News journalism has a bad reputation, worse than in some other advanced countries, and, in contradiction, news programmers are more viewed and listened to and more news channels more avidly read by larger numbers of people than in many advanced countries. It suggests that news is widely regarded as a grubby necessity. The people who supply it are suspect, not to be trusted, and their product is to be treated skeptically in the knowledge that some of it will be downright wrong, some of it mildly misleading and some of it disgrace- fully intrusive. Together the newshounds pursue newsworthy people without respect for privacy and position.
The hard school of journalism says it is exactly as it should be. Respectable journalism fails to do all of the job. If journalism is to make society face its ills wherever they are, it will have no friends. In particular, it will be disliked by people in power because it expects them to answer issues decided by the media, not solely those agreed on the political agenda. The attitude is summed up in the comment. ‘The proper relationship between a journalist and a politician is the same as the relationship between a dog and a lamp-post.’
No one believes, though, that news and journalism are simply a service to democracy. They are products, commercially judged even when, as with the BBC, they are paid for by a tax, not by money earned in the market place. News is a way of making money just as selling bread is a way of making money.
News is also in some hands a way of exercising power. The social importance of news remains. In industrial society which may be called scientific society, news is, for all its failings, a major branch of the information business, not an option, a basic necessity. Western civilization needs good flows of information like it needs good flows of air to breath.
Editing: Editing begins as soon as a journalist sees and hears of something newsworthy. The process of selection, elimination and presentation starts almost instantly. No reporter reports everything known, nor in the order it occurred. To that extent, the reporter edits. The sub-editor edits some more, as does the lay-out sub or the video-editor. The process continues until the page is published or the programme broadcast. As a result, even when all involved in the chain are greatly skilled and not mischievous, what is made public often departs significantly from reality without anyone in the process realising it. Uncertainty is expressed as an ambiguity, and ambiguity transmutes into falsehood, usually inadvertently, occasionally wilfully. People, who have been involved in a newsworthy event, actively or as witnesses, recognize the problem when they say the news story is seriously wrong.
Journalists generally underestimate the extent of the process of falsification. Many news stories contain important errors of fact or emphasis and the journalistic process is to blame for less than all of it. Other contributory factors include inadequate information from sources when the journalist is not an eyewitness. But journalistic failure nearly always makes the unreliability worse.
Agenda-setting: The concept of agenda-setting is one of the most over blown in discussion of the media. It is at its most inflated when theorists, journalists or politicians assert, as at times they do, that the media decide what topics the nation should discuss and how important they are. It was a power often claimed in the BBC by people working for Today, the breakfast-time all news and current affairs show on Radio’ 4, a programme that met competition from breakfast television by strengthening its reputation for being what anyone who is anyone listens to and seeks to be interviewed on, a role confirmed by the notables waiting their turn to be interrupted in the studio or climbing, sometimes in a dressing gown, into the radio car, the mobile studio parked at their homes. Today’s record urged prime minister Thatcher to be a regular if editorially agitated listener who at least once had a call made to the programme to say she would like to be interviewed, which she was. Two decades earlier when Harold Wilson’s government had a majority so small it would fit into a taxi-cab, he would occasionally call the BBC’s breakfast radio news from Ten Downing Street to correct a story or to suggest that the script refer to him in the first mention as prime minister rather than plain Mr. Wilson. But these political ‘interventions’ acknowledge media influence, not media power to set, meaning fix, the agenda. Equally, when political concern about agenda-setting is at its height during main elections in Britain and many other countries, the United States included, it is an exaggeration that news channels and broadcasting, television especially, dictates what issues voters should consider most important and how they should see them. Surveys of public opinion at election times show that voters develop for themselves agendas different from news priorities.
The idea of agenda-setting is, at best, a hackneyed half truth. In open societies, no one organization, no one group or category of people, journalistic or political, far less one programme or newspaper, fixes an agenda for the nation. The very idea of a set list of topics somehow observed is faulty. It implies that everyone attends to the same list. It suggests that the people of the country all attend to the items in the list in the same order. It seems that the importance they give to each topic is dictated in defiance of personal inclinations and concerns. Analyzed so, the concept is clearly inadequate.
