A RANT ABOUT JOURNALISM

This particular rant has been brewing nicely on my own mental stove for quite a while now and anyone who has ever met me probably knew it was inevitable eventually, so I guess its time has finally come and I know that I’m probably going to hate myself for it afterwards. To be honest much of it was written months ago and I’ve resisted putting it “out there” for public consumption because I know that this sort of thing tends to be quite polarising, and might very well get me into trouble with one or two of you, and, to be fair, I’m normally too tired to want to get myself involved in an argument. Then the nation went and got itself involved in yet another grubby little conflict, and so, when I saw yesterday’s headlines, I thought, “What the hell?” and dug around in the dusty corners of the blog pile and dusted it off.

I don’t really know where what I suspect could even be considered to be a kind of prejudice against the business began. Maybe it comes from a sense of bitter disappointment with what it is becoming, because even I am prepared to admit that journalism itself can be a noble and crusading profession, but somewhere along the line it feels as if its lost its way, and this constant desire to feed a public hungry for the latest scandal and sensation brings the whole business down to a very common denominator.

The headlines in yesterday’s national press truly sickened me. As a nation, I thought that we were better than this. Those in the know say that we get the press that we deserve and that our newspapers are giving the people what they want, but, honestly, are the vast majority of us really, really all that happy when we see people being blown to kingdom come on our behalf? Are we really so immune to human suffering that we want to take some pleasure in it? I accept that sometimes the greater good is served by having to make the tough decisions (even if they never actually seem to be tough enough to actually make) but do we really have to seem to be so bloody smug about it all?

I know that in their minds, they’re probably only reporting what they see as being the facts, but it’s the way they go about doing it that truly bothers me. I really thought that this kind of überpatriotic jingoism and glorification of war had gone out of fashion thirty years ago with “Gotcha” and that this need to demonise individuals, no matter how out of control that they might appear to be to us, really should have stopped with the kind of anti-Hun headlines of a hundred years ago. When you see some of those headlines, all carried away with an enthusiasm, excitement and almost action-movie rhetoric that just feels distasteful to me, and some of which do little less than condone the idea of assassination as a legitimate tool of government, you really want to weep.

Don’t the people publishing these stories have any sense of responsibility? Do they not see how that kind of thing might be viewed in certain parts of the world? How it might feed the fires of resentment and hatred? Can they not understand that the headlines they will no doubt be printing after the citizens of our country pay the price for their recklessness will be partly down to their own irresponsibility? Don’t they ever learn that this kind of sensationalism almost certainly means this nation will eventually collectively have to pay a heavy price for their ignorance and bloodlust?

I accept that I do have problems with journalism as an occupation, but at least I like to think that I’ve always been consistent about it. I mean, my own profession’s hardly the noblest in that I need to encourage people part with money they might not be able to afford to part with in order to pay my mortgage, so I’m well and truly in the glassiest of houses (or on less than solid ground to risk mixing my metaphors) if I criticise it. I’m also willing to accept that there have been genuinely great crusading journalists in the past – John Pilger, Paul Foot, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to name a few – but I still feel that huge chunks of the profession still fall into the category of doing more harm rather than good. I suppose it’s because I believe that a lot of the daily business of the news media is built on a culture of opportunism over integrity every time, and I see precious little that convinces me of the opposite.

If someone, even someone working on a lowly local newspaper, sees an opportunity to get a story out that might propel them into the big time, it really seems as if they do not care who they have to walk over to get their story, or who the hell gets hurt along the way. In fact, it would seem that, if getting someone to cry about it helps to tell the story, then so much the better. I know that, ultimately, for most people it’s just a job they do, like any other. It might not even be a job they chose to do, just something they ended up doing, but it’s a job with responsibilities, a job with consequences, and I get the feeling that rather too often a lot of them tend to forget that.

