Nicholas Stuart | Ben Roberts-Smith defamation ruling an important victory for the truth

What's far more significant today is that the internet has changed the way we communicate. It encourages people to surround themselves with messages they want to hear. The internet allows us to shape our own reality.

Fact becomes contested with interpretation. Reality begins to disappear into a mist of contested arguments over what actually occurred.

That's why what happened last Thursday is so critical - not just for the media, but for society. A court insisted we can know what's happened. Truth can be discovered. Not everything is contextual and the real world does exist.

After more than a year of detailed legal argument a judge said he believed investigative journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters. Justice Anthony Besanko found, on the balance of probability, that Australia's most decorated soldier needlessly and callously murdered Afghan civilians.

Like Major-General Paul Brereton's earlier, exhaustive report into war crimes, Besanko's finding washed straight through the miasma of excuses, exculpation and justification to discover exactly what did occurr in Orzgan more than a decade ago.

It was murder, not war.

What happens matters, as does the way we interpret and mythologise events into our national story. It says who we are and offers a guide to the sort of society we want to live in. This is why news is do critical. Journalism reflects the way we see ourselves. It shapes our society. Reporting establishes what is (and isn't) acceptable.

The news we share and the way it's treated in the media reinforces the vital moral code of values underpinning our world. Without it society would not exist. We only come together when we share stories about what's happening and use them as a way of determining what is, and isn't, acceptable behaviour.

That's why old media, particularly newspapers, remain so important.

Communication - speech - is a straight line. Somebody speaks or writes; another person listens or reads. Publishing, crucially, inserts a third party into this act. A journalist or editor has ploughed their way through everything that's happened to choose the particular elements of news that are vital if you want to understand the way the world works. That's not the way the internet works.

Meta and Twitter outsource all the work to you, making it your job to find and surround yourself with a mirrored reflection of comfortable facts to suit your preconceived notions. These companies aren't governed by the discipline of being forced to provide shared stories on a one to many model; instead they target titillating stories tailored directly to meet your individual prejudices.

It's a one-to-one engagement, free from any constraints or community. A place where facts can be chosen to build whichever interpretation you desire. The only problem is they might not be real.

Stories are about choosing how we see the world. We always highlight particular moments and events as we describe what's happening. The bigger the audience, the less exaggeration and interpretation. What's different about the internet is it's tailored to an audience of one. Nothing drags you out of the rabbit hole to show you that a bigger world exists because that's not a model that works. This is why a couple of huge American companies shouldn't be allowed to determine what we see.

Companies like Google effectively own the internet and unfortunately government (with the possible exception of Industry Minister Ed Husic) seems unwilling to regulate it. Instead we allow a continuous stream of videos and content to keep us distracted and helpless. Reality isn't part of the business model.

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Portals like Twitter allow people to live in their own, individually constructed reality. Chat GPT and other large language models similarly risk blurring the already thin line between what's fake and what's real. AI is brilliant but it can't produce knowledge: it can't discover information, news, that's not there. It can't report or ask questions - simple skills which are the foundation of journalism. It just summarises, brilliantly, what already exists.

Which explains my own new journalism project.

Writing this column for the best part of two decades offered a wonderful opportunity of engaging with a wonderful community.

A terrible car crash in Bangkok ended my ABC career as a foreign correspondent. Writing this column for The Canberra Times and ACM offered me a new chance to learn how to think about the world. The time has come now to stop and, instead, contribute. A generous grant from the Snow and John James foundations and Hands Across Canberra has established ability.news, a free website dedicated to informing, connecting and empowering people with disability in the ACT and surrounding region.

Knowledge is always the key to unlocking opportunity. By providing honest, reliable news, stories and information about the disability sector we'll be helping those who want it to thrive and work effectively, as the NDIS intended.

Today our website is just an idea. Over the coming months however, we'll be populating it with information so it can become an integral resource for the sector, linking people together with the resources they need to flourish. Because that's what the media is all about.

But I'm not clever enough to do two things at once. The Canberra Times caters to a physical community: getting ability.news up and running means something different, We will be imagining a new way of creating community, based on shared needs and identities.

I've never intended these columns as theses, insisting how life must be lived. Instead they've been essays - attempts - at making sense of our shared world. Writing has allowed me to begin my recovery and you have been kind enough to allow me to share my ideas - thank you. You've also provided me with the opportunity to share ideas like floccinaucinihilipilification, even though some might think such knowledge worthless.

I hope you've enjoyed reading them as much as I've relished writing them.