Independence: Journalism is suspect if its editorial judgments are not made freely and independently by individual journalists ‘on the ground’, by editorial teams or by trusted editors. Journalists in countries newly emerged from authoritarian control in the former communist eastern Europe are passionate about the independence of individual journalists. After decades of restriction, they are inclined to see any restrictive editorial act by a ‘grey suit’, a boss, as a disgraceful interference – and a ‘boss’ is any supervisor who does not normally make detailed editorial decisions. Exasperated journalists share the attitude in systems long used to freedom when the chief sub, senior producer, or editor overrules them. Dissatisfaction of this kind visits all news teams at some time because no sensible journalistic organization anywhere in the world accepts that what is decided by the people who normally make the decisions must be allowed to stand. In the normal Course, the reporters who gather the news make nearly all decisions at low level, by the subs who prepare it for the page, or the producers who finalize it for the programme. Most editorial machines could not work in any other way: decisions are normally made and applied at the lowest competent level. The norm has, however, to give way at times to editors and other senior editorial people who have the authority to intervene. They usually have to answer for what the paper or the programme has done and they are not prepared to sanction whatever answer those below them think appropriate.
Editors of news channels fight vigorously for their right to edit. They often seek assurances from proprietors and controlling interests that they will not be interfered with. At the same time, they assert their responsibilities downwards, over their editorial staff. Sometimes, their independence from owners is doubted.
Doubts of this kind are often made and equally often denied about editors of news channels owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born, naturalized American creator of the multi- national media giant, News Corporation. They were made also, and denied, about the Observer, the Sunday paper, when it was in the empire of Tiny Rowland, for many years boss of the conglomerate, Lomho. Robert Maxwell, as owner of the Daily Mirror and much more, behaved in a way that encouraged everyone to believe he was the editorial driving force who made whichever decisions he chose.
Serious doubts about the independence and integrity of journalism arise in other ways. Direct interference by advertisers is loudly denied; stealthy editorial influence is suspected. In financial journalism, alert audience become suspicious in the weeks approaching the beginning of the financial year in April when PEPS (Personal Equity Plans) are heavily advertised – investors being allowed one each financial year – if the advertisements are accompanied by friendly editorial copy that proclaims the attractions of PEPS after a spell in which they did badly. The same suspicion occurs over the property of news channels.
The truth about the effect of political pressure on news channels is also stealthy. But the relationships between national news channels owners, news channels editors and politicians are often more willful and even less transparent than the relation- ship between broadcasting chiefs and politicians Hard as it is to believe that a major news channels would forgo a story of government scandal or would seriously restrain it because the editor dined at Downing Street, has a knighthood, or is friendly with a cabinet minister, somewhere along the line, at some time, an editorial favor is done. As in broadcasting, it is not blatant. The effect through cabinet minister, news channels proprietor and news channels editor is surreptitious. Some- times it is illusory.
Powerful Interests: Ordinary journalists may not be in a position to resist when an approach is made stealthily. An important advertiser who fears damage from a candid story or a favored MP with a gripe will go direct to the highest editor and, as this danger exists most strongly in local than in national media, may be rewarded with a change to the story made as stealthily as the approach or with a crude, shameless editorial cut – or, on a good day for journal- ism, with a refusal to interfere with justified copy.
It is easy to say that editorial decisions should be made only on the basis of proper journalistic imperatives and those blandishments, pressures and threats should be resisted. The problem is that as some pressures – euphemistically called representations – make fair points, conceding to a fair point can seem like a craven concession while to resist a point for the sake of it can be a short cut to unreliability and unfairness. As pressure is concerned often with judgment, less often a matter of simple fact, there is always room for dispute, one journalist seeing the point as unreasonable, another seeing it as fair.
The problem is psychologically most acute when dealing with powerful interests. And it is not rare. Every day, journalists are being pressed ‘to put it right’. At times, they are genuinely being asked to put right a mistake of fact or an omission of importance. At other times, they are asked to excise or downplay a significant and uncomfortable truth. Demands come openly and surreptitiously from many powerful centres government departments, political party headquarters, MPs, local councilors, company bosses, and the police, and health service authorities, advertisers who put money into all the commercially funded media and who threaten at times to stop it. Weak journalists change a story because somebody who matters demands it. Strong journalists change a story because they are convinced it deserves to be changed – and it does not matter where the demand for change comes from. The only acceptable way is for the journalists to decide. It means isolating the point made, considering it fairly regardless of whether the source is important or ordinary, accepting the point if it seems reasonable, rejecting it if it is not – and putting up with skepticism or wrath as the case may be.
