We now move to the short debate, and I call on Bethan Sayed to speak on a topic she has chosen—Bethan.

Thank you. I decided to bring this debate forward this week because I've been considering the wider question of the quality and plurality of the Welsh media since being elected in 2007. In 2017, I said to my party conference that, quite often, the problem in Wales wasn't fake news but no news. I said it because it reflected what I and many others perceived to be such a scarcity of media in Wales, particularly when it comes to politics and current affairs. The lack of a wider established media—with national news in Wales essentially being dominated by three organisations, with, let's be fair, variations of quality and scale on occasion—means that there is a dangerous vacuum that could be filled by those with an agenda to mislead.

First, let's talk about the background to this. Of course, this first became a phenomenon in 2016, however, I would argue that this became an understandable and identifiable issue much further back. Fox News in the United States started deliberately misleading and presenting news that they called 'fair and balanced' in a way that is anything but a long time ago. In the year 2000, a constant campaign against Vice-President Gore of misinformation, including repeated claims, misleading ones, that he invented the internet, helped contribute to defeat.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the channel lost all sense of balance or even the facade of impartiality in their coverage of that Iraq war, with one reporter declaring, 'Am I biased? You're damned right I am.' Here, of course, we're long used to tabloids and have become used to needing to take some stories with the proverbial grain of salt. We know, on occasion, that tabloids misrepresent and even outright resort to falsehoods and smears to further a political agenda.

What worries me, and should worry everybody, is the vacuum that is being filled online with sources. Many people simply do not know the veracity of the source, they have no idea what they're sharing is from an illegitimate, bot-like website and assume that what they are reading is the truth. I'd like to give you two poignant examples—one manipulation from the left and one from the right of politics. I chose both because I won't discriminate here. If the right makes mistakes or makes fake stories to fulfil an agenda, it's wrong, it's bad. And if the left do the same, it is likewise wrong. It is an attack on the truth and an attempt to confuse and mislead people.

This is a passage from what is claimed is former Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, on immigration, and I quote:

'This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our Christian beliefs, or Our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, ‘THE RIGHT TO LEAVE’.'

This a hoax, of course, it's actually excerpts from an editorial by a US conservative congressman. The point of such a blatant hoax is to help legitimise views such as this by associating them with a world leader. These words, attributed to Gillard, were shared hundreds of thousands of times.

Suzy Davies took the Chair.

My second example is a photo, apparently of the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota in 2017. The aim was to prevent a pipeline being built across Native American lands—I nearly said ‘naked’, then, but that would have been another story altogether—threatening their environment and water supplies. Some activists clearly decided that it would be good to inflate the size of the protests and accuse the media of covering them up. What they did was stand in an actual photograph of the Standing Rock protest with a photo of the Woodstock festival in 1969 in New York state—thousands of miles and 48 years out of place. Again, the rationale for the action is clear: how do we confuse people so that they don’t understand what the true nature of a particular moment in time is? Not just bend the truth, not just exaggerate, but lie. The bigger and more brass-necked the lie is, apparently, the further it seems to be able to travel. It’s a truly sorry state of affairs, not to mention a very worrying one.

There is a need for an escalated and more urgent public debate regarding this whole issue, and we must focus on some potential solutions. Firstly, we have to make room and help facilitate a renewal in local press and news. Hyperlocals, supported at first by Government, if necessary, can potentially provide an effective and trusted alternative, and help people back into a habit of recognising a trusted news source. We already know that local news is trusted far more than any other type of news, and social media news is trusted far less. Fifty-nine per cent of people surveyed for the 2018 Edelman trust barometer said they were unsure what they see in the media is true and about what isn’t, while nearly seven in 10 said they worry about fake news being used as a weapon. Only one in four British people trust news that they see on social media, whilst trust in local news is three times greater than Facebook.

As part of the budget deal with Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party, we came to an agreement to supply £200,000 in seed money to hyperlocals; an important first step. It’s part of having an honest discussion here in Wales, so lacking in a pluralistic media, about whether we see news and current affairs as crucial to our civic life. Do we see news and the media as just another commercial entity, or something vital to the health of our democracy and society? Do we dare to begin having a wider discussion on whether we begin to offer wider funding for journalism and independent media, particularly on a local level? This is something that’s done in other countries as a matter of discourse. It isn’t completely out of the realms of acceptability, and it may well need to be necessary.

We in Plaid Cymru have also called for a long time for the devolution of broadcasting powers and other regulatory mechanisms surrounding the media. If those powers were here, we could consider solutions right for the country where there is a lack of a competitive pluralistic news media environment. So, perhaps a charter to supply Welsh versions of newspapers, perhaps a closer step to a more competitive media environment. Hopefully, one day, we could get all broadcasters to stop placing items such as NHS stories from England at the top of their UK news agenda. It’s the kind of thing that I also class as misleading news, but in this country it seems to be accepted.

