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Friday Fronts
14 March 2008:
John Lanchester on Flat Earth News, in the London Review of Books.
The institutions of democracy and unfettered commercial media have utterly different bloodlines intellectually, but their realization in the actual world occurred at the same time, roughly: toward the end of the Seventeenth Century. The importance of newspapers to political discourse was great from the start, but their actual influence on public affairs was rather more difficult to make out than the degree to which they informed the democratic citizenry about the world. Much of this information was faulty in detail, but most of it was as sound as current comprehension would allow. Newspapers told voters what was going on in the parts of the world that they could not see for themselves. From the voters' standpoint, this world beyond the horizon grew enormously in the two centuries before the end of World War II.
What happened to news in the postwar period is, to use the theoretical word, overdetermined. There are lots of possible explanations. But the fact that print journalism has undergone a severe contraction in significance if not in volume is established by a new book, Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies. As an autopsy of the British press, the book may not merit an independent American edition, and in this age of Amazon there is no pressing need for one. What we do need is an American counterpart, an examination of the American press that conducts a similar analysis of resources and results. John Lanchester's review, in the current London Review of Books, makes that need appallingly clear.
It comes down to this: why buy a newspaper at all if all it can afford to do is recycle press releases? According a study cited by Mr Davies, fully sixty percent of the stories that appeared in British newspapers in 2007 simply recycled wire copy and/or press releases. That wire copy, cranked out by the Press Association, was in turn substantially sourced by further press releases. It appears to be seriously uneconomical to conduct journalism in the old-fashioned way (never, as Mr Lanchester points out, as universal as nostalgists suppose), by beat reporting.
Mr Davies's opening case is the Y2K fiasco — a fiasco that never happened, that never could have happened, and that certainly didn't need to be prevented by billions of dollars in consultants' interventions. How did the Y2K story gain credence?
Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn’t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies’s view, is to check facts. Journalists don’t just pass on what they’re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don’t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.
Any explanation rooted in morality is bound to lead nowhere. Journalists have not forgotten how to do their jobs, or, worse, decided against doing them properly. It would appear rather that the world in which they work has been transformed in ways variously subtle and obvious. As a consumer of journalism with no professional background in the field, I can only infer what these might be. One that Mr Lanchester notes has been clear to me for some time:
Back in the day, an ambitious young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President’s Men once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with a single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the equivalent ambitious young toad would dream of having a column with their picture at the top, as a precursor to a well-timed move to TV or politics or some other form of showbiz.
Certainly the world of journalism is itself visible today where it used to be transparent. Perhaps in response to the hostility of Richard M Nixon, journalists advanced, if that's the word for it, from being observers to being players. Whatever the cause, the hall of mirrors that eventually opened up in the Blogosphere was the effect, with its commentary upon commentary upon commentary, leading to an infinitely regressing thread of comments.
Perhaps it is the collapse of authoritative narrative. Perhaps it is vastly ramified specialization, which makes it virtually impossible for generalists even so focused as "financial news reporters" to know their field. Undoubtedly the brute fact of costs (including journalists' greatly increased expectations on the compensation front) explains this:
In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.
Mr Davies believes that "the illness is terminal." If this is so, let's get the hand-wringing out of the way as quickly as possible and move on to whatever is, or ought to be, next.
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press