Impartiality: Impartiality is demanded of regulated British broadcasting but not of British newspapers which are not regulated. Audiences, generally much more politically mixed, especially for national programmers, than newspaper readerships, are sensitive to partiality. Promised an impartial approach, they expect it, at times so sensitively that they challenge good sense. In the early part of the British general election campaign in 1992, the BBC had hundreds of complaints against the blue background of the studio set for the Nine O’clock News on television, a programme which reported a great deal of election news. Callers said blue favoured the Conservative party because it is the party colour. According to one, ‘The blue background cannot be considered impartial.’ The colour of the set was changed.
Balance: Balance is not a concept to trouble news channels much, although they all like to say a bit portentously that they take a suitably balanced approach to affairs. It is, though, a concept at the heart of the way British broadcasting is judged. It does not feature in the Broadcasting Act but years ago it acquired an official imprimatur through the now superseded Annex to the BBC License and Agreement, through the BBC Producers’ Guidelines and in the programme codes parliament requires the Independent Television Commission and the Radio Authority to draw up. It features frequently in discussions about the quality of factual broadcasting and in complaints that programmers’ have not lived up to the standards expected of them. Balance was never intended to mean ‘thirty seconds for them and thirty seconds for each of the others’, nor in newspapers to mean a sentence, a paragraph or an article to each of the contending views. Equality of sound-bite, the stopwatch version of balance in broadcasting, is favored by the political parties when they believe their electoral chances would benefit from an equal quota of appearances. Other embattled interests suffering from adverse publicity in programmers’ also tend to interpret the concept in a mechanistic way. Programme makers regard these skeptically. Balance is in fact a simple and straight- forward notion, not profound, and not precise. It is closely allied to impartiality and fairness, and is used very often to mean much the same. These virtues of public service broadcasting are all quite ordinary and they impede, instead of helping, valid editorial effort if asked to deliver exact results. Sometimes the stop-watch is helpful, as during general elections when so much mundane party political comment is broadcast that the likeliest way to fair treatment all round is to stick close to quotas. Even then, the stop-watch is set aside when the news justifies more attention to one party than another. Stop-watch or not, experienced programme makers realize what interviewees find hard – that a cogent argument in thirty seconds is worth more than an ill-focused minute and a half. In such cases, equal time has low priority. To decide whether a programme is reasonably balanced, the prominence of a contribution, how it is introduced, what follows; it and whether it is directly rebutted by anyone else are all more significant than equal time.
For the normal run of programme making and news channels reporting, balanced treatment means being even-handed, not giving one side of an argument unreasonable attention to its advantage or disadvantage. It means exploring issues in an uncommitted way so that viewers, listeners and readers appreciate all the important arguments, including the weight of support they enjoy. A balanced treatment of abortion, for instance, will recognize the passions that exist for and against without pretending that every argument is of equal weight and without every argument being given the same amount of air- time or equal column inches. It would recognize that some views on abortion are held by relatively few people but at times it may give minority views a great deal of attention because they are new, are developing, are particularly threatening or whatever. The dimensions of valid editorial interest are endless. Equally, balance does not mean allocating programme time or column inches according to the intensity of the belief.
It does not mean reflecting all sides to the argument every time the issue is examined. A news channels feature or programme might fairly explore the growth of militant opposition to abortion that pickets vulnerable people outside clinics and might fairly try to understand the power of its belief without a word from the supporters of abortion. Even if the programme or station or paper had not explored any other aspect of abortion and did not intend to, it could still have dealt with the militants in balanced way. The critical question would be whether the militants had gained unfair advantage or suffered unfair disadvantage as a result and, arising from that, whether the public was badly or well served.
Objectivity: Objectivity is one of the partners of impartiality, often taken to mean much the same. It is a virtue expected of public service broadcasters. Programme journalists recognize that objectivity is not totally achievable but this does not allow them to abandon the idea that they must try to report events in ways that will survive scrutiny. Better to try to be objective as far as possible than to swamp people with partiality.
The idea is easily rubbished. Skeptics say it is dangerously misleading. It causes people to believe that certain news organizations are more to be trusted than others because they try to be objective and impartial when in fact their judgments are as selective and as biased as anyone else’s. Overtly biased publications are, by this analysis, more honest because they do not pretend to be anything else and their prejudices are evident for all to see.
