Back in the last century, when life was simpler, I wrote my university thesis on what I termed the “Drudge Effect”.
I got the idea after spending the summer of 1998 in New York City, watching first-hand the feeding frenzy around the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky revelations. As the Kenneth Starr hearings played out live on every television channel, it was fascinating to watch the rules of an industry I hoped to join being rewritten before my eyes.
The Drudge Effect, I suggested, risked squeezing a previous media prerogative – to be right and be first with a story – into an either-or proposition
When fedora-loving blogger Matt Drudge broke the story, previously spiked by Newsweek magazine, he smashed the classic news cycle and forced traditional news outlets to adopt an iterative approach to reporting – or choke in the dust of the galloping herd.
The Drudge Effect, I suggested, risked squeezing a previous media prerogative – to be right and be first with a story – into an either-or proposition.
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We all know what happened next. Drunk on colourful online news cocktails for every taste, soon spiked with new social media spirits, we staggered from the walled garden of fact-based news-gathering into a clattering, squawking market place of online opinion.
Flash forward 25 years from Matt Drudge and what do we have? John Cleese blaming ever-narrower public debate for his decision to host a new show on the fledgling “free speech” outlet GB News.
After an hour on BBC Radio 3 last December, the network he says won’t have him on, he announced his new career on BBC Radio 4. At this stage the Monty Python legend sounds more like Groucho Marx, who refused to join a club that would have him as a member.
[ John Cleese: He’s not the free-speech messiah, he’s a very naughty boyOpens in new window ]
Ruckus
Still, Cleese’s claims are echoed in The Fourth Estate, a new book causing a ruckus in Germany. It argues that today’s journalists increasingly see themselves as actors in, not observers of, public life.
Whether on the refugee crisis, the pandemic or the Russian-Ukraine war, the book’s authors – philosopher Richard David Precht and socio-psychologist Harald Welzer – see a blurring of fact and opinion into a hybrid news product of fast takes in ever-narrowing corridors of acceptable opinion.
No longer satisfied with looking over politicians’ shoulders, they argue, journalists increasingly reach for the steering wheel.
“The more the fourth estate itself becomes an actor for steering public agitation, the more dangerous for democracy,” they write, warning of a growing “representation gap” as media players push to make even their minority views majority public opinion.
They say the effects of a growing German “mediocracy” are already visible in a series of recent representative opinion polls. Some 44 per cent of Germans polled last year said they were afraid of expressing their opinion, the highest recorded value since the poll began in 1953, and up 18 points in 10 years. A second poll this year, by another agency, found 43 per cent of respondents agreeing that the quality of journalism had declined.
When some pounced on these poll numbers to suggest things are now “as bad as East Germany”, then-chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to intervene.
Unlike in her former homeland, she said, you are free to say what you like in modern Germany, “but you have to be prepared for headwind”.
‘In the past, people wanted to be chroniclers, to inform people or research serious problems,’ he said. ‘Of late I hear that, as a journalist, you have to fight climate change... or even change the world’
Her point: being infuriated when you are contradicted, in particular on social media, is not the same as censorship.
Not that such perceptions rule out a shift in how journalists view their profession.
Motivations
Last week, Germany’s federal finance minister Christian Lindner spoke of how he has visited journalism schools for the last 15 years to talk to students, including about their motivations for being there.
“In the past, people wanted to be chroniclers, to inform people or research serious problems,” he said. “Of late I hear that, as a journalist, you have to fight climate change... or even change the world.”
In their new book, Precht and Welzer go further, suggesting entire generations of journalists and editors have internalised what gets the most online clicks, and generates online advertising revenue: personalisation, simplification, demonisation. These habits have become norms, they suggest, even if click-based revenue is no longer as essential for financial survival in today’s somewhat calmer climate of media subscriptions and paywalls.
The Precht-Welzer text, less book than pamphlet, draws on their own recent experiences on the “wrong” side of public debate in the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
On the latter, however, their main claim – that Germany media coverage has been united in bullying the Government to deliver heavy arms to Kyiv – is neither backed up by content analysis, nor does it reflect the political reality. Journalists are paid to shout, you could argue, politicians to act – or ignore.
Rather than differentiated discussion of their arguments, however, a common German media response to their book – “two aggrieved men complaining” – has merely confirmed one of the authors’ main arguments. The Drudge Effect lingers on.