14 Nov 10 | Uncategorized
Reading and watching the coverage of last Wednesday’s education protest reminded me of something that can be depressing for a journalist: modern news journalism is a weird and skew-eyed way of describing the world.
By common consent only a small minority of marchers took part in the violence at Millbank tower; indeed in the predictable language of some papers they “hijacked” the event. Yet their rowdiness and violence was the story. The coverage was not about the experience of the tens of thousands, but about what a couple of hundred did. It was about the most dramatic, extreme events and nothing else.
Those are the rules of journalism, of course. Prince Charles once drew attention to the strangeness of it: there’s a frenzy when a plane crashes, but nobody reports the 999,999 planes that land safely. How could it be otherwise? When a dog bites a man, after all, it’s just not worth telling people.
For years I have been teaching journalism students two things which often sit together uncomfortably: that journalism is mostly about news — men biting dogs and planes that crash — and that it is about describing the world as it is, about bearing witness to truth. But how true was the march coverage when it concentrated on the activities of the minority?
This isn’t merely abstract. I recall a story from the early days of the troubles in Northern Ireland. An executive at Ulster Television answered a phone in the newsroom one day to hear a voice say: “Where are the cameras? We’re ready for the riot.”
“Huh?’ said the baffled executive. And the voice said: “We’re all here. We’ll start throwing stones as soon as the cameras arrive.”
The TV man gathered his thoughts and said: “I’m sorry but that’s not the way it works. We won’t be sending any cameras. Goodbye.”
If your rule is that you must report the most dramatic, if the competitive imperative is to accentuate the lurid and extreme, then you are vulnerable to manipulation, to the staged riot or the media event, and your news agenda soon ceases to have much to do with reality.
The student who breaks away from the march and kicks the window pane will always have the headlines because he wants to, whether he is an extremist or just unusually upset about education cuts. With the help of journalists, he can fabricate a distinct reality.
Journalism seems to be trapped. It can’t start dealing in peaceful marchers and ignoring stone-throwers. It can’t report the planes that land safely because you wouldn’t read, watch, listen to or buy that, and neither would I. So it is stuck out there thumbing a lift from the hijacker.
I liked Michael White’s piece about the march, and I liked the way the Guardian put it on the front — though like all the other papers they led the page on the trouble. White seemed to escape the trap; he wrote about what the many did more than about the few, and he produced something that resembled what I guess most marchers experienced.
Elsewhere, few papers that I saw made much of an effort to reflect the many. And of course if there had been no trouble the coverage would have been so different: it would have been much shorter and less prominent, and almost certainly bland and snide — “students find excuse to skip lectures” and so on. And it would have been illustrated with pictures of pretty young women with placards.
So if you are a student or lecturer, or anyone else with something to complain about (which must be a lot of people these days), what do you do?
Evil triumphs when the good stay silent, they say, so that is not an option. So take your pick: act responsibly and be ignored or patronised, or be “hijacked” and so condemned or travestied. Either way, unless you are very lucky, nobody will pay much attention to your real message, because the news rules don’t seem to allow it.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
01 Nov 10 | Uncategorized
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.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London, he tweets @BrianCathcart
26 Oct 10 | Index Index, minipost
Webster Shamu, a Zimbabwean minister, yesterday said that his country should draw lessons from China when defining the role of the media. In particular, he praised China’s ability to counter negative stereotypes and derogatory messages in the Western media. His comments came yesterday in Harare as he opened a two-day photography course sponsored by his ministry, the Chinese Embassy and Xinhua News Agency. He also said that information and media ministers from developing nations had met in July to discuss media dissemination.
26 Oct 10 | Index Index, minipost
Turkey’s Radio Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) has fined a Turkish news channel for airing an interview which criticizes the current government. CNN Turk had broadcast the opinions of Hasan Basri Özbey, Secretary General of the Labour Party, which included his criticisms of past policies by both the current President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The International Press Institute (IPI) National Committee has criticized RTÜK’s decision, remarking that “RTÜK chose one of these opinions to penalize by equating the critic with the broadcaster.”
