Good evening, that was the news...
News cycles no longer exist in the way they once did - the internet dominates every aspect of news gathering, publishing, archiving and fact-checking.
Not so long ago, top BBC journalist Emily Maitlis left the BBC to found a podcast called the News Agents. Maitlis had decided that the BBC and traditional news organisations were not for her. I can understand why.
Journalism may not be dead but traditional media appears to be, at least in the way our parents knew it. There was a time when we all shared major moments - the death of a Kennedy, the Poll Tax riots, Miners’ Strike, the demise of Thatcher. These were defined moments and news was a kind of living history. News sources were clear - there were newspapers, news agencies and broadcasters, radio and TV. Not much else.
Lord Northcliffe, the early 20th century newspaper publisher, famously defined news as ‘What somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.’ This was the definition we were taught when I did my journalism apprenticeship in the 1980s. I believe Northcliffe’s definition still holds true despite what internet clickbaiters, who mostly deal in the latter, might want us to think.
Let’s talk a bit about how the face of news has changed in the past 50 or so years.
News today is not transmitted by headlines but by a kind of digital osmosis which means a news event is rarely fully defined in time but instead floats on as a saga, with tiny updates emerging every so often - but a clear picture of what is happening rarely solidifies. Instead there is a drip, drip, drip of push notifications and messaging, shared links, podcasts and emails. Channels like SkyNews are now emulating this experience even when they are broadcasting in the traditional way on TV. I am not even going to attempt to sketch the impact of Artificial Intelligence both now and in the future.
This brings the news into disrepute and makes politics sound like the stream of nonsense it increasingly is.
The internet’s impact has been deep and rapid. Traditional distribution channels have to a large extent been replaced by news aggregators like Google, Youtube, Flipboard and Reddit who personalise and shape our news so we live in a kind of bubble, reading only about our narrow focus of personal interests. Video lives in spaces defined by Youtube, TikTok and various other imitators.
With always-on connectivity, push messaging makes every waking minute an update on something or other - and with little sense of context. ‘Two thousand feared dead in earthquake’ appears on my timeline immediately before ‘You have two new likes on Instagram.’
Then there is social fragmentation. When I was a kid, mass audience programs would be talked about for days afterwards. There were no video recorders, no Youtube or digital streaming services. Consequently both news and entertainment drew audiences of many, many millions. Today consistency of the channel through which you find news is less and less constricting. The BBC which once stood as the benchmark against which all other services were judged, is going through an existential crisis. Between 2014 and 2019, its News channel lost in the order of 7 million viewers and now has a mere 18m. Coronation Street in the 1970s drew audiences of 21m. Today, even including video on demand, video recording and live TV, it draws just a third of that.
While newspapers - and broadcast media to some extent - used to have a defined amount of space in which to work for each edition, the internet has no such limits. Consequently a lot of what is there can be poorly edited or unedited, unbalanced and unrevised by editors, whose entire job was once to challenge and question their reporters, who should have been challenging and questioning too. The consumer review you read may have been written by a journalist but possibly by a car mechanic in downtown Delhi moonlighting for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Traditional broadcast and print journalism had to fight for space and everything was constantly being boiled down, made more coherent and concise. Today, with no limits on the bandwidth for ‘news’ the quality of journalism has suffered, with the exception of a few flagships such as the Guardian and a few others. Other UK media, particularly the tabloids, have become increasingly partisan - giving their readers information that supports their prejudices at the expense of reality or challenge, and diversity of opinion. This was happening even before the internet became a thing but has accelerated since.
Today even big stories like Brexit are poorly told. Its costs are open-ended, timelines so tight and yet so loose, its details so defined and yet so blurred - so blurred indeed that the government doesn’t even appear to understand it. Tabloids routinely lie and distort to retain and win readers. Journalists should be all over it. They are not.
Witness the recent arguments over Northern Ireland’s custom points, which were not going to be built but which now are. And then of course there was the £350m on the side of the bus which was never properly challenged by journalists in the UK, in my opinion.
The Trump presidency was another one of these interminable news sagas, running from one disaster to another but with few real details ever emerging, other than the constant premise that there is something lurking in his background.
Another such saga is the environmental challenge - constantly reshaping and reemerging but rarely defined in any real sense by news media. Conferences come and go and are reported on but nobody seems able to give a solid, substantial view on what is really happening. Nobody follows up. Indeed, news has to some extent become more event-focused than ever. Events such as the G7 are reported on, but we rarely share the full context or the depth behind the outcomes or on the situation a year later.
There are many other factors making it harder and harder to find and understand what is going on around us. Clickbait - items deliberately designed to generate clicks - is part of this. We have all witnessed it. ‘See the gadget everyone in - insert place name - is buying,’ for example. This makes finding genuine news like looking for the proverbial needle. The same is true of conspiracy theories, growing rapidly online and undermining solid news journalism - the 5G radio mast conspiracy is only the latest of many. We now additionally have a number of these from the Far Right.
YouTube is an interesting case study. It offers micro-audiences for niche areas which can become global when they go online - I have an interest in film cameras, for example, and there are now thousands of Youtube channels devoted to this. But your interest could be as narrow as, say, one particular lens or film type, there will be channels devoted to it. One lads’ channel on Youtube, DudePerfect, has 50m subscribers worldwide.
For print journalism particularly, this apocalypse has been coming for many years, since the late 1960s in fact. Circulations then could be as high as 5m for the Daily Mirror and 4m for the Express. Today these figures stand at 1.2m and 0.6m respectively.
Throw into this long-term decline the increasingly arrogant approach of media-trained senior politicians who speak only to their ‘followers’ rather than larger entities like ‘the nation’. Every time a politician says to an interviewer, ‘Let me be clear on this…’ I know we are in for a whopping great lie or obfuscation. The poor quality of journalistic training today is failing to stand up to this onslaught, hence many political interviews are soft and flabby and fail to challenge. All of this brings the news into disrepute and makes politics sound like the stream of nonsense it increasingly is.
When the basic job of fact-checking is not being done by journalists, we now have to turn to sites like Snopes.com and Fullfact.org, or the Radio 4 program, Behind the Stats. So what is the solution to all of this?
The Indian writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor said famously that: “…our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources.”
Perhaps the answer to this is a strengthening of ‘long-form’ journalism - otherwise known as in-depth reporting or books. But this in itself is problematic - in-depth reporting is labour intensive and expensive to produce and few agencies can do it. Meanwhile, reading as a pastime among the young is dying.
Statistics from 2014 show that one in five children in England cannot read well by the age of 11. Similar percentages of 15-year-olds across the UK do not have a minimum level of literacy proficiency. Only 35% of 10-year-olds in England report that they like reading 'very much'.
It seems clear to me that unless a wide-ranging coalition of groups is able to drive both social and legal change, the internet’s impact on journalism and news reporting is likely to continue for some time, potentially at huge social cost.