The actual performance of organizations that claim to be objective is also much questioned. Large numbers of viewers and listeners take objectivity to mean they will not hear or see anything done in a way that offends their idea of how it should be done. Claims to objectivity seem to encourage intolerance in its customers. When issues divide societies deeply, many people complain that coverage is partial, not objective, and that it will make divisions worse. The criticism was made persistently against the British media during the years of strife in Northern Ireland. What satisfied the nationalist community tended to disaffect the loyalists, and what met approval from loyalists in the neat terraced streets of east Belfast was scoffed at in the Bog side of Derry and the Catholic areas of west Belfast.
The same response greeted broadcast coverage of the miners’ strike in 1984-5, the most bitter, the biggest and most protracted labour dispute in Britain for many years. Few people were neutral and many were suspicious of the news programmes. The miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, encouraged his members to the view that the news media were part of the enemy, active in a conspiracy to misrepresent the miners and to mislead the public. The belief was fostered when BBC television news inadvertently reversed pictures of a sequence of events during violent picketing at the Orgreave coking plant. Pickets were shown as charging the police and the police as retaliating when it was in fact the other way round. The mistake was later put right and the BBC apologized. But the human failure in the stressful process of quick editing was repeatedly, for years, paraded as evidence of bias, a damaging failure of objectivity that turned public opinion; it was said, against the miners. Those who claim to be objective, or are required to be so, are not allowed simple mistakes.
Straight Dealing : Journalists so often enquire into matters people do not want to talk about they soon develop methods of approach that are tentative, careful, oblique, roundabout, stealthy or sly. If it suits their purpose, they ask questions on the phone without declaring who they are, and if necessary pretend to business other than journalism. The description does not apply to all journalists all of the time but most, at some time, have behaved in ways most people would not regard as straight. It is one of the reasons for the poor reputation of journalists, competing as they do with politicians and estate agents for bottom places in the popularity list. It gives rise to the scathing image of the wheedling figure with the brown trilby, the grubby raincoat, the cigarette, the seedy complexion and he boozed features. ‘)
The phenomenon stretches back to the origins of journalism. First applied to news channels, it extends to broadcasting though the conspicuous apparatus of television and radio might be expected to limit the opportunities for shifty approaches. Concern in the BBC that some programme makers were not as open as they should be about their intentions towards interviewees and other contributors led to rules about straight dealing being devised and being included as first chapter in two successive editions of the Producers’ Guidelines Complaints had generated the concern. On examination, a number left a suspicion that a small minority of producers, researchers or reporters had been less than honest or worse, a minority who compromised the reputation of all the rest. The concern was not confined to the BBC. It was echoed in complaints about other broadcasting organizations and it was a charge leveled more at television than at radio.
The need in broadcasting for comments to be literally ‘on the record’ encourages the problem. Where a newspaper journalist will make do with a comment from an unnamed source, in a reference dressed up to persuade as in ‘a source in company headquarters’, television strives to record it on video tape. And deviousness is used to persuade people to record when they might be reluctant if the real purpose is openly declared. After programmes had been broadcast, a repeated complaint from people interviewed was that the purpose of the interview and the programme were not made clear, that they were explained harmlessly in a generalized way. In one notorious case, a programme about a rape, the producer was accused of inveigling people into co-operation by telling them the programme was about trauma. Typically in cases complained about, the interview for the programme would be at length, half an hour or more, but with only a small extract used, an extract that at the time of recording seemed almost an aside but which assumed great importance in the different context of the completed programme. People felt the true intention had been deliberately kept from them. They had been enticed into talking about something they would have refused to talk about or would have talked about more circumspectly had the programme makers been honest with them. When the programme people admitted their guile, which was not often, they said it uncovered important truth, which would otherwise have been hidden.
Another factor to make programme producers and programme reporters seem less than straight is that many people do not appreciate the need for a crisp ‘sound-bite’. Practiced politicians and other seasoned public figures do. They know the game. But people not used to interviews often feel cheated when only thirty seconds is used out of an interview that lasted thirty minutes. The harsh reality that it took thirty minutes of fishing to produce thirty succinct seconds passes them by.
People who complain are not always to be trusted. They too have hidden purposes especially when they are in significant positions. They are at times too slow to realize until after the event that the burden of telling an unwelcome truth is more painful when millions see you doing it on the television screen.
