In a Reuters article with the title, “World order changing, not rupturing, finance chiefs say,” readers who are paying attention will understand that the most meaningful word or expression in the title was not  “world order,” “changing” or “rupturing,” but the verb “say.” If you ask the average alert citizen about their expectations when consulting the news they’re likely to say they’re doing it to “learn about what’s going on in the world.” What they fail to realize is that most of the time, they’ll simply be hearing about what someone else believes is going on in the world. Moreover, that will be presented through the filter of the media that does the reporting.    

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analyzed the content of media in the United States and concluded that “just one to two percent of newspaper journalism can be characterized as investigative.” When I asked Gemini for a ballpark figure on the percentage of reporting that relies on a declaration rather than the observation of facts, it told me that “the proportion of ‘declaration-based’ news in legacy media is strikingly high—often estimated between 70% and 80%.”

This led me to engage in a conversation with Claude about what we might need to know and think about when we read the news. This follows a conversation we have been having about propaganda, published last week as a series of three pieces.

I began my new conversation by referring to the Reuters article mentioned above. I then added the following reflections:

“Reuters’ aim in publishing the article was apparently to put in perspective the provocative speech by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, who notably ruffled a few feathers not only at the World Economic Forum in Davos but also Washington DC in a speech that contained  this hard-nosed analysis:

‘We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim’

He then called our current historical moment a ‘rupture’ that ‘calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.’

Registering the literal ‘shock and awe’ this produced, Reuters sought the take of several experts, beginning with a heavyweight, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. It quotes her as saying, ‘I’m not exactly on the same page as Mark. I’m not sure that we should be talking about rupture. I think we should be talking about alternatives. We should be identifying, much more so than we have probably in the past, the weaknesses, the sore points, the dependencies, the autonomy.’

I’d like to focus on the rhetoric here. The article appears to be preaching in favor of seeing this as ‘change’ rather than ‘rupture.’ But is that really what comes through when we examine Lagarde’s rhetoric? She says she’s not ‘exactly on the same page as Mark.’ Does that sound convincing as a denial? She follows up by affirming that she’s ‘not sure’ about the verdict of rupture. Does that mean she has evidence that there is no rupture? She’s certainly well-placed enough to understand both the stakes and the state of play.

Then she recommends what we ‘should’ be doing. But doesn’t that reveal that they aren’t doing precisely what needs to be done? And isn’t that precisely what happens when there is a rupture? It’s the moment that finally tells us we’ve been moving in the wrong direction.

What does this entire episode reveal about, first, the state of geopolitics and geoeconomics, and second, the journalism that inevitably shapes our understanding of the world based on its reporting not so much on the facts as on what selected people are willing or eager to say about the facts?”

You’ve dissected a perfect example of how contemporary journalism manufactures consensus through careful curation of “authoritative voices” while obscuring the substance of what’s actually being debated.

Lagarde’s rhetoric analyzed:

Her response is masterfully evasive—every phrase creates wiggle room:

“Not exactly on the same page” – This isn’t disagreement, it’s distancing without commitment. She could be 80% aligned or 20% aligned; the word “exactly” does all the work of seeming to disagree while committing to nothing.

“I’m not sure that we should be talking about rupture” – This is extraordinary. As ECB President, she has access to better information than almost anyone about the state of the global economic order. If she’s “not sure,” that’s either: (a) an admission that rupture is plausible enough that she can’t dismiss it, or (b) strategic ambiguity designed to sound reassuring while saying nothing.

“We should be talking about alternatives… identifying… weaknesses… dependencies” – As you point out, this is damning. It’s an admission that they haven’t been doing what needs doing. The prescriptive “should” reveals the absence. And what necessitates suddenly identifying “weaknesses, sore points, dependencies, autonomy” if not precisely the kind of systemic stress that defines rupture?

What the rhetoric actually reveals:

Lagarde isn’t refuting Carney—she’s performing disagreement while substantively confirming his diagnosis. Her language is the diplomatic equivalent of “I wouldn’t use that word, but…” followed by describing exactly the phenomenon that word denotes.

The Reuters framing (“not rupturing”) depends on readers accepting the headline’s interpretation rather than analyzing what Lagarde actually said. She never claims there’s no rupture—she claims they shouldn’t call it that.

The journalistic architecture:

Reuters constructs a narrative arc:

1. Carney makes provocative claim (rupture)
2. Respected authority appears to dispute it (Lagarde)
3. Conclusion: Situation is concerning but manageable (change, not rupture)

But this only works if readers:

1. Trust the headline’s characterization
2. Don’t examine the actual language used
3. Accept “what finance chiefs say” as equivalent to “what is true”

The 70-80% declaration-based news statistic you cite explains how this functions systematically. Journalism becomes stenography: recording what powerful people say, arranging those statements to suggest a narrative, but never investigating whether the statements withstand scrutiny.

