Journalistic Decline

The good old London Review of Books landed on my doormat on Friday. It's a great magazine if you can find the time to read its incredibly well written but equally incredibly long articles. As a matter of fact, I've got a free subscription offer that technically I've given Clem first dibs on but it's free to a worthy home.

The lead article this week is a review of a book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. You can read it here and I strongly recommend that you do. As it goes its not one of the longer articles that the LRB publishes.

Ok, read it? Good. See what I mean?

I'm not going to reiterate everything that John Lancaster has written in his article but I just wanted to ruminate a little on a couple of things.

Firstly it's very interesting to read about a book that purports to give substance to what I'd hitherto suspected but not been able to quite put my finger on, namely that the contents of our newspapers have, to quote a PR monkey being interviewed about the newly diminutive Mars Bar on the Today show a couple of years ago, an increased sensation of lightness. I've felt disinclined to read newspapers for a number of years now for this very reason. For the record I read The Economist predominantly and The London Review of Books when I have time, which is not as often as I would like to even though without fail every time I do take the time I'm struck by the same thought that I wish I had more time to read this more often.

John Lancaster quotes some interesting statistics that Nick Davies' research team uncovered when they analysed the contents on the "posh" papers as he calls them and the Daily Mail. Posh I take to mean what would formerly have been described as the broadsheets. Specifically, oh what the hell, I'll stick the same quote here that's in the article, you probably didn't read it anyway:

"They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked."

So essentially journalists are regurgitating press-releases and wire copy (which he goes on to say is largely Press Association).

Reading all of this reminded me of a talk that I went to at the frontline club (a private club for foreign correspondents) which was an interview with John Fisher Burns, the Bureau Chief in Iraq for the New York Times. You can see that interview here. Incidentally there's also a recording of an interview with Nick Davies that you can see here. Anyway, go back to the John Fisher Burns interview and watch from about 40 minutes in until 50 minutes where Burns is responding to a question about who may have predicted the outcome of the invasion of Iraq at the time to which he responds that Robert Fisk was probably the only person who did before going on to explain that in the year leading up to the war that he was writing articles based on the premise that the human rights abuses going on in Iraq were so atrocious that getting rid of Saddam almost no matter what the cost was the correct course of action. He then expands on that thought I think with a remarkable degree of honestly to say that he felt that he measured the problem "by the standard of human rights [rather than] by the standard of history" and he concludes by saying that if he had his time again he would have studied the history of Iraq and the region in much greater detail.

I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear this from this man who was, and I say this with no trace of over-statement, one of the world's most important opinion formers leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the bureau chief for Iraq admitting that he had a "failure of imagination" and didn't grasp that removing the capstone that Saddam Hussein was would cause the kinds of problems we've been seeing for the last five years.

And we wonder why our Newspapers are light. There's your answer right there.

Makes I mad.