Standards Of Information

Standards Of Information

In a previous post I said that I think that the British Standards Institution should create a standard for information integrity to which media might sign up or not, as they wished, with the obvious connotations. I feel that even more strongly now.

Institutions are not just bricks, mortar and committees but can be abstract as, for instance, in the British reputed insistence on fair play in sport. That, at one time, was an accepted British characteristic and, as such, an abstract institution. As an aside, a French IT colleague once said to me that the English breakfast was not really a meal but an instituiion. Something simuilar, in my youth, was true of The Times newspaper; it rigourously separated news reporting from opnion so that you knew which was which in any article you were reading and could make up your mind accordingly. Again we have an abstract institution, in this example on information integrity. And, in times past, the BBC was viewed by millions throughout the world as a medium through which they could learn the truth when they could not rely on their national media. That may still be true of foreign news coverage but…...

It’s a personal view, but I think that all these previously respected abstract institutions have more recently failed to live up to their billing, generally quite demonstrably so. The void that needs to be filled is one of integrity. There are practical difficulties as I know from personal experience in chairing an IT standards committee at BSI in 1996. Standards typically take around 2 years to formulate, for practical not bureaurocratic reasons, but can be fast-tracked in around 9 months (as my own committee did). Any standard implies at least and may specifically state tests that have to be passed to meet the standard and some very simple tests on reasonable attempts to verify facts are possible. Indeed, the assumed professuonal code for journalists implies most of the tests. I think we need such a standard on the integrity of published information as soon as possible. Without it, the population at large is at the mercy of very clever manipulators and the considerable sums needed to employ them. If you disagree, are you happy to be manipulated or what would you suggest ?