Journalists like to think that people buy newspapers because they want to read the articles they publish. It is a delusion: most people buy – or bought – newspapers for the crossword puzzle, the sports results, the cinema listings or the classified ads. As The Economist put it in 2009: ‘A newspaper is a package of content – politics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth – which exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements.’134
Before the dawning of the digital age, if you wanted to buy a secondhand car, or a new home, you bought a newspaper and scoured the classified ads. Now, you simply go online, enter the relevant specification (‘E-type Jag, low mileage, soft top, max price £10,000’), and hit Enter. An editor once told me that readers will forgive everything in a newspaper except for one thing: move the crossword puzzle to a different page and their wrath will be terrible to behold. It is even worse than when Radio 4 changes the start time of The Archers.
So the ‘bundle’ that used to drop with a thud on the doormat every morning is now surplus to requirements. Who needs ink on paper when you have a phone in your pocket that is, in Emily Bell’s phrase, your portal to the world? More significantly, who in their right mind would prefer to pay for that grubby, inconvenient bundle of newsprint when everything you could possibly want to know is available, free of charge, on the screen of your smartphone?
So will newspapers survive? My hunch is that they will, at least for a few more decades, but not for ever. If I were to be able to pop back in a hundred years’ time, I would be very surprised indeed to see bundles of newsprint still on sale in corner shops. Medieval scribes were killed off by the printing press, and I see no reason why the pixel should not inflict the same fate on the printing press.
That is not the same as saying that the power of the pixel will kill journalism. As I have suggested, I believe that journalism will have to adapt to the digital world, but I am confident that it will be up to the task. We humans are curious creatures, and we will always want to know more. From our earliest days sitting round fires in caves, we have listened to storytellers, agog to hear tales from the next valley, the other side of the river or the other side of the world.
And that, incidentally, is also why I am confident about the future of radio. The author and radio critic Kate Chisholm put it well:
Radio’s real power is that it takes us right back into a pre-technological world, to a world of storytelling, of discovery through narrative, not in pictures but as an aural experience. We rediscover in radio the kind of world our ancestors knew, where stories were told and information gathered through human connection. It’s this that makes radio so much more potent than TV.135
After all, like most animal species, our primary means of communication is through sound. A baby cries, a mother soothes or sings, a dog barks, a cow moos, a bird chirps. Each sound carries a message, and that is precisely what radio does. That is why radio aficionados like to claim that the pictures on radio are so much better than the ones on TV: they are made in the mind of the listener, not in the viewfinder of the camera.
On 18 April 1930, which was Good Friday, a BBC radio newsreader solemnly announced: ‘There is no news.’ Piano music followed. Happy days!
I have often felt tempted to say something very similar, on days so dull that I could only secretly sympathise with any listener tuning in. All credit, therefore, to the Battlefords News-Optimist, a community newspaper in Saskatchewan, Canada, which in January 2016 reported on its front page: ‘To be truthful, there isn’t really anything happening in the news this week … It’s January, the weather has taken a nasty turn and there just isn’t much happening.’
There is, of course, always something happening somewhere. But it may not always be the sort of something that news editors think will be of much interest to their readers, listeners or viewers. If you dish up too much dull stuff, you will soon lose them, so the temptation – always – is to find something, anything, with which to fill the columns or minutes that have been allocated to ‘news’. There is little point in producing a newspaper that no one wants to read. Similarly, it is a waste of everyone’s energy to put together a radio programme that no one bothers to listen to. So the trick is to find a way to report the news that you believe is important in such a way as to attract readers and listeners. If something is important but happens every day – like the war in Syria, for example – it risks being relegated to the ‘no longer news’ category. As every rookie reporter is taught: ‘dog bites man’ is not a story, but ‘man bites dog’ is. If it happens every day, it is not news.
Take the example of railway accidents. At the end of the nineteenth century, they were so frequent that they usually merited just a few paragraphs in the next day’s newspapers. Now, however, railway accidents are so rare that when they do occur, they get banner headline treatment. Perversely, therefore, readers may be left with the impression that rail travel is now more dangerous than it was a hundred years ago, whereas the truth is precisely the opposite.136
When I give talks about journalism in schools, I sometimes ask students to imagine that they have a choice between two different newspapers: one has a headline saying ‘All students at Perfection Academy were well-behaved this term’ and the other says ‘Record number of students arrested after fight at Imperfection Academy’. Which one would they buy? Another useful experiment is to ask them to imagine that they are the editor of the school newspaper. They have a choice of three stories to put on the front page: ‘Head teacher praises students at Perfection Academy’; ‘New menus planned for school meals’; or ‘Shock rise in muggings outside school gate’. The more copies of the newspaper they sell, the more cash they will raise to give to their favourite charity. So which story do they choose? Invariably, it is the one about the muggings.
