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Date Published: 22/01/01
Author: David Cromwell If you really want to know about the inadequacies of the mainstream media, says David Cromwell, ask its journalists. |
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In surveys of British public opinion, journalists typically rank below politicians, lawyers and used-car salesmen as trustworthy characters. And yet we depend upon journalists to guide us through today’s rapidly evolving, information-rich ‘media age’. The internet, digital television and technologies as yet unborn all promise (or threaten) to revolutionise how we learn about what’s going on in a world increasingly shaped by the forces of economic globalisation. But there is surely no substitute for good-quality, probing journalism. After all, it is the great crusading craft. The bastion of democracy. The fourth estate, and all that.
In every society, authority – whether government, corporate or pressure group – needs to be constantly and vigorously challenged by an independent press. In every society too, that challenge rarely comes from the right. Instead, in theory at least, it should come from the campaigning, liberal media. For if they don’t fulfil this function, what is their purpose?
Good question. For the fact is that, in Britain, they don’t. And if you don’t believe me, listen to the voices of the journalists themselves; for they have an interesting tale to tell.
Consider, for example, Nato’s so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo two years ago. The PM’s spokesman, Alastair Campbell, was told by The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane that he ought to be grateful for the partisan support he received from journalists. ‘Campbell should acknowledge’, said O’Kane, ‘that it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against Milosevic.’ The BBC’s John Simpson also spoke up for the media’s support of Nato: ‘Why did British, American, German, and French public opinion stay rock-solid for the bombing, in spite of Nato’s mistakes? Because they knew the war was right. Who gave them the information? The media.’
In fact, it was liberal commentators who were at the forefront of support for Nato intervention in Kosovo. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, who declined to talk to me about the media’s role in that war, wrote of how ‘either the West could try to halt the greatest campaign of barbarism in Europe since 1945 – or it could do nothing’. The Third Way was to inflict a barbarism of its own.
Andrew Marr, former Observer columnist, Independent editor and now BBC political editor, is another liberal defender of the Nato moral crusade in Kosovo. In The Observer, Marr wrote a number of fawning articles with titles such as ‘Hail to the chief. Sorry, Bill, but this time we’re talking about Tony’, and ‘Brave, bold, visionary. Whatever became of Blair the ultra-cautious cynic?’ Marr declared himself in awe of Blair’s ‘moral courage’ and called upon Blair to take the ‘Macbeth option’: not to hold back from wading further in blood.
By relying on such ‘compliant journalists’, claims The Independent’s Robert Fisk, Nato was able to conduct a war that actually had limited public support. Fisk expressed scorn at the almost universal acceptance by his fellow reporters of the Nato line spun to them. ‘Most of the journalists at Nato headquarters were so supine, so utterly taken in by Nato’s generals and air commodores that their questions might have been printed out for them by Nato in advance.’
‘Supine’ obedience and uniformity are distinguishing features of the modern press. Take any broadsheet paper on any day of the week and compare it to any other broadsheet on the same day. You’ll find that it’s amazingly similar. The ‘news of the day’ is the same across virtually all the newspapers. ‘It’s not a conspiracy’, says media analyst David Edwards, ‘just a reflection of the editorial need to follow state-corporate power, to avoid stepping on the toes of authority, as well as the fear of looking stupid by going out on a limb chasing the “wrong story”’. Edwards adds: ‘Each big story is approached from the same “hard-hitting” journalistic angle which is marked by asking tough questions about peripheral issues, but leaving the structure of society unexamined.’
Two reasons for this, among many others, are the mass media’s concentrated ownership and its imperative to attract business advertising to survive in a fiercely competitive market. The Guardian’s Hugo Young acknowledges the truth of this, but responds: ‘The Guardian, although free from the usual ownership pressures, exists with everyone else’s commercial pressures. We struggle to strike the right balances.’
But there are other, often unrecognised, constraints at work too. Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that ‘Professional journalism relies heavily on official sources. Reporters have to talk to the PM’s official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, the business association, the army general. What those people say is news. Their perspectives are automatically legitimate.’ Whereas, according to McChesney, ‘if you talk to prisoners, strikers, the homeless, or protesters, you have to paint their perspectives as unreliable, or else you’ve become an advocate and are no longer a “neutral” professional journalist’. Such reliance on official sources gives the news an inherently conservative cast and gives those in power tremendous influence over defining what is or isn’t ‘news’. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, warns: ‘This is precisely the opposite of what a functioning democracy needs, which is a ruthless accounting of the powers that be.’
Polly Toynbee of The Guardian agrees: ‘Yes, the media is responsible for a huge amount of evil and we have the worst in the western world,’ she says. Toynbee, a former Independent columnist and BBC correspondent, concludes despairingly: ‘The trouble is, what’s to be done?’
