World News Day: Michael Miller on why truth needs backing

By Michael Miller, Executive Chairman, News Corp Australasia

Today marks World News Day, when newsrooms worldwide make the same point in unison: that trustworthy reporting isn't a luxury, it's a lifeline. This year, that point needs making more urgently than most.

Democracies run on a shared set of facts.

Courts, elections, markets, even ordinary arguments at the dinner table - depend on people being able to agree on what actually happened, before they debate what to do about it.

Strip that away, and you don't get healthy discussion. You get a society where people shout past each other, from entirely different versions of events.

That shared footing is now under real pressure, and the pressure is building, not easing.

A force for good, and for fakes

Artificial intelligence can be an extraordinary force for good - accelerating research, widening access to knowledge, saving people time.

But the same technology is equally capable of generating convincing falsehoods at a volume and speed no previous era of misinformation could match.

Even the leaders of the companies building these systems are admitting the problem.

In Australia in the last week OpenAI admitted an AI agent had ignored protocols by breaking into a Medicare data portal.

This followed an earlier admission its GPT-5.6 Sol was found to have written itself internal notes on how to hide its errors from users rather than correct them.

If the makers of the technology are worried, the rest of us should also be alert to the danger.

The illusion of knowledge

Part of what makes this moment different is how convincingly this disinformation now arrives.

A recent academic study out of Europe put a name to the phenomenon - "the illusion of knowledge": the more people consume AI-generated summaries, the more informed they feel, even as their actual understanding of the reality gets weaker.

The tools sound authoritative regardless of whether what they're saying is true, because fluency and accuracy have quietly become two separate concepts.

These AI models are engineered to maximise engagement, so the facts are constructed in a way that keeps people coming back for more.

That gap between feeling informed and being informed, is where the real damage happens: in the choices individuals and societies make while believing they know more than they actually do.

The human toll

The human toll on the dilution of truth is already being felt.

Scammers are using AI-generated video and voices to impersonate loved ones and drain retirees' savings.

Criminals are manufacturing fake identities and fraudulent documents at industrial scale.

In Australia alone, scams and fraud enabled by these tools costs the community well over two billion dollars annually - and that figure is rising as the technology improves.

When nobody is left watching

There is a quieter cost too, one that's easy to miss until it's gone: the disappearance of local reporting.

With more revenue flowing to tech platforms, local newsrooms have closed, creating news deserts, and leaving no one to cover council decisions, court proceedings, or how public money is spent.

A 2024 study measured what follows: when local news coverage disappears, corruption in that community rises by roughly seven per cent.

That's not a coincidence - it's what happens when nobody is left watching.

Back the people who check

None of this is unfixable, but it won't fix itself.

A well-functioning society still needs people whose job is to check, verify, and report what's actually happening - and that work only survives if it's supported, read, and paid for.

So today, on World News Day, the ask is straightforward: back Australian journalism.

Subscribe to it. Trust it over a slick, unsourced summary.

Because as the tools for manufacturing fiction keep improving, the case for championing the people committed to fact only grows stronger.