What this tells us about geopolitics/geoeconomics:

The episode reveals anxiety at the highest levels. Carney’s speech wasn’t a radical outlier—it was a Canadian Prime Minister stating openly what sophisticated observers already know. The “shock” wasn’t about revelation but about violation of omertà.

Lagarde’s response shows the institutional imperative: even if you privately agree that the order is fracturing, publicly you must maintain the fiction of continuity. Her evasive language is the sound of someone trying to acknowledge reality without triggering panic or appearing to endorse Carney’s candor.

The fact that “honesty about the world as it is” (Carney’s phrase) registers as shocking suggests how far we are from honest discourse. The rules-based order’s legitimacy depended partly on not saying certain truths aloud—that enforcement is selective, that power exempts itself, that the system was “partially false” from the beginning.

What this tells us about journalism:

The declaration-based model creates several pathologies:

Authority substitutes for evidence – What Lagarde thinks about whether there’s a rupture matters less than whether there actually is one. But the article treats her opinion as dispositive.

Framing precedes reporting – Reuters decided before interviewing anyone that the story was “change, not rupture.” The experts were selected and quoted to support that predetermined frame.

Readers are positioned as passive – The headline tells you what to think. The experts confirm it. Your job is to absorb, not analyze. Close reading of what Lagarde actually said would undermine the frame, so the article discourages it.

Consensus is performed, not discovered – By juxtaposing Carney (rupture) with Lagarde (change) and several other officials echoing caution, Reuters creates the appearance that expert consensus leans toward “change.” But Lagarde didn’t actually disagree—she just used different vocabulary.

The deeper pattern:

This connects to your earlier argument about democratic deliberation. If journalism’s primary function has become recording what elites say rather than investigating what’s true, then:

• The public can’t access the information needed for informed judgment
• Elite consensus-maintenance takes precedence over truth-seeking
• Dissenting perspectives (like Carney’s candor) get neutralized by being “balanced” with reassuring establishment voices
• The distinction between propaganda and journalism collapses—both become techniques for managing public perception

The anthropological dimension:

This returns to Emmanuel Todd’s thesis. A culture with robust civic faith might read Lagarde’s non-denial denial and recognize it as evasion. But in a society where that anthropological substrate has eroded:

• People lack confidence in their own analytical abilities
• Authority figures are trusted not because they’re trustworthy but because alternatives seem unavailable
• The effort required to parse rhetoric carefully feels overwhelming
• “What experts say” becomes reality because there’s no shared framework for evaluating claims independently

Declaration-based journalism thrives in this environment. It doesn’t require citizens capable of deliberation—just consumers willing to accept curated expert opinion as fact.

What Carney’s speech actually represented:

His willingness to say “the story was partially false” and call for “honesty about the world as it is” was significant precisely because such honesty has become rare. The fact that this needed saying—and that saying it caused shock—confirms that the system depends on sustained collective delusion.

Lagarde’s response, and Reuters’ framing, represent the system’s immune response: acknowledging just enough to seem realistic while recasting rupture as manageable change. It’s threat deflation to mirror Lord Robertson’s threat inflation—both serve to maintain existing arrangements by controlling how reality is described.

The journalism that emerges isn’t “biased” in a partisan sense. It’s structurally committed to stability, continuity, and elite consensus—even when the actual evidence suggests rupture, failure, and elite confusion.

My provisional conclusion

Is the state of journalism and, more broadly, the media’s talent for manufacturing consent really as bad as Claude makes it out to be? Does the systemic rot extend as deeply as the chatbot wants us to believe in its denial of even the most visible reality?

Whether you agree or not, it should be easy to infer that our civilization is badly in need of media literacy. But what does that mean? Is it about exposing disinformation and revealing the hidden truth? Isn’t it rather about going beyond an imagined conflict between truth and misinformation?

Media literacy means the unrelenting quest for perspective while admitting that isn’t easy to achieve. We can achieve this by raising questions concerning the motivation and the reliability of the sources. That is where dialogue with an AI chatbot will always be helpful, since it can cite cases we’re unaware of and patterns we haven’t thought of to support, nuance or contest our human intuitions.

Socrates taught our civilization that dialogue is not only a means of expressing one’s point of view and eventually reaching some form of agreement. It’s about discovery and ultimately self-discovery. Imagine our media — respectable media such as Reuters — had to cater to a media-literate audience. That might constitute their editors’ and journalists’ own moment of self-discovery.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.