Toynbee’s resigned dejection at the parlous state of even the liberal media is, it seems, all too common, and is shared by other prominent journalists. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of the few columnists anywhere in the mainstream to highlight the devastating impact of economic sanctions against Iraq and identify the US and UK as the prime culprits, admits: ‘So much of what you say [about media complicity in human rights abuses] is depressingly true and believe me there are days when I want to have two baths to wash away my sense of disgust that I am part of the media industry.’
Such resignation is not uncommon. Amongst the journalists who responded to my queries, there was a constant refrain: ‘what can I possibly do?’ Or – worse – ‘it’s nothing to do with me’. John Naughton of The Observer says: ‘I don’t, alas, have any influence over editorial policy.’ There must be a whole army of journalists beavering away who believe that they have ‘no influence over editorial policy’. In fact, as John Pilger correctly puts it: ‘journalists are the essential footsoldiers in a network devoted to power and propaganda’. It’s a view not shared, unsurprisingly, by The Independent’s Michael Brown, a former Conservative MP: ‘Such arguments are very similar to the self-styled “libertarian socialist” Noam Chomsky who lectures anyone prepared to listen on how the media is effectively an instrument of nasty capitalists exploiting humanity.’
Brown is typical of those in the media who cannot resist using the ‘conspiracy theory’ charge that rears its ugly head all too often. David Edwards counters: ‘This is a standard response: to reject criticism of the mass media as the ravings of conspiracy theorists. It’s not that the media is “an instrument of nasty capitalists” – in other words that it is controlled by elite interests – but that the media is part of the same elite interests. The media industry is not controlled by big business, it is big business.’ A controversial view to those raised on a diet of mainstream news. But David Edwards is right.
‘One of the main problems with the British media’, David Seymour, political editor at The Mirror, told me, ‘is that the level of criticism is pathetically low’. Seymour, a journalist of 30 years’ standing, added: ‘None of the [press] commentators provide intelligent, unbiased criticism. Some are plain absurd.’ But even such apparently scathing criticism of the press actually avoids some uncomfortable truths. Namely, that elite interests shape the mass media agenda and that the media is complicit in human rights and environmental abuses that go largely unreported. Ostensibly hard-hitting and media-savvy journalists invariably focus instead on symptoms of the underlying malaise.
Several liberal journalists said something to the effect that though the press was far from perfect, at least their own paper was the ‘best of a bad bunch’. But is that good enough? Are self-avowed liberal newspapers really better than more explicitly reactionary broadsheets? In reality, ostensibly ‘centre-left’ newspapers mark the limits of acceptable and decent debate just as much as the right-wing press, while maintaining the illusion of a progressive fourth estate.
At the other, more honourable, end of the spectrum of journalism, lies a commitment to reporting the true state of the world, rather than the views held by authority. In response to my leading opening question: ‘To what extent can we learn the truth about the world from the mainstream media?’, Greg Palast of The Observer shot back, ‘You can’t... that’s why I’m on the Board of www.MediaChannel.org which is attempting to bust open the media monopolies.’ MediaChannel is just one of many internet resources – ZNet, SchNEWS and Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) are other major sites – that provide ‘alternative’ or ‘radical’ perspectives on world affairs. David Edwards suggests that we should replace ‘radical’ with the word ‘rational’. Use of the former word is a standard technique, he believes, to marginalise views that run counter to the interests of power in society.
That many serious, major topics – sanctions against Iraq, vigorous business lobbying to create a corporate-shaped economy, the paltry political response to climate change – are rarely raised by any mainstream newspaper or broadcaster is damning. Wouldn’t a truly ‘free’ and healthy media, for example, examine itself rigorously – its own assumptions, prejudices and omissions? No doubt many editors and journalists are aware of this but are too afraid of bucking the system. After all, who wants to have one’s career blocked or lose one’s job when there’s a mortgage to pay? And so, media debate is restricted within tightly constrained parameters that serve capital, but not democracy.
The Independent’s David Aaronovitch, who refrained from participating in my polling of journalists despite several invitations to do so, wrote recently that ‘in the age of the media, what we have is the most complex possible relationship between politics, public, perception and power’. But Aaronovitch and most of his cohorts barely scratch the surface of this relationship. As Nick Cohen revealed last year in the New Statesman, many liberal commentators earn a nice salary, thank you very much indeed, by portraying themselves as the watchdogs of democracy while – in reality – they are merely snapping playfully at the heels of authority.
And so, the poor majority of the world continue to be trampled upon by Western governments, corporations and investors; environmental and human rights abuses mount up; and ‘democracy’ is moulded to the specifications of centralised power, even as a rising frenzy of trivia maintains its grip on the airwaves and newspapers.
Welcome to the media age.
David Cromwell is a freelance writer. His first book, 'Private Planet,' will be published later this year.
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