A few nights ago, I rewatched the classic movie All the President’s Men, which covered the investigation by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward into the Watergate scandal. It has been fifty years since that movie was released, and it is showing its age. One of the notable differences between its depiction of news media from the 1970s and today is the sea change that has occurred in the profession of journalism.

The newsroom, the place where individual journalists gathered to present their ideas, argue about which items were newsworthy, and decide the layout of the next issue, rushing to get their copy done to submit it to the printing presses, is long gone. This was the age prior to the internet and social media, where media companies actually employed people on a full-time basis to be journalists.

Woodward and Bernstein did all the difficult legwork, chasing up sources, confirming quotes, verifying statistics and submitting their results to their usually cranky senior editor. This was all required before the first printing press machines began rolling, and the typesetting for the intended news stories was completed. Today, at the touch of a keypad, anyone with a social media account can write and submit stories to online platforms.

The contemporary social media ecosystem is certainly more democratic than the hierarchical structures of the major media conglomerates, that is true. More people can easily access news and features across multiple platforms. Video and sound not only accompany articles, but have become constituent components of news content.

Let’s also consider the following; there is ample opportunity for a person to become an online mini-Julius Streicher, spewing hate and venom for everyone in cyberspace to view. It is no secret that the manosphere has successfully captured the attention of millions of young men, susceptible to misogyny and hateful messaging online.

Julius Streicher was the Nazi regime’s propaganda minister. He never fired a single bullet, or threw a grenade. Yet his writings and broadcasts created a climate of hate and fear of the Jewish community. His words incited racial violence. For his role in anti-immigrant violence, he was put on trial and sentenced to death at Nuremberg.

He was hanged because he spent decades criminalising the presence of the Jewish people in Germany. We cannot avoid seeing parallels today, with the explosion of anti-immigrant violence and race riots in Belfast earlier this year. This social explosion did not emerge from nowhere.

The deliberate targeting of refugees and migrants in Belfast was made possible by the deep roots of Protestant loyalism and its associated anti-immigrant ideology. The organised far right Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, spurred on by anti-migrant hostilities, launched their pogroms backed up by new recruits from toxic social media. Their messaging has an impact that goes beyond computers and keyboards.

Belfast 2026 and Kristallnacht 1938 are not so far apart.

The power of social media and digital communication was on display, in a perverse way, with the Belfast anti-immigrant attacks. Mainstream politicians, fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment, have found receptive audiences on social media platforms. It is no secret that Elon Musk, tech mogul and far right influencer, has repeatedly shared anti-immigrant misinformation on his platforms.

The disappearance of the collective newsroom is no accident. Media multinationals have deliberately cut back jobs, reduced financial security, and are now increasingly relying on generative AI to create news and feature items. The Washington Post itself, once the benchmark of liberal journalism, has reduced its workforce by the thousands over the years. Any budding Woodward and Bernsteins would have been cast out, their positions made redundant.

Indeed, journalism is rapidly losing its viability as a long term career. The profession is characterised by increasing precarity, and diminishing job openings and opportunities.

No, I am not suggesting that the future is completely bleak. Freelancers and community-based media are doing their best to perform the function which used to be performed by the fourth estate. However, we must do more than just outsource journalism to precarious freelancers. Politicians must do more than just blandly state ‘we like good migrants’ in the aftermath of pogroms such as Belfast.

We must collectively act to rebuild community journalism as a profession, reviving public trust in the news in this day and age of misinformation and AI-generated slop. Journalists are not corporate stenographers, but fact-checkers and first responders to any misinformation.

In the early 1990s, I watched as major media outlets acted as public relations consultants for the Anglo-American alliance as it built up to the first Gulf War. Actually that engagement should be more correctly called the first attack on Iraq. The corporate media did little more than repeat the fictional claims of London and Washington, amplified by Canberra.

We need to do better than just be spokespersons for imperial power. The late John Pilger demonstrated to all of us how to be an incisive journalist.