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The Sun's front page at the height of the Falklands' War in 1982 |
Press delete and start again?
Nick Davies is quick to point out the flaws in journalism, but falls short of providing any solutions, writes Geoffrey Goodman
SOME years ago I joined with a small group of financial experts and marketing “wizards” to plan and promote the concept of launching a new national daily newspaper.
The objective was to offer more honest, truthful, balanced, more intelligent and better quality journalism – albeit still aiming at a “popular” audience.
It was a serious attempt to break away from the declining standards of journalistic offerings such as the facile, biased, often brazenly dishonest characteristics which disfigure much of British journalism – and always have.
The concept collapsed because the “market wizards”, firmly supported by financial advisers, simply declared the idea a non-starter.
Their combined response was: “Who is going to buy such a newspaper – in preference to the Sun, Star, Mirror, Mail and Express or indeed the so-called ‘quality dailies’?”
Answer: Not many. And who would provide the sustained capital necessary to keep it alive? A Rupert Murdoch figure with hundreds of millions to spare – and willing to lose large chunks of it in pursuit of such an idealistic venture?
Or perhaps a publicly financed independent corporation similar to the BBC? The final, depressing verdict was: worthy idea but in practice, sadly, a non-starter.
Yet, it seems to me, that this is precisely the kind of daily newspaper which might just satisfy Nick Davies, the author of this excellently presented book in pursuit of the author’s ideal. Even so I find this book depressingly facile – despite its 408 pages; moreover, it ends inconclusively with the author’s confession that despite having described, often quite accurately, the deep flaws in modern journalism he has nothing significant to propose by way of effective remedies. Not that this failure surprises me in the slightest.
Almost all previous critics of our press and media – including three Royal Commissions since the war – have also failed to offer substantial or persuasive remedies.
Let me first summarise Davies’s argument: Our media, and especially the national press, is misleading, often dishonest; lazy in its pursuit of factual truths; poorly and even cravenly managed; increasingly dominated by a massive public relations industry which consciously misleads the public; and is too easily manipulated by government, the intelligence services and establishment political scheming, and… all this is getting worse.
It is getting worse largely because the obsession with technology has intensified the slipshod, the glib superficialities of our trade in pursuit of a brutally competitive market operating to a 24-hour, seven-day week non-stop clock.
The result of this frenzied environment is too few properly trained and experienced journalists trying, desperately, to operate in a “news factory” system where the end product is Churnalism. That is, churning out unchecked half-truths.
Davies writes: “This is life in a news factory. No reporter who is turning out nearly 10 stories every shift can possibly do his or her job properly… print and broadcast have been swamped by a tide of churnalism.”
No national newspaper escapes Davies’s denunciation – not even his old paper the Guardian, still less so its Sunday partner, the Observer which comes in for Davies’s most withering rebukes.
In this competitive media madhouse, on which Nick Davies focuses, costs are cut and staffing levels reduced while at the same time journalists are required to work harder.
Reporters, glued to their desks, may have to handle two or three screens of information simultaneously, much of which remains unchecked.
They rarely leave their desks in pursuit of a story in the old style of newspapermen.
Scoops are spiked, Davies claims, especially where they might embarrass “authority” and lies (that is, information which mostly cannot be verified) are peddled to curry favour with officialdom. It is a damning indictment.
Davies hired academics at Cardiff’s school of journalism to research staffing levels on national papers and relate these to column inches of news over the past 20 years. The research concluded that the average reporter is now filling three times as much space compared with before.
Davies argues that this “news factory” frenzy penetrates every zone of the media, regional as well as national newspapers, television and radio news as well as foreign news reporting. Added to this, he argues, the internet has turned the scene into an “information madhouse” in which more and more alleged information is poured out often in the form of superficial garbage.
Well, yes, Mr Davies. I think all this is close enough to contemporary reality for me to go along with much of your argument.
Except this: you seem to believe, in a rather magisterial manner, that there was a golden age when all this was quite different. Only up to a point, Lord Copper.
I was in this trade long before the internet and all the modern buzz, indeed even before television, and in my experience journalism at regional and national level has always been a funny old business: a huge amorphous mix of slipshod and wonderful reporting, of sloppy and superb subbing, of often inadequate yet also inspired editing and all too often of megalomaniac proprietors even where they were oft-times sane.
And I have too often experienced editors of genius sometimes struggling with a proprietor who, even if a bit mad, had a genuine love for the smell of newsprint such as, love or loathe him, Beaverbrook.
That was the journalism we grew up with and loved, yet still complained about, often with justice… all well before new technology.
Reading this book I frequently felt irritated by Davies’s pomposity, even where his revelations were well argued and persuasively researched.
Nor is this book original in revealing the errors, misdeeds and sheer bunkum which have long invaded our complex trade.
The serious problems endemic in the kind of free-booting press we, as working journalists, have always brooded over have been better analysed by such fine writers as Richard Hoggart, whose book The Uses of Literacy remains a classic 50 years after its publication – along with Hoggart’s more recent books.
His analysis remains as true now as it was half a century ago: if you want to know the real root of why Britain has such a depressingly poor national press, run by dubious proprietors, then look to our appallingly class-ridden education system.
You’ll find it all in Richard Hoggart’s books.
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