What is “proper journalism”?

The “Breaking News” book by the former editor of “The Guardian”, Alan Rusbridger, contrasts the two worlds of what he calls the “legacy media” with that of the social…… and raises many profound issues for us as global citizens – eg

- can anyone really understand what’s going on in the world?

- do we not just see what we are looking for?

- did the legacy media not deserve some of the kickback – given its hectoring “top-down” tone?

- can we sustain the prejudice that the social media is sheer distraction? Rusbridger suggests that the new Twitter thread suggests otherwise….

- how can the legacy media fight back? 

By 2017 the “legacy media” had developed an understandable obsession with the GAFAT companies – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter – which, in their view, were working to different rules on a hopelessly tilted playing field.

The old-media view was simple: the “Gafaters” stole their content; built an audience around it; sold that audience to advertisers; gave almost nothing in return; took virtually no responsibility for the content they hosted; got a free pass on the regulations that burdened traditional media; and – to cap it all – paid virtually no tax. 

It was all, in other words, deeply unfair. But, however unjust, many companies felt they had no choice but to play by the new rules. A Reuters Institute report in late 2017 discovered fatalism within newsrooms and management. Social media was, they nearly all agreed, a vital bridge to the next generation of audiences. As the platforms grew, so legacy media – which could never dream of rivalling the Gafaters for scale – would weaken.

The number one aim of the legacy media was to get Facebook to admit it was a publisher, not just a pipe down which content flowed. That meant they would have to face the same responsibilities – and costs and regulation – as others. To the Daily Mail, Facebook was a 

‘deeply tarnished, filth-peddling, taxdodging, pusillanimous, terror-abetting behemoth which targets the vulnerable with bile and hatred’.

 Not all the traditional players would use such language. But, as unease grew over the extent to which Facebook’s laissez-faire processes were being manipulated to dark ends, there was something of a broader backlash against companies which were seen as greedy, out of control, arrogant and destructive of social and democratic fabrics.

There were demands that the GAFAT giants should do more to support old-fashioned journalism. But Zuckenburg turned the question around. ‘This journalism you think we should be supporting, what does it look like?’ 

It was a genuine enquiry, and the glances among his colleagues suggested it was one they had been grappling with themselves. If you think we should be sharing our revenues in the cause of some kind of public benefit, how do you define that benefit? 

For all its mildness and politeness, it was the deadliest and most profound question. “What is journalism? Who gets to do it? Do you all agree on a core set of standards and ethics and methods? Do you all agree on a common concept of public interest? Do you want us to support the gutter press? Or just local news or investigative news? Help us understand”.

There were senior figures within both Facebook and Google who were very troubled by aspects of the information chaos they had partly enabled, and who valued some – but not all – of the things that the old information order produced. They felt most traditional news executives didn’t understand algorithms. Some of them would privately admit they didn’t understand journalism.  

Try drawing a map of things we call ‘news’. There is straight news and adversarial news; subjective news and objective news. There is news as public service and news as entertainment. There is exclusive news and commodity news. There are investigations; there are campaigns and there is advocacy. There is breaking news and there is slow, considered news. There is analysis, or news with context; explanatory news. There is news as activism. There is opinion dressed up as news; there’s eyewitness news; firstperson news; or scoops of interpretation. There may even be sponsored news or advertising dressed up to look like news.

The potential of Twitter?

Like most grumpy old men, I have a stock response whenever I hear talk of Twitter….It’s one of the things which has poisoned our exchanges. It invites abuse. But Rusbridger points to the use of the “thread” by specialists as demonstrating the potential offered by the social media

In the binary argument over journalism in a digital world it became an article of faith to some that the internet was largely dross. You needed professionals to bring you reliable information because only they could be trusted [insert brain surgeon comparison]. Twitter – with its restrictive character limit – was widely held up as a place of simplicities, hatred and ignorance. All that was true, but only partly.

If, as a journalist, that’s all you chose to believe then you were blind to how Twitter was also a place of expertise, intelligent debate and genuine dialogue.

At first, they were constricted by the format. But then came the invention of a new format: the thread – a sequence of tweets making an argument or advancing a proposition. Suddenly the straitjacket of 140 or 280 characters melted away.

In the right hands the thread is a fascinating new form. Over many tweets a writer can develop quite a sophisticated argument. Each tweet can be accompanied by a screenshot or link to supporting evidence. Each tweet can be individually commented on or shared. 

The truth is that it is difficult to map the new eco-system of information in a neat way with – at different ends of a spectrum – ‘proper’ mainstream media and ‘other stuff’. Much of the information being produced by nonprofessionals is just as reliable, informative and useful as that produced by journalists. Vice versa, some information produced ‘professionally’ is weak, unreliable, unethical . . . and even untruthful. You could call it ‘fake’. 

On the eve of Donald Trump taking office, the respected NYU media academic Jay Rosen published a bleak blog post titled ‘Winter is Coming’ in which he argued that ‘so many things are happening to disarm and disable serious journalism . . . at the darkest time in American history since WW1’.

- He began with an ever-more severe economic crisis for news combined with the lowest levels of trust in news media in living memory, citing the First World War as a time of particular censorship and suppression of dissent.

- He added in a ‘broken and outdated’ model for political journalism (based on ‘access’ or ‘inside’ reporting which misses broader connections with the public).

- Then came a lack of diversity in newsrooms; weak leadership and ‘thin institutional structures’ in the American press. The mistrust of the media was mirrored by low levels of trust in most institutions and their leaders – the very people journalists were writing about.

- Then came an organised movement on the political right to discredit mainstream journalism and the increasingly dim prospect that there was even a fact-based debate to which journalists could usefully contribute. Media companies increasingly subordinated news and political debate to entertainment values; while finally, Facebook was slowly taking charge of the day-to-day relationship with users of the news system. 

Those who enjoyed “Breaking News” will find News – and How to Use (2020) an even more interesting read. It’s presented as an alphabetic glossary

In the interests of balance, I should draw readers’ attention to a critical assessment of the newspaper Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian  ed D Freedman (2021)