This preference for the dramatic, on which all news choices are based, gives rise to some serious problems, especially when dealing with crime. The fact is that in nearly all the world’s most developed countries, including the UK, crime rates have been falling for several years. Yet fear of crime has not, because the reporting of crimes becomes more sensational the rarer they are. The reporting of climate change is even more of a problem: immensely complex, and immensely slow as an observable process, without question by far the most important issue of our times, yet you would never think so by looking at the relatively low-key reporting of it.
The prize for the best-known boring headline was claimed many years ago by Claud Cockburn, who in the early 1930s was a sub-editor on The Times.
Someone had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning’s newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.’137
No one has ever managed to find the headline in the archives, however, and the story is almost certainly apocryphal. But Times subs were not alone in trying to find ways to alleviate the boredom of a long night at the news coalface. Once, when Ruth and I were on a walking holiday in Tuscany, our fellow walkers challenged me to insert the word ‘Etruscan’ into the first programme I presented after I returned to work. To their great surprise, I managed it. I also once wrote an introduction to a recorded report in which the first letter of each sentence spelt out ‘happy birthday’ in honour of our editor’s birthday. Until I pointed it out, of course, he had no idea. With such harmless pleasures can dull evenings be livened up.
The choices that journalists make – what stories to cover, which people to interview – reflect their own biases and their best guesses about what will interest their audience. It is instructive, for example, to compare the coverage given to the deaths of different rock musicians: those who played an important role in the formative teenage years of news executives will always receive far more generous coverage than those whose greatest success fell either before or after the executives’ adolescence.
/> It is this usually unconscious subjective bias that makes it so important to expand and diversify the journalistic recruitment pool as much as humanly possible. If journalists are white, middle class and have a university degree – which is usually the case – the stories that they choose to cover will inevitably reflect their own background. I worried during my two decades at the BBC that as London property prices rose inexorably and BBC salaries did not, the gene pool from which new generations of journalists were drawn became progressively shallower. Who can afford to live and work in London on a succession of three-month contracts other than comfortably-off graduates whose parents are helping them with the bills? A report on social mobility published in 2012 by the former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Milburn said that journalism had moved ‘to a greater degree of social exclusivity than any other profession’. The National Union of Journalists went one step further and called journalism ‘the preserve of the privileged’.138
The Guardian journalist Gary Younge has pointed out that in the US, where he worked for many years, on average seven children or teenagers are shot dead every day.139 Most of them are African-Americans, living in communities from which very few mainstream journalists are drawn. Most of these deaths receive no more than a few lines of coverage in the local newspaper or on the local TV news station. If the news executives making the choices were their neighbours, the scale of the coverage would be very different.
Journalism does not reflect the world in which we live. What it does reflect is only those events that journalists think are interesting, and likely to be of interest to the people who are their target consumers. And as the business models of news organisations come under increasing strain, journalism is further restricted to those stories that can be covered within ever-narrowing budgetary constraints. Why is there now so little on-the-ground reporting from Iraq? Because it costs a fortune to maintain a reporting presence there, and with relatively few Western troops still deployed, and more than a decade after the US-led invasion, the judgement has been made that it can no longer be regarded as a news priority.
When more than three hundred people were killed in a bomb attack in Baghdad in June 2016, it received only a fraction of the coverage given to similar attacks in Paris (a hundred and thirty dead) and Brussels (thirty-two dead). Why? Because bomb attacks in Baghdad had become commonplace – in other words, much less newsworthy – and also because Paris and Brussels are much closer to London than Baghdad is, and British news consumers are far more likely to have been there.
When immigration levels became a major political issue, the media were accused with some justification of having ignored the concerns of people living in places where a perceived influx of immigrants was causing high levels of resentment. I do not believe that this was a result of a deliberate political decision to pretend it was not happening or to sweep it under the carpet – it was, I think, much more likely to have been a result of the fact that most mainstream media journalists live and work in London, in areas where cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are far more readily accepted than elsewhere.
Perhaps one of the most significant ways in which the development of digital media outlets has affected our perception of the world is that it has made non-metropolitan views far more visible than they used to be. One of the reasons the shooting of young black males by police officers in the US became a major issue was that the widespread availability of camera phones with video recording capacity enabled witnesses to capture and publish incidents that would otherwise have gone unnoticed except by the people directly affected. The non-professional video footage also, crucially, provided an alternative version of events to that provided by the police, and therefore immediately offered a corrective if the official account was less than truthful.
