News As If People Mattered

By Daniel Simpson

[Another one hits the spike]

March 2006

• Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media by David Edwards and David Cromwell, Pluto Press, January 2006
• Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel G. Freedman, Basic Books, May 2006
• My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr, Pan, July 2005
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, Penguin Modern Classics, August 2003 (First published 193

The first law of journalism, dictated to scribes down the ages, is to tell us something we don’t already know. “News,” quoth Corker, the archetypal hack of Evelyn Waugh’s Fleet Street satire Scoop, “is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. We’re paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn’t news.” This adage from a bygone era of copy boys and hot metal printing lost none of its currency with the advent of videophones, satellite trucks and all the rest of the panoply of gizmos that consigned telegrams to the same historical dustbin as the quaint cablese in which they were written. If anything, its tyranny holds fiercer sway than ever. The quest for novelty, no matter how trivial or tangential to everyday life, preoccupies even the most jaded and deskbound reporter as he scuttles from fax machine to inbox in pursuit of hitherto untransmitted revelations, embellishing the quotidian for the apathetic with the requisite sexing up. Few ever stop to ask why.

That journalists subsist on a diet of innuendo and intricate misrepresentation, or as Waugh put it seven decades ago, “the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history”, is so widely held to be true in these days of instant refutation by blogger that it scarcely merits a mention in the news-in-brief section. To the doyens of the press corps, however, it remains anathema, regardless of how readily they devour Scoop and all its barbs. Lubricated by alcohol, and out of earshot of the customers, they may give voice to occasional doubts about the ethics of their trade, but such moments of weakness are soon drowned out by old war stories and gripes about their employers. For all their pretensions to fearless truthseeking, the task of telling it like it is about the news business is left to satirists like Waugh, his fortnightly imitators in the pages of Private Eye and an ever-widening circle of media critics, most of whom are confined to cyberspace.

Today’s jobbing journalist has little time for searching questions about what ought to be newsworthy; with websites to refresh and round-the-clock schedules to fill, rolling deadlines have become the norm and product-peddling the professional imperative. As competitors converge on a common agenda for fear of losing market share, rival brands report the same stories with only the most minor variations in “angle”, lapping up the tsunami of rent-a-quotes, spin doctors and public relations executives that floods the average newsroom with press releases. A fixation on access to powerful sources skews the news to focus on their words while rigid conceptions of balance protect them from systematic scrutiny of their actions. Truly investigative journalism is a rarity; managers prefer to pump money into cheaper and more dependable sources of revenue: opinionated punditry, lifestyle features and celebrity tittle-tattle. The bottom line trumps all other considerations, even the cherished journalistic clichés of leaving no stone unturned and shining lights into dark places. “We are a capitalist company providing capitalist news,” stresses an editor at Reuters, a global media conglomerate, which subsidises foreign reporting by selling trading systems to banks. “We do not go in for campaigning.”

So entrenched are the structural constraints that deter corporate media from serving as more effective watchdogs over the powerful, or guides to the way the world works, that attempts to discuss them are alternately derided as cynical and idealist. Exceptions to the routine mediocrity, meanwhile, are held up to dispel suggestions that the priorities and proclivities of most reporters are so at odds with the duties of a Fourth Estate that their modern role might more accurately be rendered as being “4 the state”.