From Storytellers to Journalists: Who Owns the Story?

Long before there were newspapers and journalists, there were storytellers.

Think of a time when there were no smartphones, no internet, no newspapers, nor a printing press. If so, then how did people get news? How did they get to know what was happening on the other side of the world? This is where the storyteller's tale comes into action.

Kh. Ali Ar Raji mentioned the thousands-of-years-old news conveyers in his book on Journalism ‘Sangbadikota: Dwitiya Path’; he called them "The Storytellers." They wandered from town to town, carrying news the way traders carried goods. When they reached a busy bazaar or a king's court, a crowd would gather, and they would begin: what they had seen on the road during their journey, how strangers lived in faraway lands, what had happened in the last kingdom they passed through. Most valuable of all was any event that others needed to know about. Listeners rewarded them with food or a few coins. Kings paid better, and some hired these travellers to gather information from the places they visited, making them informants and spies. Raji traces the journalist's family tree back to exactly these wanderers and argues that reporters grew out of these storytellers, and that the journalist is their latest form. What set the reporter apart was a new discipline: collecting facts with great care and getting them right.

Raji is not the only one who sees the storyteller in the journalist’s ancestry. In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens also finds the roots of journalism long before print, in minstrels, town criers and wandering travellers who gathered news in marketplaces and courts and passed it along by word of mouth. Denis McQuail, in his work on mass communication, makes a similar point: the jobs we now associate with journalism, such as watching the world, explaining it, entertaining people and carrying culture forward, were first done by oral historians, balladeers, town criers and court chroniclers. The press did not invent these roles. It inherited them.

Some storytellers served certain purposes for the rulers, mostly the kings. They were paid to tell good things about kings to the people of the state, and audiences tended to believe what they heard, since the tellers were a major source of information. This is how a false belief could be cultivated in their mind. But the overall process was very slow until the 'Printing Press' came into the landscape. Before Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable-type printing in Europe in the mid-1400s, information moved slowly and reached few people. A message carried by a messenger could take weeks, sometimes months, to arrive, and it would reach only a handful of listeners. Books were copied by hand, one painstaking page at a time, so they were rare and expensive, and knowledge stayed in the hands of kings, priests, and scholars. (Printing itself was not new. Woodblock printing and even movable type had appeared earlier in China and Korea. What Gutenberg did was make the technology spread across Europe.)

The press broke that bottleneck. Thousands of pages could be printed, stored, and sent far and wide, and as many copies as needed could be made. Ideas that once travelled at the speed of a horse now travelled at the speed of a printing shop. Within a century, printed pamphlets were carrying arguments across borders, and by the early 1600s Europe had its first regular newspapers.

But a printing press is like a loudspeaker: it does not care who is holding it. Rulers quickly saw what it could do for them. Instead of reporting facts, they used it the same way they did with storytellers: they used printing presses to say only what they wanted people to hear. Many governments licensed printers and censored what they printed, and papers became a means of publicity, telling the public about the good work rulers claimed to be doing rather than what they were actually doing, and spreading their ideology to the masses.

The same struggle came to our part of the world. In 1780, James Augustus Hicky started Hicky's ‘Bengal Gazette’ in Calcutta, the subcontinent's first newspaper. He filled it with gossip and sharp criticism of powerful colonial officials, including the Governor-General. The authorities struck back. They prosecuted and jailed Hicky, seized his press, and closed the paper in 1782. The first newspaper in our region was also among the first to learn what power does to an inconvenient press.

The most chilling proof that the press can be turned into a weapon came in the twentieth century. When Adolf Hitler's Nazi party took power in Germany in 1933, one of its first steps was to create a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. Its aim was to control every channel through which Germans learned about the world. The state brought newspapers under its control, made editors answerable to the government, and removed journalists who would not comply. Radio, then the newest medium, was pushed into millions of homes through cheap, mass-produced sets. Films, posters and rallies were staged to build one story: that the nation was under threat, that a particular group was to blame, and that one leader had the answer. Repeated relentlessly, a lie began to feel like common knowledge.

The lesson was not that people are foolish. It was that whoever controls the flow of information can shape what a whole society believes. Nazi propaganda worked because it combined three things: a powerful new medium, a single controlled message, and an audience with no easy way to check it.

Now look at our own time. The medium is no longer radio or the printed page. It is the smartphone, and it is far faster. The propaganda minister's ministry has been replaced by something less visible: algorithms that show each person more of whatever keeps them scrolling, and coordinated networks of accounts that can make a claim look like public opinion. The difference is important. In Hitler's Germany, the state controlled a few loud channels. Today no single hand controls the flow, yet the effect can be the same, because false and emotional content spreads faster than careful reporting. In 2018, UN investigators said that social media, and Facebook in particular, had played a 'determining role' in stirring up hatred against the Rohingya in Myanmar, a warning that lies on a screen can lead to real harm.

To see how far we have come, follow the journey in our own region. In 1818, the Serampore missionaries began ‘Samachar Darpan’, the first Bengali weekly, and the Bengali press soon grew into a voice for social reform and, later, for the independence movement. In East Bengal, newspapers carried the arguments of the language movement and the demand for autonomy, and in 1971 the press and radio again played a central role. Radio and television then brought news to people who could not read. From the 1990s, private dailies and television channels expanded the field, and after that the internet arrived.

Each stage changed who could speak and how fast. For decades, a few editors, owners and broadcasters decided what counted as news, and the audience only received it. Online news portals broke the daily deadline, so news no longer waited for the morning paper. Social media then removed the gatekeeper altogether. Today, a student with a phone can film an event and reach more people in minutes than a newspaper once reached in a day. The July 2024 uprising showed both sides of this: footage and organising messages travelled through social platforms, and the shutting down of the internet showed how much people now depend on it.

This is a real gain, but it has a cost. When everyone can publish, no one is responsible for what is published. Rumours are shared as fast as facts, headlines are written for clicks, and newsrooms, hurt by falling advertising, have fewer reporters to check what is true.

The next change is the most disturbing. Artificial intelligence can now write convincing text in seconds, clone a person's voice, and produce video of someone saying or doing things they never said or did. These fakes are called deepfakes. For most of modern history, a photograph, a recording, or a video worked as evidence. Deepfakes threaten that.

The danger is twofold. The first is the obvious one: a fake video of a leader, a fabricated confession, or a forged voice message can spread before anyone can disprove it. The second is quieter. When people know that anything can be faked, they can also dismiss real evidence as fake. A politician caught on camera can simply say, "It's AI." In a society where nothing can be trusted, the biggest winner is anyone who profits from confusion, an outcome that would have suited the Nazi propagandists, and one that can now be reached at a fraction of the effort.

Look back over the whole journey. It began with a storyteller in the bazaar, who was trusted only as far as his listeners could believe him. It moved through Hicky's fearless gazette, then through Gutenberg's press and the Bengali papers that fought for reform. It passed through the propaganda machines of the twentieth century and has arrived at a world of endless screens. The tools changed beyond recognition, from voice to print to radio to television to the internet to AI. The central problem never did: how do people know what is true, and who can they trust to tell them?

According to Raji, the value of a journalist lies in a set of qualities: careful collection of facts, impartiality, the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, and accountability for mistakes. The audiences, tired of being lied to by rulers, officials, and businesses, still expect honesty from journalists. That expectation matters more now than ever. In an age of deepfakes, the journalist's discipline of checking, verifying, and taking responsibility is not made obsolete by technology. It is the one thing that machines cannot supply for us.

The storyteller has always been essential. But the future belongs to the storyteller who can be trusted, and that includes each of us who reads, shares, and believes what appears on our screens.