When I started in journalism a gazillion years ago, there was a person called a printer. They were shouty folk (they worked in a loud environment), who smelled of metal and ink and who could deftly arrange tiny rows of letters that would be used to print the next morning’s paper. They could read upside down and backwards. That skill, and the people who possessed it, are largely gone now.
That was down to economics, and computers: the same forces that may well make the printed newspaper obsolete; that might kill the newspaper altogether.
Potentially, anyone can set up a blog or a YouTube channel or a website and give their opinions on the world. Potentially, everyone is a journalist. So, potentially, no one is a journalist. If we can all do it, then why professionalise it? Why have people who do research, who interview, who get information from primary sources, who submit their work to editors to be reworked and parsed for accuracy?
What the professional media still does – and almost everyone else does not – is report: they deliver the information that the rest of us get to comment on. That’s the beating heart of journalism.
Now it's all too easy, and often fun, to blame Donald Trump for everything. Not too long ago, he claimed to have invented the term Fake News. He didn't, but he did make it wildly popular. Any piece of information that you don't like the look of can be tarred as Fake News now, and with the multiplier effect of the internet, you'll quickly have plenty of people to agree with you and even provide "evidence" that you're right.
And this is no longer the exclusive province of the right-wing-Alex Jones-conspiracy types. Not believing what sometimes is patently true has infected all shades of political opinion, both abroad and in this country: the starting point all too often being a refusal to believe the communicator. The BBC, CNN, this newspaper. They are “neocon stooges” or “PC illuminati”.
That swelling distrust is being exploited by national actors. During the US elections in 2016, Russia, through an outfit called the Internet Research Agency, established thousands of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts with the aim of spreading outright lies and paranoia. They've done it in other countries as well: and we can be pretty sure that if they are doing it, so too are the Americans and the Chinese.
More than a century of liberal democracy in the western world has had a free and fair media as one of its foundations. It acted as a watchdog and an intersection between citizens and those in power. But now that media is under sustained attack from multiple forces. There doesn’t seem to be an over-arching plan here, other than nihilism: to sow as much suspicion as possible, to make readers, listeners and viewers suspect the motives of everyone, to create a sort of moral solipsism where everyone is a liar and a hypocrite, except you.
Do I even need to point out that the media has flaws? It’s too middle class, too east coast. It can be biased. It can get things wrong. But that’s a million light years away from getting it wrong all the time, from being biased all the time. Like democracy itself, it’s far from perfect, but it’s immeasuarably better than the alternative.
I don’t want to see journalists go the way of printers. I work in the media; I have a ‘vested interest’. But given that you’ve been bothered to read this, that you might vote and think and need reliable information to decide how to vote and think, you have a vested interest too.