The unguarded comment, the remark regretted cannot be denied when you have been seen to make it. The quote in the newspaper is easier to deny, or to charge as being used out of context, or to have been made ‘off-the-record’, a phrase of seriously uncertain meaning that can give credence to spurious complaint because it can mean ‘not for use at all’ or simply ‘not for attribution’. The alleged victim of television has to make a more elaborate case against television journalists. The case is usually that the journalists misled them from the outset in one way or another.
Consumer programmers’ that routinely pursue commercial villains and exploiters might be expected to be accused of underhand dealing more often than others. In fact, they are among the least likely to be so accused. Apart from formally approved surreptitious methods, mainly secret recordings, they tend to confront their targets openly and to provide clear opportunities to answer difficult points, including allegations, though these opportunities may well involve ‘foot-in-the-door’ methods or scuffling encounters on the pavement. Consumer programmers’ are more likely to face complaint, obstruction and prevarication before transmission than after, the tactics of their victims, usually companies and corporations, occasionally informed by former consumer programme people who have become specialist advisers, poachers turned gamekeepers.
Accuracy: Accuracy ought not to be an editorial issue. It is a fundamental value, deserving to be unquestioned and always applied as rigorously as reporters and editors can apply it. Instead, in significant areas of journalism, it is cynically manipulated, waved aside with the old jest that the facts should not be allowed to get in the way of a good story.
Even when intentions are good, accuracy is often much more difficult to achieve than non-journalists would believe. Reporters frequently depend, at best, on the eye-witness of others who have no training and who in newsworthy circumstances may become nervously unreliable or, worse, on honest but struggling third-hand hearsay, and worst of all, on the say so of people who want their partial version of events to be accepted as the whole truth.
News is also escorted by professionals through a variety of channels, shedding a bit of reliability every step of the way, mocking the experience of its handlers, the journalists. Picked up first by a seasoned freelance from a whisper, adapted knowingly after a call to police headquarters miles away, further embellished when rendered into journalese as the story is filed to an agency, snappily re-written before it gets on the agency wires, remodeled once more by a newsroom sub-editor, and then improved by a judicious word massage here and there from a more senior editor before it reaches the trusting public as a true record of what happened. By then the merchants of truth have delivered a reasonable approximation or, for all they know, a gross distortion.
Because of this propensity for news to travel badly, some American journals use ‘fact checkers’. They check essential facts in copy by going back to primary sources or as near as they can get to them. Their remit runs from the momentous to the trivial. They are not confined to bald facts. They question judgments because they have to be justified by the facts. American media-study circles have referred to a ‘fetishism of facts’ and that fact checkers are ‘obsessed with facility’, like accusing a doctor of being obsessed with cure.
Good News, Bad News: A steady stream of complaint from the public says the news is too gloomy, that there is too much bad news and that journal- ism is to blame because positive developments are ignored.
Government sometimes develops the complaint, arguing that excessive bad news saps public morale by exaggerating failures and underestimating successes. Business joins in now and again with the argument that excessive bad news seriously damages the country’s image and its commercial efforts abroad.
In an important sense, the criticism is groundless. Even the worst news has positive elements. The famines and genocides of Africa arouse passionate concern and huge relief effort. The world has forever suffered from heart-breaking disaster but only in recent times have humanitarian agencies moved consciences and supplies to the extent they do now. Reports of accidents show people behaving with courage and self-sacrifice. In other ways too and without riding on the back of disasters, the news media provide frequent insights into genuine human progress – in reports of medical advances, in reports of big commercial contracts for public works aimed at improving the daily lot of millions of people, in reports of human endurance and in reports of technological invention that relieve drudgery and danger. It is all there for people who care to look for it without bias.
Accordingly, when people say there is too much bad news, they are, to an important degree, criticizing their own perceptions. They also overlook the influence the news media, especially television; have as a force for the benefit of humankind against hostile or indifferent authority.
Birtism: No one really knows what ‘Birtism’ means. Even the man whose name has been hijacked, John Birt, would be hard pushed to define it and he, in any case, is said to dislike it as a term. The word took hold after he was appointed deputy director general of the BBC in 1987 and tended to be used as a criticism by people, particularly inside the BBC and especially inside BBC television current affairs, who did not like his ideas.
