NAB Amplify
Fake news has become weaponized in politics and spreads like
wild fire on social media. Now local TV stations are fighting back with NextGen
TV.
An astonishing 8.6 billion incidents of engagement with
unreliable news occurred on social media in 2019 — doubling to a staggering
16.3 billion last year, per NewsGuard Analysis.
Not only is misinformation a risk to life, as in the Capitol
riots, it is undermining the trusted relationship communities have with TV
news.
EW Scripps is doing something about it. Its executives
shared a demo of a News Literacy app it has built using ATSC 3.0 with NAB and
viewable now at NAB Show Premiere, “How Newsrooms Can Engage Audiences With
NextGen TV.”
Almost a quarter of US TV households are already in a market
with a NextGen TV signal with many more launching this year.
NextGen TV allows broadcasters o to write and deliver their
own application as part of their over-the-air communications. That’s because
ATSC 3.0 is the world’s first terrestrial broadcast standard to use IP as its
transport layer.
“Among other things this enables broadcasters to deliver
content via broadcast as well as broadband,” explained Sam Matheny CTO NAB. “A
NextGen compatible TV set can then combine these into a personalized
experience. The apps are written in HTML 5, more commonly associated with
authoring in web browser, but NextGen means audiences can think of their entire
TV screen as a web browser.
“They will have the opportunity to either lean back and be
informed as always or lean in and engage further,” he said.
Using ATSC 3.0, EW Scripps with consultant and integrator
Fincons Group has developed a broadcast app for news literacy to help people
recognize false news. It uses interactive features such as polls and quizzes to
encourage viewers to engage with news stories in real time. Viewers participate
via their remote control or app on their smartphone.
Elen Weiss, Washington Bureau chief for EW Scripps, said,
“News literacy is a fundamental life skill. It teaches us that all
communication is not created equal. News literacy is about enabling citizens to
be active in our democracy by providing the tools to determine what news to
trust, to share and what information to act on. The public is being assaulted
with lots of information that might be seen as credible only because bad
information is masked.”
Unmasking fake news is part of the pact that broadcasters
have with their audience.
“We want to create a better source of trust and say to
consumer that when you watch something from Scripps these are the facts, here is
the background and here are our sources,” said Sean McGarvy, senior director
content strategy at Scripps. “We want to be able to push forward fact-based
reporting and this tech enables us to do that.”
While some people either don’t care or willfully seek out
the news that just matches their existing opinions, many other citizens do care
about the veracity of their information.
“It’s about empowering the audience to get more information
so they don’t have to shop around for multiple sources,” McGarvy argued. “If we
package it correctly, they will have all the information they need. We want to
use NextGen to continue to give audiences the big picture as well as granular
perspectives on an event.”
For example, a Tweet from January 5th, the day before the
Capitol riots, depicted large crowds rallying ahead of the Save America March.
Is it true or false? the Scripps app asks. Turns out to be false with the
picture actually taken from a rally in 2018.
Another example: a picture of soldiers sleeping on the floor
of the Capitol building was misreported on social and shared thousands of
times, as showing dozens of military dead.
In theory, each time such an article appears the Scripps app
places a red marker indicating whether the source can be trusted or not.
Scripps is said to have “a conservative and a liberal CEO to
ensure stories are not biased.”
“This is opening up our notebooks to share where we got the
information,” said Weiss. “At the same time, we don’t want to overwhelm viewers
with information either. We will experiment with what the tolerance is and how
our newsroom staff are capable of mounting this kind of effort. It will take
more people to make this kind of reporting available.”
With news rooms under massive pressure to reduce staff
counts, that the new interactive app requires more time and effort of the
journalists, producers and tech teams will see such engagement limited to
certain events, rather than spread across all newscasts.
“We can take the same tech team familiar with Javascript and
HTML and OTT and apply them directly to NextGen TV. There is no need to ramp up
new skills,” said Bryan Dunbar, CTO. “We don’t generally work that directly
with the newsrooms but we may have to now and build some new tools that news
teams can customize with our help to get a specific point across.”
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