Two days ago, the Telegraph in the UK published a piece entitled “Cambridge University caves to student demands to ‘decolonise’ English curriculum”. The front page of the print edition featured an image leading to the article — a large inset picture of Cambridge University Student Union women’s officer Lola Olufemi. The image is titled “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”. The caption is even more pointed;

Cambridge will replace some white authors with black writers on English courses following demands from Lola Olufemi, the student union women’s officer. Miss Olufemi wrote a letter saying that the curriculum ‘risks perpetuating institutional racism’

The Telegraph Front Page: 25th October 2017

Online the article (which has subsequently been amended), available to read here, repeats the claim in its first sentence with a slight modification to include the theme of ‘decolonisation’:

Cambridge University’s English Literature professors could replace white authors with black writers, following proposals put forward by academic staff in response to student demands to “decolonise” the curriculum.

The call for this change is said to have come from an open letter, written by Olufemi and signed by more than 100 other students.

The article incited a huge response online, particularly within the comments section and threads on Reddit. Many people were angered by what they had read in the Telegraph and were worried about the possible effects.

A comment from the original article (ironically the commentator shares my first name)

However, the response on Twitter was the real story. In today’s age of real-time publishing, an article filled with inflammatory language and inaccuracies can be quickly called out. As a British-born person, my Twitter was quickly filled with tweets like this:

Tweet from @LucyAllenFWR

In response, the Telegraph did what nearly all mainstream media outlets typically do in the situation — they amended the article and published a small correction on page two of the newspaper a few days later. No headline text or image this time. Of course this was again called out on Twitter.

But surely there is a better way to hold the media to account? Especially given all this amazing technology that allows us to do magical things on a daily basis.

The case we are examining here is fairly well publicized, yet only a fraction of the people that saw the front-page (remember it’s not only people that buy the newspaper that see the front-page) and read the story online will see the correction from the publication. In fact anyone reading the article today will only see the amended article.

Now think about all the less publicized stories. The small reports that don’t make it onto page one, or trigger a tweet-storm. Unfortunately there is currently a huge amount of bad reporting that goes uncorrected. The ugly truth is that in an attention economy, if a story does not cause enough controversy the incentives for the publisher to act responsibly are negligible.

Holding the Media to Account

So how do we solve this? Perhaps we can all take to Twitter and write to the journalists. But if the result is just a correction on page two, plus some amends that actually remove any trace of the original story, is that really a win?

We could all boycott the mainstream media and shift towards niche, independent publications unbeholden to outside interests, which I would certainly advocate, yet this does not seem like a realistic proposition.

Some people call for printing clarifications at the same size as the original article. But let’s face it, in a world where the media has little accountability to anyone apart from its advertising partners, this is extremely unlikely to happen. It’s no wonder then that people have lost faith in the traditional media.