Mat Kenyon


Spotlight 08 Informed


News Recovery Plan is the NUJ’s manifesto for the media and will provide the basis for conversations with this new government on shoring up public service broadcasting and a BBC that has been batered by politicians with an agenda to undermine it and starve it of cash. Te NRP says: “Te BBC’s funding model must protect and sustain the principle of universality and its funding setlement must be sufficient to guarantee quality journalism and news programming.” In her speech to the International


News Recovery Plan


Te NUJ’s media roadmap has been revamped to encompass the union’s policy on AI and to stem a growing lack of trust in the media, reports Frances Rafferty


Te NUJ’s News Recovery Plan (NRP) was produced in response to the threat to the media industry during the pandemic – posed by those disseminating disinformation, misinformation, racism and partisan agendas – and to provide a path to a future media landscape rooted in public interest journalism. Four years later, it is needed more than


ever and its mixture of principles and pragmatic proposals has been updated to take in the threat of generative AI, the use of which is now being monitored by the NUJ across workplaces. It also notes how the cost-of-living crisis has added significant additional pressure to an already beleaguered sector and that the news industry’s response has been a business-as-usual one of more cuts and redundancies. Te UK has a new government. Te


Federation of Journalists’ annual general meeting in London, where the global trade union leaders were given a preview of the plan, Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary, quoted a Reuters Institute report which looked at the levels of trust in journalism. She said: “In the UK it’s actually weakened – the proportion of those who trust most news most of the time is 35 per cent, down from 51 per cent in 2015. Compare that to Ireland where it’s stayed static at 46 per cent over the same period. We all know as journalists that trust is hard to build, but easy to lose.” Four years on since the pandemic began, the levels of disinformation and misinformation swimming around social media platforms have vastly increased, with Russian and Chinese cyber-farms cynically undermining democratic discourse. Te political scene is becoming ever more polarised, extreme right parties are in the ascendant and the spectre of a Trump- led United States a growing possibility. Michelle said: “Right now the


pressures on journalism and journalists are at their most grave at a time when we need quality, trusted information and news more than ever. “Yet levels in public trust are impaired,


frontline news resources have been hollowed out in many media outlets aſter successive cutbacks; the levels of deliberate engagement in mis- and dis-information by a range of actors are unparalleled; a combination that


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