Information, ethics and post-truth

Abstract

Information continues to be, after many hazardous centuries, the key idea that has given rise to the journalistic profession. Its raison d'être is to be able to serve as a link between outer reality and the knowledge of citizens. After many years, and as far as Spain is concerned, information is going through moments of strong confusion in its three components: journalists, the media businessmen and the public general. In the opinion of many professionals, this confusion might be leading to an eventual disappearance of the profession as it has been understood for many decades or, at least, to a distortion of its aims as they have been proclaimed since the beginning of its existence.

Here we sum up the main ideas of a book to be published very soon, Ética Informativa en la Era de la Posverdad, where a more extensive development of them can be read. The reasons why these changes are taking place must be analyzed from three perspectives: the essential traits of information: truth and objectivity; information deontology, as a moral and an ethical bases of information activity; and post-truth, with its twin sister, fake news, which mean the real and most serious attacks on information currently happening, to its waterline, the information truth.