Lies, Secrets and the Resurrection of the Fourth Estate
Rumours of the death of print journalism may be premature – thank goodness. Here’s the transcript of my latest audioblog.
The purpose of this audioblog is to highlight stories that made me feel a little more hopeful and what’s doing it for me this week is journalism – or more specifically the way that print journalism seems to be rising phoenix-like from the ashes and showing how valuable and important it is in a free society.
As a journalist and editor I’ve had the unhappy experience of working with people who believe that print is dead. They’ve misunderstood, or maybe they never understood, how powerful longform and investigative journalism can be in provoking change, provoking thought, provoking outrage in some cases. There is a belief that we don’t need newspapers or magazines anymore because all the information people need is already somewhere on the internet.
In this respect, so I am told, the world wide web is setting us free. And while I am a big user of the web, and I appreciate the public access aspect of it and the speedy connections with other people and countries, the fact is that information on its own is completely worthless. Doesn’t matter how explosive the information potentially is, a handful of seemingly disconnected facts scattered around the millions of websites that are available to us, lost amongst the dross of me-too postings on twitter and facebook, have the power to change absolutely nothing. It is total nonsense to assume that just because something is in the public domain that the public will somehow be interested or able to graze the net and get what it needs. I sometimes think that the increasing amounts of data on the net are the electronic equivalent of junk food. Lots of data/calories but little actual intellectual/nutritional substance.
Providing that substance is a journalist’s job. It is an art, a craft, a calling even. You will hear a lot these days about the deskilling of society – it’s a particular bugbear of the Transition Town movement. But this deskilling is not just about manual skills like fixing a leaky pipe or making your own clothes or jam, there is a loss of research skills, a kind of intellectual lethargy that comes with being over-fed with data.
Some people have gone as far as to say that journalism has failed in its duty as the fourth estate to keep politicians and big businesses in check and instead has become their advocate, and that in this new era the online world is now the fifth estate, the great leveller.
Well the media has failed lately – no doubt about that. But so has the online community which provides a largely random experience of news and data, devoid of context. This of course isn’t helped by the rule that says you must never write anything longer than 800 words on a blog post or in web article. A rule, by the way, which largely works in favour of the sleazy, the dishonest, the liars, the corporate and political sleight of hand that is always trying to pull one over on the public.
So what a joy, first a few weeks ago, to see General Stanley McChrystal, the most senior US military commander in Afghanistan, brought down by a 9000 word article in Rolling Stone. The longform journalism of the piece brought colour and life to an insane and disorganised war, highlighted the military’s lack of loyalty to and faith in and respect for the commander in Chief President Obama and his staff. It made it clear that with huge internal rifts like that no one could claim to be ‘in charge’ of operations and the likely outcome, to paraphrase McChrystal, is that this war will never look taste or smell like a win.
Then in the last week or so the Washington Post, itself becoming a victim of the ‘print is dead’ mentality, published a fantastic piece, or rather set of pieces, the result of two years of investigative work on the failings of US intelligence community post 9/11. Virtually all the data on which the story was based was in the public record. It took experienced journalists to put it into context and help readers understand how it all fit together and why it was important.
Somebody had to crunch the numbers, to explain why the security services have become a lawless paranoid nation-within-a-nation – with some 850,000 people, more than 1½ times the population of Washington DC, having top security clearance. It’s a costly enterprise full of duplication of effort and waste, publishing some 50,000 intelligence reports a year – so many that most are routinely ignored. The counter-terrorism world is populated by private companies more beholding to shareholders than to the public and as a result has become incapable of fulfilling its primary function effectively, and as a result incapable of protecting the likes of you and me.
And this bonanza has continued with the WikiLeaks information dump. OK not quite a journalistic endeavour, but an impressively organised helping hand for any journalist who has the gumption to dig into it. Critics have argued that the WikiLeaks documents showed us nothing new. We know that there have been civilian casualties, we know that the Government has worked tirelessly to cover these up. But this criticism sounds like sour grapes to me.
Dig through the documents even a little bit and you find inconsistencies that drive you crazy: how is it possible to storm into a village and have a 100% kill rate of so called hostiles and yet claim no civilian casualties? It isn’t. And taken as a whole, what the 91,000 pages of documents seem to amount to is a self deluding daily diary that attempts to rewrite the reality of the war to make it more palatable. Wherever you live if your country is involved in the continuum that is the Iran/Iraq/Afghan war your taxes are being used to fund this exercise. In the US that amounts to $1 trillion so far – that’s the cost of killing 100,000 civilians in those countries (the official estimate times it by 3 or 4 and you may get close to the real numbers).
I had a publisher say to me once: “It’s only 1000 words, how hard can it be to write 1000 words?!”. Too which I say it depends on the words. And the writer. I’m one of those journalists who would have routinely had 20,000 words of backing evidence to support my 1000 or so words, which is why I was able for so long to be directly critical of major corporations and household brands, to expose the human health hazards of chemical pollution and never once be sued. I call it being thorough and being thorough takes time, passion and intelligence and self belief – qualities we need a whole lot more of in our profession.
The challenge today for any media, but particularly for journalists, is very clear: how do we make information matter? How do we stop the terabites of information taking up space on the web from becoming just so much background noise. And I am greatly looking forward to the future when the penny drops on those arrogant, ignorant publishers – the ones who deify short-termism – that print is not dead, it is just evolving. It’s in the process of reinventing or maybe rediscovering itself as a vital independent fourth estate, in partnership rather than in competition with the electronic media, and as a force that is good for something so much more than tittle-tattle and celebrity gossip, with the power to punch through secrecy and deception. And of course this is going to come with inevitable vociferous debates on ethics, the law, and the public right to know. So there’s interesting times ahead and I say bring it on – and watch this space.
© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without the author’s permission.