Given the online media’s obsession with video content, anything dramatic – and there is nothing more dramatic than a shooting – will automatically be snapped up and widely shared. The effect is that the decisions about which events gain media coverage are no longer in the hands only of professional journalists: a middle-aged, white news editor sitting in a newspaper office or TV newsroom may not think much of ‘yet another shooting’, but if someone has uploaded twenty seconds of video, the decision will be taken elsewhere. In general, I welcome this democratisation of media decision-making. But it does have consequences that can have a significant impact on public perceptions of danger, especially when it involves fear of terrorist attacks.
On 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded within three minutes of each other on four commuter trains in Madrid. A hundred and ninety-two people were killed and another two thousand were injured. It was the highest death toll from any terrorist attack in Europe since the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, when two hundred and seventy people were killed. But in 2004, camera phones and social media sites were still in their infancy (Facebook had been founded just a month before the Madrid bombings), and although the attacks were extensively reported, their impact on public consciousness across Europe was much less than that of the Paris and Brussels attacks in 2015 and 2016. As a result, I strongly suspect that people were far more frightened of terrorist attacks after Paris and Brussels than they were after Madrid.
Television news channels devour what they call ‘user-generated content’, material that is made available to them by members of the public who happen to be on the spot when a news event occurs. Whether it is floods in Yorkshire, a mass shooting in a Florida disco, or bombs in Brussels, non-professional images increasingly dominate both mainstream media and social media coverage of major news events. Images that twenty years ago would have been regarded as too harrowing to show now make their way from non-curated, nonprofessional sites onto newspaper front pages and TV news bulletins. The jihadi group Islamic State was quick to understand the power of non-curated material by publishing gruesome images of its butchery online and, in effect, daring the mainstream media not to use them. Fortunately, after some initial uncertainty, editors realised the dangers and stopped using them.
Editors and others also need to develop new skills in evaluating the authenticity and provenance of material that comes from non-traditional sources. Atrocity images are endlessly recycled – what may once have been a distressing image of a dead child in Syria can often reappear months or even years later as a dead child in Yemen, or Gaza, or anywhere else where propagandists have access to Twitter or Facebook.
In May 2013, TV news channels were offered non-professional video footage of one of the men who killed Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers on a street in south London. The killer’s hands were covered in the soldier’s blood and he was carrying a knife and a meat cleaver as he explained why they had killed him. No one who saw the footage will ever forget it, and there were hundreds of complaints from viewers who thought it should never have been broadcast. Once again, the horror of such an attack, up close and personal, was beamed into citizens’ living rooms in a way that would have been impossible before the arrival of camera phones.
Should it have been broadcast? My own view is that it should have been, appropriately edited, on the grounds that it offered a vivid insight into the killers’ motives and was, therefore, in the public interest. There is a danger, I think, that when people are exposed to material that makes them feel uncomfortable – or even sickened – they are tempted to blame the messenger rather than think about the message. Should the media not cover the effects of famine on starving people? Or tell the stories of children who have been sexually abused? Or report from the front lines of conflicts in which thousands of civilians are killed?
There is an important difference of principle between broadcasting propaganda produced by a party to a conflict and disseminating material that has been obtained from a bystander or eyewitness. One line, however, that I would never cross is to broadcast the actual killing of a human being. Basic human decency applies even to journalism.
It comes back to the basic task of all journalism: to tell peopl
e things that they need to know in order to make informed decisions about how they wish to be governed and by whom. Walter Lippmann, sometimes called the greatest American journalist of his age, defined the job like this:
If the country is to be governed with the consent of the governed, then the governed must arrive at opinions about what their governors want them to consent to … We correspondents perform an essential service … We make it our business to find out what is going on under the surface and beyond the horizon, to infer, to deduce, to imagine, and to guess what is going on inside, what this meant yesterday, and what it could mean tomorrow.140
Put like that, journalism sounds like the noblest calling on earth. Sometimes – often – it is. But sometimes it is the polar opposite. I doubt that phone-hacking, celebrity-baiting and migrant-bashing are what Lippmann had in mind when he spoke of the ‘essential service’ performed by journalists. The Chinese journalist and author Yang Jisheng put it well when he received the 2016 Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism:
This is a despicable profession that can confuse right and wrong, reverse black and white, manufacture monstrous falsehoods and dupe an audience of millions. This is a noble profession that can point out the ills of our times, uncover the darkness, castigate evil, advocate for the people and take on the responsibility of social conscience.141
‘Manufacture monstrous falsehoods’. In the six months leading up to the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016, the country’s two leading mid-market newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, which between them sell more than 2 million copies a day, each published thirty-four front-page stories about immigrants and immigration. (In the same period, The Guardian and The Times each published just six stories on the same subject.)142
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