The Actual Quality of Journalism
The internet has put a lot of pressure on news organisations in many different ways, but the most obvious one is the sudden demand that absolutely anything and everything be available for free. This undermines not only the comfortable business model of being able to swap money for content, but also the basic assumption that there is any need for a printed edition of anything in the first place.
Add to that the fact that there are now infinitely more sources of information out there, and you have another problem. Without a relative monopoly on the dissemination of authoritative information, the established news media are finding that rather than be challenged by newspapers who might well be telling them what they don’t want to hear (‘if you think Barack Obama is a Socialist, then you have absolutely no idea what Socialism is, you fucking ignoramus’, for example) they would rather just find one of the dozens of info-tainment channels out there, from Fox News to any one of a bazillion special interest pseudo-news sites and blogs. These sites mix some truth with some fiction with some dogma with a shitload of spin, but they are often there simply to reassure people that their own existing worldview is essentially correct.
So what do you have? A traditional news media which is in increasing amounts of trouble, struggling to generate income and in many cases struggling to attract an audience. Amongst a wide variety of effects this struggle has had is the squeeze on journalists themselves. As a journalist, just getting paid is becoming an increasingly distant fantasy, and those who are being paid are being asked to do increasing amounts of work in decreasing amounts of time. The result: shit news.
I find it depressing just how many times I send out a press release for Song, by Toad Records, only to find this that or the other blog or internet magazine just copy it, paste it, and slap it up on the internet with little evidence that they’ve actually listened to the music in question, never mind enjoyed it. It’s uncomfortable, because I’m grateful for any coverage we can get, but reading that kind of thing makes me feel just a little bit grubby.
Our business, of course, is just music, and rather trivial. But in medicine these stories are everywhere, from the supposed electro-smog stories planted a couple of years ago by someone essentially wanting to sell you a tinfoil hat, to more sinister attempts by large pharmaceutical companies to conjure markets out of nothing for anything, from homeopathic fairy tales to drugs for imaginary psychological conditions which may be no exceptional more than feeling a bit apprehensive about going back to work on a Monday.
There are two massive issues with this sort of stuff, as far as the mainstream established media are concerned: the audience appeal of simply trotting out this nonsense, and the fact that their journalists and fact checkers often simply do not have the time to combat the stream of bollocks from a PR army who now significantly outnumber them. Over the last few years I have read about these battles in the world of medicine on any number of sites, from the Quackometer to Bad Science to David Colquhoun’s excellent blog.
The video at the top of the page is well worth watching, and was generated by the Media Standards Trust charity to launch their new site, called Churnalism, which is intended to start tackling the problem of news being infiltrated by regurgitated press releases. There is a report in the Guardian here (and I have spent at least a little time checking that it isn’t a hoax itself, and superficially it appears legit!).
Initially, it appeared that the greatest threat the internet posed to the quality of news to which we have access was the proliferation of unaccountable amateur sites which could present more or less anything they wanted as fact. Now it appears that there is a secondary, self-reinforcing threat: the undermining of mainstream news media has put these organisations under so much pressure that they are actively sabotaging themselves by lowering their own standards.
Now, it’s possible that they have no choice, and that the pressure on their finances simply forces journalists into doing too much work in too little time, making this sort of lapse inevitable. This is the side of the argument on which I myself would err. Some journos may be a little deluded as to the honour and integrity of their profession, but I don’t particularly doubt their collective idealism.
But the general public’s nose for bullshit seems never to have been more necessary, and healthy scepticism never more important. And unless the major news organisations are prepared to rigorously maintain the standards to justify their lofty positions of both trust and self-regard, they could end up hastening their own downfall.
