The need to understand what is going on is a basic human instinct. That’s why ‘news’ existed long before journalism was invented. But, with journalism on the back foot, some politicians are shunning the scrutiny that lies at the heart of democracy. That’s bad news for everybody
ABOUT 2,500 YEARS ago, a Greek soldier called Pheidippides ran just short of 25 miles from Marathon to Athens with the news of Greece’s triumphant defeat of Persia at the Battle of Marathon.
In doing so, he accidentally invented the marathons that are run today - and he joined a long list of news-bearers who lived and died a thousand or more years before the invention of the printing press.
News was in demand long before journalists were invented. We are a tribal species and ever since we dropped from the trees we have been desperate for information about what is going on in our own tribe, what nearby tribes are up to and what lies out there in the environment that might do us harm.
Knowledge helped us survive, and while good news makes us feel better, bad news is more useful: if you know bad times are heading your way, you can at least prepare for them. (Psychologists have attributed the panic buying of toilet rolls in the early days of coronavirus to this atavistic need to prepare for the worst: it’s in our genes.)
Couriers, emissaries, runners and riders carried good and bad news in their heads or in hand-written documents long before the Chinese invented the privately-owned newspaper in 1582, during the Ming dynasty.
Given our keen interest in survival, it’s hardly surprising that from the outset the most popular newspapers specialised in bad news, gossip about the ‘top dogs’ in the tribe (celebrities as we now know them) and ‘opinion’.
This last needs a little explanation. As well as being tribal, we are a pattern-seeking species - it’s why we see animals in clouds and flames and pictures of prophets in toast and on stained bedsheets. We have evolved to take random data and to create sets (patterns) out of them - if the data says ‘fast’, ‘sharp teeth’, ‘furry’, ‘roaring’, we can collapse that data into the pattern ‘tiger’ and get the hell out of there. Pattern seeking and the creation of data sets confer evolutionary advantage.
And so if a newspaper’s leader writer takes a series of random facts and creates a narrative or a pattern out of them, that leads to what we call ‘opinion’ - something that is not, in itself, a fact but a way of seeing things, which the leader writer believes plausible. It’s a way of creating a pattern that makes sense of what is happening, and we all need to make sense of what is happening.
It is half a century (gulp) since I started work as a journalist on a daily newspaper - and how things have changed. Before the advent of ‘citizen journalism’, social media, desktop computers, the internet and smart phones, news was brought to the public by trained journalists through newspapers and on TV and radio.
My training was in part in college and in part by public humiliation in a busy newsroom. I remember glowing a fierce red as an elderly Glaswegian sub-editor took me to task for using a stray adjective in a news story: “Nobody cares what you fucking think,” he hollered from about six inches away. I was 19-years old.
And so we were taught to keep opinion out of news stories, to think of the reader first, last and always and to prize accuracy, honesty and integrity. We were to have nothing to do with advertising sales people or advertisers, and we were lectured on the dangers of bribery. In those days ‘freebies’ were seen as overt bribes.
Not everybody took the role of ‘news bearer’ as seriously as I did, but personally I ran metaphorical marathons every day to get the news out there.
Cut to 2020. If you have a smart phone, you can now call yourself a citizen journalist; if you have an Instagram account, you can become an influencer; if you have Twitter you can report - accurately or inaccurately - from the scene of a disaster. And because there are more people with Twitter accounts than there are trained journalists in the world, news is often broken by those for whom fact checking is less important than getting Tweets out there, and being seen.
As a result, traditional media often lags behind social media on breaking news. And in an effort to catch up, traditional media owners sometimes urge employees to follow social media with inaccurate clickbait stories so that the publisher can sell clicks to advertisers, or they drift into opinion pieces because that’s the only game left in town.
Meanwhile, publishers who are losing ad revenue to Google and Facebook have put journalists - and especially those working on news websites - under tremendous pressure to churn stories, often without giving them time to do proper fact checking. And, worryingly, world leaders - especially The Donald - have begun to cry ‘fake news’ whenever a journalist poses a question they don’t like.
Done properly, the craft of journalism was never a simple or straightforward job - but, with pressure to churn stories and kowtow to advertisers, there are days now when it is nigh on impossible to do it properly at all. I sympathise with today’s journalists - they have a tougher job than I ever had.
Apart from inventing journalism, humans also invented democracy (in Athens at around the time Pheidippides was still running around). Democracy means government by the people (the demos in the word). It’s a system in which the people elect representatives to manage their societies, and then hold them to account for their actions.
In the UK, we elect our representatives for a relatively short term so that we can kick them out if we don’t think they’re up to the job. Obvious downsides to this approach are that it encourages short-term thinking and a focus on remaining in power to get particular policies through. Usually, we can live with the downsides.
There’s not much fear of contradiction when I say that Brexit - a huge policy move, however you look at it - was the principal focus of the current government’s early months in office. And then pandemic struck.
I’m not going to get into how well or badly the government responded to the crisis - there are more than enough people doing that.
But I do think the daily press conferences - called by the government, not the media, remember - are at times unedifying. It makes me uncomfortable to see journalists from serious newspapers demanding apologies from ministers who are, as they keep telling us, only doing their best and acting on the advice of scientists. Some of the journalists have done a good job holding the government to account on important issues - but I don’t think demanding an apology is so much telling truth to power as hunting a clickbait headline.
On the other hand, what if there had been no press conference - and the government had simply made a series of uncontested statements, or no statements at all? That would have led to accusations that the government was propagandising or avoiding the issue, and there would have been demands for public questioning of one sort or another.
And is the government coming out of the press conferences it has organised badly? I think not. The questions posed by journalists who - like the politicians - are surfing the wave of a rolling story with incomplete data, at least allow the government to respond quickly to fake news and to establish that laboriously repeated fact that they are ‘doing their best and following the science’. (Scientists are now in the firing line as result.) The press conferences clearly benefit the government and, perhaps, the public, even if they sometimes leave some of us with a bad taste in our mouths.
Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, roundly defends the journalists: “If this week we were to rely on ministers and their in-house scientists on the question of wearing face masks, we would be clueless. If we had relied on government press statements on Covid-19 deaths, we would never have known they were just deaths in NHS hospitals, not care homes or any other homes. Independent epidemiologists disagreeing with Whitehall’s virus model from Imperial College had to challenge it in newspapers. It has been left to journalists, not MPs, to track down the chaos over protection equipment, key worker testing and the capital’s underused intensive care beds.”
It’s a cogent point of view. Journalists are not meant to be cheerleaders.
My biggest fear, though, is not for journalism (the demand for news will never diminish, since it is a basic human instinct) - it is for democracy.
In democracies, politicians are called to account - it’s the accountability to the demos, the people, that is the underpinning of the system. And so they should be held up - and willingly hold themselves up - to scrutiny.
That is less likely to happen if journalists and other scrutineers are demonised as mere finger-pointers and accusers, or if questions politicians don’t like are dismissed as ‘fake news’.
Journalism may be on the back foot in some places. But if politicians successfully shun public scrutiny, what does that lead to? Dictatorship? Fascism? And then who will replace the journalists as scrutineers? Instagram influencers? The Twitterati? Mark Zuckerberg?
Once Covid-19 has been beaten, and it will be, there will be a reckoning.
Let’s hope that that doesn’t bring even more bad news.