I believe this would start to fill the vacuum in Wales before fake news, on a Welsh level, was able to move in. However, in broader terms, there is a major global problem. The solutions to tackling it are not easy, even though we can be heartened by the knowledge that so many people do not necessarily believe what they see online. The challenge is also to alleviate confusion online so that more people can more clearly identify what is fake and what is real, what is objective and fair journalistic analysis and what is a hack piece written with an agenda behind it. It’s also crucial that we separate real journalists and decent political commentators from influencers who peddle a fantasy of lies.

The challenge was summed up in November last year, when the Daily Mail referenced a 10-day-old tweet, with no evidence, of a lorry crashing into pedestrians and gunshots around Oxford Circus in London. The resulting article, again with no evidence, was then referenced by the so-called Tommy Robinson, who tweeted,

How long before we find out that today’s attack in Oxford Circus was by a Muslim?

So, there is a need to ascertain who is genuine and a real influencer and/or a journalist and who is not. We also have to start really calling out the standards of tabloids’ news sources and those with a specific political allegiance. When there is a falsehood, it should be up to us as politicians, regardless of our position on the political spectrum, to call it out for the good of democracy. 

But there must be more robust procedures in place, using and promoting our existing watchdogs to do their jobs, and to be able to do it more effectively. We should be promoting those with good journalism degrees and industry accreditation. We should be using and promoting the Independent Press Standards Organisation as a wider standard bearer, and promoting it as a place to complain about misleading sources. This needs to be part of a wider education programme surrounding trusted and verifiable sites and news sources, encouraging the use of fact-checkers, broadening understanding, for example.

I would hope, too, that we can encourage the use and more consumption of news in general this way. I understand that we live in a time dominated by social media, but we're also in a time dominated in many respects by a vastly changing world. It would be good to use this opportunity to encourage even greater participation.

So, I've brought this debate here today because we need to keep the focus on what is a growing menace. We know that foreign actors are using these strategies to undermine elections and swing public debate. Even though most people don't necessarily believe what they read on Facebook or other social media networks, the stories being peddled, the memes, the comments from bots, are all part of a general environment of confusion and gaslighting, all designed to make us question the value of news and question what we believe, to force us to consider whether institutions we've trusted forever, our whole lives, are bringing us the skilled analysis and coverage. This is something that really, really worries me in that regard.

There is a final point to make. This also has to include politicians. This terrible phenomenon has become widespread, in part because politicians have helped to foster it. Some politicians have expertly and, at times, crudely, set large sections of the public against trusted journalists, and onto untrusted sources that share their agenda, whether it's Trump in the USA, Orbán in Hungary or President Duterte in the Philippines. Politicians and political systems have to recognise themselves when they are crossing the line into the bounds of misleading and lies, and check themselves for the good of our democracy.

To finish, I'd like to play a short clip now from my brother, Ciaran Jenkins, who is an investigative journalist for Channel 4. He's done various amounts of reporting on this in the Philippines and also in parts of Europe, where there are young boys who are actually making a living in poverty-stricken states to ensure that they can perpetuate the idea of fake news. So, I'd like to finish with that and to give us food for thought as to how we can stop fake news growing here in Wales.

An audio-visual presentation was shown. The transcription in quotation marks below is a transcription of the oral contributions in the presentation.

Ciaran Jenkins: 'In the Philippines and the incredible story of the democratically elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Thousands of people were killed on the streets of the Philippines, and still are, by vigilante death squads, legitimised by the president himself. And yet, in that country, there was remarkably little public dissent to what was happening, even though more people had been killed under his watch than under the previous dictatorship. It transpired that social media usage in the Philippines is among the highest in the world, and we found people offering paid-for services in which they could set out to undermine a message that someone of influence disagreed with. These were paid-for armies of social media trolls who would attack a rival social media influencer with the purpose of undermining their credibility, to give the impression of resistance to that message and to promote an alternative message, even if that message was extreme or way off the common consensus.'

'You have trolls working for you.' 

'Yes.'

Ciaran Jenkins: 'And you create fake Facebook profiles which you then operate and pretend to be other people.' 

'Yes, yes, yes.' 

Ciaran Jenkins: 'Armand Nocum says he has operatives across the Philippines controlling 30 or 40 fake accounts each.'

'So, if I'm a political candidate in the Philippines and I say something against your candidate, will your trolls attack me?' 

'Yes, by the hundreds of them. We are capitalising on the tendency of people to go where many are going. You'd call that "herd mentality".' 

Ciaran Jenkins: 'Herd mentality.' 

'We'd be naive, I think, if we didn't think that these sorts of things were also happening within our own democratic systems. What the two stories I did have in common is they showed the mechanisms by which it is possible to undermine the general public's faith in facts and truth and reality. I think the question that we have to ask always with fake news is: who gains, who benefits when people's relationship with the truth is so fundamentally undermined?'

Well, I call on the Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport to reply to the debate—Dafydd Elis-Thomas—and perhaps to the film as well.