If it could be tied down to an editorial meaning, it would signify an unusually methodical approach to the making of serious programmers’, probably also to the making of light- hearted programmes. It would put greater store on detailed calculation than on inspired insight. It would certainly expect great reliability, of perspective as well as of fact. It would put emphasis on explaining what things mean and why they are as they are, that is the attempt to get rid of the ‘bias against understanding’, the charge against television news, jointly prosecuted by Birt and the economics journalist, Peter Jay, in the 1970s. Part of the calculating approach of Birtism is to try to make sure that ‘built’ programmes and features – those prepared over a number of days, weeks or months – work out clearly in advance what their intentions are and stick to them, instead of starting with a general idea and allowing the programme to go wherever the trail takes it. This involves strong research before anything is recorded. It is the aspect most virulently objected to by critics of editorial Birtism. They see it as a denial of robust journalism in that reporters and producers should be able to adapt their direction according to the facts they uncover, not to stick mechanically to a trail predetermined by earlier research. The conflict of view is, almost certainly, sterile, based on misunderstanding, some of it wilful. The issue is not whether broadcast journalism is to be allowed to follow the facts wherever they lead. The true disagreement is about the stage at which this should be done. The Birt way is for the conclusion to be as clear as possible before the programme commits itself to interviews and other recordings and to limit unpredicted directions to the minimum. Many journalists feel strongly that their job cannot be done properly without a large degree of continuing freedom to take whatever editorial turn they believe justified. Birtism as a concept accrued managerial meanings before Birt became BBC director general in 1993. It now seems to mean any policy he encouraged, managerial or editorial, and which well-meaning, as well as ill-meaning, traditionalists do not like, for instance, the free market way of managing resources for programmers’, known as producer choice.
Identification: The disadvantages of being identified in the newspapers and in the news on radio and television are more widely felt than they used to be. One reason is that even a mild media interest these days means being approached, harried as the quarry sees it, by a squad of reporters, photographers and camera crews, bearing the intrusive weapons of the news trade. When the interest is high, as when the media pursue well-known personalities or their lovers, alleged or actual, the squad becomes a small army and the weapons of the trades are augmented to include stepladders, listening devices and the surreptitious long lens.
Another, perhaps more powerful influence is that television has disclosed how disagreeable it all is. In the old days when newspapers ran around after the news, when the BBC did not bother much and when independent radio and television did not exist, only the victims of newsworthiness knew how much of an ordeal it was. The newspapers did not show the pursuit, or showed it only rarely. Now, millions of people who have never been newsworthy and who never will be can see for themselves, on the television screen, the intimidating insistence of the news hounds and the unseemly thrust of microphones and cameras. Many do not like it and the newsgathering scrum often distracts attention from the news being gathered.
It has all contributed to the belief that in the face of self interested behavior by the news media, often not justified by a genuine public interest, people need to be protected. Programmes and newspapers are honest enough to air the concern so that people who have been in the public eye for a few days or for a week or two are seen and heard to testify to the nature of the ordeal. The debate about privacy reflects the concern. In another aspect, the courts of law are increasingly sympathetic to the desire for anonymity on the part of witnesses and victims and to defendants who face further trials – to such an extent that the principle of open justice is seriously qualified. There are suggestions that, as in a few other European countries, the names of people accused in legal cases should not be made public unless and until they are found guilty. Support groups talk about the ordeal of victims of crimes and accidents, with some opinion seeking to give victims control over the way their experiences are used editorially and, by implication, whether they should be used at all. Unless victims of crime consent, a number of police forces will not identify them to journalists when giving news of crime. In time of war, as in the 1991 Gulf War when American, British, French and Arab forces acted against Iraq for invading and over-running Kuwait, the Ministry of Defence in Britain and the armed services strongly protect the families of the dead, the injured and missing.
The issues of identification, harassment and intrusion merge into a composite problem. If names are not given in the first place, people cannot be approached let alone harassed. H they agree to speak only anonymously, their ordeal at the hands of the media is held to be lessened and in most such cases it is lessened because an anonymous witness is much less appealing than a witness of flesh and bone and tears. H these pressures advance in response to collective excesses the media will not act against they will damage the generally overlooked contribution news makes to knowledge. They would reduce the human element in the news and without the human element; reports of crime and disaster become cold, far enough removed from the suffering of identifiable people to fail to evoke compassion and understanding.
