The latest revelations in the phone-hacking scandal have prompted the suspension of a News of the World executive, but they also raise serious concerns about security — and possible corruption — at mobile phone companies, Brian Cathcart writes
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Latest revelations on the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal puts the police under the spotlight, says Brian Cathcart. The Met should be taken off the case and the investigation reopened
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Foreign news coverage is in steep decline in the national press and we are turning our backs on the rest of the world. That, in a sentence, is the message of a simple and impressive study published today by the Media Standards Trust.
“Shrinking World” compares four national dailies over a given week in 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009 and finds a 40 per cent drop in the number of international news stories published. In 1979, on average, foreign news took up one-fifth of a daily paper; in 2009 the figure is 11 per cent.
Editors won’t like this because it makes them look lazy, cheap and dumb. They will either ignore it, or they will have a go at the trust (‘Who are these people anyway?”) or they will look for little holes in its methodology.
But the report is shocking and the declines are far, far steeper than I for one had expected. You might think, for example, that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have boosted the 2009 figures; well the truth is that they did, but the effect was only to raise them above even more appalling depths.
I gather that one newspaper executive, asked about these low levels of coverage of events abroad, remarked that his staff would write about China if only there were more celebrities in China. Heaven help us.
As the veteran Daily Mail foreign correspondent Harry Edgington points out, we in Britain are used to the idea that Americans are ignorant of the world because their news media are so insular. That, we tell ourselves, is why their politics are so xenophobic and why, for example, they could so easily be persuaded to link Iraq with 9/11.
Well that beam is now in our eye. Why are the British still so comically/tragically un-European, despite nearly 40 years of EU membership? Well, maybe it is because they aren’t told anything about other Europeans that isn’t written in London by people with little or no understanding of what they are describing.
The trust didn’t explore the content of the reporting, but my bet is that, of the rump of foreign journalism that survives, the biggest slice is about America (where they speak English and have lots of celebrities) while much of the rest deals with wars and disasters. What sort of world view is that?
And don’t let’s kid ourselves that this is just an old media problem. The Mail, Guardian, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Mirror and so forth remain the dominant organs of news in this country both in print and online. The general public is not reading Reuters online every day, nor is it dabbling in Le Monde or the Washington Post, or even the Drudge Report and Perez Hilton.
And those papers shape the broadcast news agenda. Sky and ITN (with the exception of C4 news) provide foreign coverage which is overwhelmingly America-plus-disasters too. Only the BBC (which the Murdoch/Mail press naturally hate with a passion) stands up for a wider world view, though even it is normally led by the big papers.
Editors responding to Shrinking World may plead (if they are unusually frank) that it’s the readers’ fault, that people just aren’t interested in what happens in Egypt or Russia or France. They may also plead that it’s all too expensive: they can’t afford foreign bureaux any more. These are the counsels of failure. Journalists and editors are supposed to provide some kind of meaningful reflection of the real world: they are not supposed to hide in some cheap, shiny corner of it.
If you ever imagined that, over time, British journalism would inevitably adjust to the society it serves by becoming less white and less middle class, now is probably the time to abandon that idea.
For a few exciting years it looked as though improvement might be on the way, but sharp increases in university fees will surely put paid to that. Like it or not, for at least another generation your news and current affairs will continue to come to you through that white, middle-class filter.
The window of hope that is now closing was opened by the universities, which over the past 20 years quietly took over responsibility for most journalism education after the big news organisations, national and regional, cut down or shut down their training schemes to save money.
At first the media studies departments did the teaching, but now universities teach journalism as a subject in its own right, often at both undergraduate and MA levels. This transformation has been almost entirely state-funded, which means the news industry pulled off the clever trick of nationalising its own training.
But if this change has given employers a free, trained talent pool (they ask for their applicants to be “newsroom-ready”, like so many supermarket chickens), it has also had the potential to bring valuable long-term change to the industry.
For one thing, universities teach students to think about journalism as well as do it; they teach about the ethics, responsibilities, history, politics and social function of the job – never high priorities when the industry was training its own. Call me an idealist, but I think that could only improve the news culture in this country.
For another, the universities have operated open, transparent recruitment and admissions policies which gave applicants from ethnic minorities and from poorer backgrounds a far better chance than before of getting an education in journalism.
There are drawbacks. Experience of the workplace is important in journalism education, as was recognised in the old sandwich courses. Universities can’t provide that themselves, or at least they can’t provide enough of it, and the result is the journalism work experience phenomenon, a powerful filter that halts the progress of many who can’t afford to work for several months for no pay.
None the less, university journalism departments have been quietly turning out able, independent-minded, thoughtful graduates who, though they are by no means a perfect reflection of the society they live in, collectively reflect it far, far better than the industry itself does. In other words, more people from poor backgrounds, more people from the ethnic minorities, more disabled people, more women…
The idealist in me fondly imagines this generation, over time, moving through the system and helping to change the way that British society sees and understands itself.
But a big hike in university fees, combined with other effects of the reforms proposed by the government and Lord Browne, will cut this precious experiment short.
Of all the professions, journalism is surely among the most vulnerable when it comes to the kind of touch cost-benefit analysis that school leavers and parents will have to do in a world of higher fees. Undeniably, the news industry is in existential crisis: yes, it offers thrilling new possibilities, but it is distinctly short on security.
In this environment, whatever Vince Cable and Nick Clegg may say, poorer students — by which I mean students who are not middle class — are more likely to back away than risk the big debts that will accompany a journalism degree.
The next generation of journalists, therefore, will probably have just the same social profile as the generation currently supplying us with news, even though the country around us will have changed.
It reminds me of those generals in the Crimean War whose mindset equipped them to fight only in the way that Wellington had fought Napoleon 40 years earlier. They made a terrible hash of it.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London.