entity, or a public one, but rather an organization of civil society, of academia, in which the errors committed by journalism can be reviewed and pointed out.” .
Ruiz is concerned that these errors, always more visible than the successes, prevent citizens from recognizing the quality journalism that is done every day in many places and in many media.
“There has to be a collective reflection, which begins with the union and includes other parts of society.”
In that reflection, the media cannot evade its responsibility, says Bock.
“This example of Geraldine is really insignificant if she is compared to an intelligence report or a corruption process.
If the media trusts only that voice and does not have a contrast process, we are experiencing a setback in internal review methods.”
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