Portrayal: Journalism is notorious for leaving individuals and groups with the belief that it has misrepresented them, not so much by getting facts wrong, though that occurs often enough, as by elevating a few facts and excluding others. Independent-minded journalism takes the view that it must portray people according to its purposes and as it sees them rather than as they see themselves or would like others to see them. Even without the distraction of political correctness, it is an area of genuine conflict between journalistic independence and social sensitivity. Willful as journalistic partiality sometimes is, it is mainly a product of the pursuit of ‘the story’. Facts about people are relevant only to the extent they relate to the news story. People who appear in stories are partially portrayed because only part of them is relevant. A news reporter does not normally want their life story or even a rounded picture of them. If a person in a wheelchair is involved, say as a victim of a robbery at home, the fact of the wheelchair nearly always matters more to the story than the full-time job the person does. The wheelchair will be prominent because it adds interest, the fulltime job at best referred to in passing because it is not relevant and, in the context, not interesting. This is likely to change only a little and slowly – not at all in some journalistic quarters. After a few years of hard-bitten experience, journalists come to dislike facts being wished into their stories for ulterior, non-journalistic purposes whether to appease a political or commercial pressure, or to concede a point to a well-intentioned lobby that argues for a better social image for single parents or for ‘pensioners’, the usual British label, for gays or for any of the other groups who feel misrepresented, misunderstood and – as a result, they say badly provided for.
To that extent, clichés and stereotypes are inevitable, ensuring vigorous argument and protest. Journalistic resistance to pressure is well justified because there are so many ‘image improvers’ keen to bend journalism to their purposes. Equally, decent social sensitivity, though liable to be scoffed at as politically correct, sees many instances of media discrimination on grounds of sex and sexual character, race, disability and age, failings that arise from general biases shared by journalists.
Political Correctness
Political correctness struggles to survive in Britain. It flourished for a while in what became known as ‘loony left’ local authorities where public policies passionately favored minority needs, the dubious as well as the deserving. Elsewhere, it quickly became a wilting import from America where notions of equality and fairness are pursued more determinedly through rules, regulations, codes, quotas and policies than the British have stomach for. It was from the start a pejorative term in the British context, a counter-productive phrase that damages what its socially improving proponents try to achieve. It has, perversely, set back the causes of feminism and minority rights. Hostility to it has helped racism, sexism and other biased ‘isms’. The case for journalistic care in the use of language – to avoid ‘policemen’ because there are ‘policewomen’, to avoid references to skin colour when it has nothing to do with the issue, to refuse to say ‘dykes’ and ‘queers’ in a hostile context – is now easily mocked by invoking the curse of political correctness something else. The ‘something else’ can be the language used. If it is exceptional, exceptionally attractive or exceptionally ugly, the audience will pay so much attention to the form of speech that the message will be missed. A topical, non-creative programme fails if audiences notice the way they are spoken to rather than what they are told. The programme speech should be so easy as to make broadcasting seem easy.
Journalese
Journalese is poorly regarded, an abuse of language, cliché ridden, strongly contributing to declined standards of speech and writing, a baleful influence on the young, a source of exasperation to the middle aged and middle class, a banal form of writing that over-simplifies and which indicates an over- simplified view of the world. The word is dismissive. But journalese would not survive were it not successful. It justifies a different string of terms. Journalese is a vigorous form of expression, plain, straightforward, calculated to capture the attention of people who might otherwise ignore events in the world beyond their personal experience, a form that renders complex facts and circumstances simple because it sees no virtue in convolutions that deter interest.
In newspapers, easy writing makes easy reading and, in broad- casting, normal programme speech in news and other topical programmers’ is designed to convey meaning without distraction. The linearity of broadcasting means that listeners and viewers cannot go back over what they did not understand or what slipped by them because they were distracted by. Journalese is purposeful. It has a function. It is not as it is because it does not know how to be better. It can, without doubt, go too far and become a parody. It happens. But journalese is also a joker who cultivates excess, especially in the biggest selling tabloid newspapers were exaggerated populism plays profit- ably on the connections between language and class in its ‘Gotchas’ and ‘Worra lorra laffs’. ‘Pop and prattle’ radio exploits language in much the same way to appeal to younger people. At another extreme and in the long years of no direct competition, BBC Radio 3 cultivated a brand of lugubrious speech, supposedly of appeal to listeners who appreciate correct, grammatical talk along with other higher cultural values but which became so odd that a critic condemned it as the speech of a group of people talking to themselves while listeners eavesdropped. It was the excess of ‘anti-journalese’, a cure at least as bad as the ill.
Journalese gets implied support from experts in language who dismiss the idea of ‘good usage’ and ‘bad usage’. When the test is the effectiveness of communication, journalese passes the test. It works because it communicates well.