May I in the first instance thank Bethan Sayed for introducing such a philosophical topic, which gives me an opportunity to continue with the seminar, possibly? Because, clearly, as a Government, our powers in relation to the media are limited by the legislation surrounding devolution. I don't want to rehearse the issues over the devolution of broadcasting, but in my view the reason for not arguing for devolution of broadcasting is that we would then be talking about seeking control that would possibly be very limited or even fake control over one platform, whilst I think it's important to look—as we've been encouraged to do by Bethan Sayed in this debate—at the fundamental questions surrounding citizenship and participation, which relate to this whole question.

The media in any society are a means to have discourse and debate, and where that media is controlled by a minority of any kind—be that a powerful minority by virtue of the structure of the organisations controlling the media, or as in the example that we saw, towards the end there, of people who were involved with criminality by using and buying people to undermine opinions—then these trends are trends that, in my view, can only be dealt with practically by us as a Government by trying to undermine them. And that is by increasing the emphasis on constructive education on the media and in terms of social understanding of the nature of mass media.

Many years ago, I taught in this area, and I think that we have lost that fundamental emphasis very often, namely that we don't educate the population sufficiently on how to read the mass media. The emphasis is not in our schools or in our courses or perhaps even in places such as this place, where we discuss politics. Perhaps we don't discuss the fact that understanding relies on the ability of the individual and any specific group that one is part of to be able to analyse what is being said.

And therefore I have to say that I find it very difficult as a former part-time philosopher to respond to a debate where one can talk about 'the truth' or 'the reality' or 'the events', because as they were reported, as they occurred. Because, to me, every event is analysed and interpreted. Therefore, what we need to help to create is an active population that can analyse intellectually, that feel as soon they hear any statement, about any event, that the next question that should arise is: well, what really happened? Not that one can find the truth or identify the truth, because the person who is receiving the message wasn't involved in the event and wasn't witness to it in that sense, but that one actually develops an intellectual understanding and curiosity. I think that's central to this.

Therefore, what I will take from this debate is the need for us, as a Government—and this is an issue not just in terms of culture or the media, but particularly in terms of the curriculum and education—that we do seek to find out how we can use the new curriculum for Wales so that our children and young people will be citizens who have an understanding of ethics and can evaluate and use evidence and can become critical citizens, because the only truth in my view—and I’ve used that word myself now—but the only effective way, I should say, to respond to any fake news is by analysing what an event is and what is one’s understanding of that event.

The weakness of the term 'fake news' is that it suggests that there is such a thing as true news. All news is a description of an incident or an event, therefore we have to develop that understanding to see through what happened and to be critical in our understanding of it. Understanding democratic responsibilities and rights means that we have to understand that prejudice is commonplace in society, and that we must also be able to analyse our own prejudice. Did you want to intervene? 

I have a great deal of interest in what the Minister is saying. Accepting of course that there is such a thing as different versions of the truth, does he accept that in this case, of course, the difference is that people are deliberately manipulating the information and conveying information that they know isn’t true or genuine?

Yes, well, one could argue that much of the mass media has been doing that over many years. I don’t think that one can rely on analysing the motives of an individual, but one can analyse the motives of an institution and an organisation and the need to respond to that motive by creating a critical community.

So, we need to raise awareness that every message conveyed on any medium is a message that people, on receiving it, should question. I think that’s crucial to what I'm trying to develop.

Secondly, detailed training is required in the discipline of news gathering for citizens, particularly young citizens, so that people understand the nature of the process of generating news, creating the message, and conveying news, to understand what the meaning of the principles of dealing with information are and that that should be clear and should encourage a greater understanding.

I recall one story that perhaps I shouldn't repeat, but I do feel like repeating it this afternoon. I was part of a debate many years ago with someone who worked for a broadcasting corporation in Wales, and I was seeking to make the argument that there wasn’t enough Welsh news, and the response of the journalist to me was—and the discussion was in English:

'Don't you talk to me about news, boy. News is what comes down from London on the wire.'

Now then, we have to have a clearer understanding than that of the nature of generating news and analysing news; we must share the ability to be creative and critical among our young people; and then consider the question of whether we need to strengthen regulation. But, the priority that I will seek to take forward, following a previous discussion on the budget two years ago, is that we should seek a way of developing journalistic practice at a local level and at a hyperlocal level. And, I think the importance of expenditure on that and the importance of developing creativity through the new national curriculum are two ways by which we, as a Government, can have an influence here.

I don't have a great opinion of what the UK Government is doing in this area at the moment, where a review has been established, but we will follow developments there, of course, in case they do come up with anything constructive. But what I would like to see is whether the culture committee would be interested in returning to this particular point as part of its activities over the next few months so that we can continue with the discussion. Having said that, I am grateful to Bethan Sayed for placing an international emphasis, centrally, on our activities as an Assembly, because we are not just an Assembly for Wales, but an Assembly for Wales in the world.

Thank you very much. That brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 18:01.