In this episode, Edward Stourton, the veteran journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme, examines how truth can survive in a digital age, and explains why truth-telling still matters.
He was delivering the Sir Tony Baldry Lecture in Winchester Cathedral on 28 February, as part of the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature (Features, 7 March).
“Technology can create challenges as well as opportunities,” he says. “Today’s digital landscape offers us an abundance — a superabundance — of sources for information, something unimaginable in the 1940s, and, indeed, in the three-television-channel world I joined in the 1970s. If we’re offered several versions of the truth, it is only natural to prefer the version which best fits our views and prejudices, and that’s a real challenge facing us in what’s sometimes called the mainstream media. So, how do we meet that challenge?”
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