I also accept that I have an utter incomprehension of what it is about a person that would make them want to appear in the news in the first place unless their own self-interest is being served, which might be excessively cynical but it’s the way I genuinely see it. Certainly seeking out an appearance in the press seems to me to be an utterly crazy thing to want to do, and yet some people, not even our so-called ‘celebrities’ seem to bend over backwards to get a photograph of themselves or their nearest and dearest into the local rag, little realising how the media suck you in, chew you up and spit you out, with little thought as to what becomes of you after the fact.

Some of the stories that do get covered seem fatuous at best, fluff pieces of nonsense just really there to polish the ego of the subject or worse, their children. Why anyone would want a picture of their child in the local paper with details of their name and where they go to school for example is quite, quite beyond me, especially as it might very well lead to the very same families crying for the cameras later on, when that information is used by the more unsavoury elements of society to target that child. Maybe I’m just overly cautious, but it wouldn’t half worry me.

Quite often, the press will put people who are inexperienced in the ways of how these things work into the spotlight and then allow the mob to come and pick the bones clean before walking away and absolving themselves of any responsibility. So many of those who put themselves naively into the spotlight seem completely taken by surprise when the tables are turned upon them. Surely we all know now how the system works? Or does everyone genuinely think it won’t happen to them? Why do lottery winners, for example, feel the need to be in the papers after they’ve won? Are you really that shallow? Do you need the world to know that you are now “considerably richer than me”? I’d just want to take the cash and run like a thief into the night.

Then there are the lives completely ruined by the scrutiny of the press. If tomorrow person “X” was completely erroneously accused of crime “Y” and arrested for it, the story would be splashed over the front pages whether or not it turned out to be true, and the press would take no personal responsibility for that, maybe saying that they have to trust their sources or whatever, but “X” would still find their life or career totally in ruins, and six months down the line, no matter what they may claim, the average person in the street would be saying “X”? Isn’t he the guy that did “Y”? People remember the headline for a lot longer than they remember the truth, and even if you’re totally exonerated, the old suspicion of “no smoke without fire” can stick to you forever, and any retractions are seldom published in the same front page banner typeface and six page special report format that the original story was when it broke.

I often think about those articles written – because they very often are full of bile - once someone has been found guilty of a particularly vicious crime. “Monster” this did “Vile” that. Sometimes the language used to describe the guilty party is ridiculously strong and almost pandering to the thirst of the mob for blood, almost as if the rage has been building up during a trial and the journalist needs some kind of cathartic release. Later on, of course, it has occasionally turned out that the person found guilty was not actually guilty of those crimes – like that solicitor found guilty of killing her children who turned out to be totally innocent - and I do wonder how much harm comes to them on the inside simply because of what other inmates have read about them in the paper, true or not. No-one ever seems to retract those “monster incarcerated” articles after the fact or ever bring themselves to say “Sorry, maybe our descriptions of you were a bit strong there.”

It’s in a similar vein that I get tired over gender stereotyping in the media in recent years. “Men do this, women do that” as if the boundaries are never crossed, because the truth is always more interesting than that. It may surprise you, but women can read maps, men can multi-task, women can exaggerate their flu symptoms, and men can be empathic. Everybody isn’t talking about EastEnders… or “Britain’s Got Talent”… or whichever World Cup is currently occurring. We don’t all care about the latest celebrity gossip or want the latest cars, or to play with all the “apps” on the latest trendy style of phone. Some of us don’t even want to have to have the phones themselves but now have to have because that’s the way our increasingly shallow and knee-jerk responsive society has chosen to define itself. It’s just lazy stereotyping that encourages conformity, discourages individualism and makes us all just a little bit less diverse in our outlook and diminishes everybody’s hopes and dreams and opportunities.

I do hope that clarifies my feelings upon this matter for you. Ultimately, I have to accept that having a free press is a good thing to have and is one of the cornerstones of living in a democracy, but I do wish that they took that responsibility more seriously and didn’t take the freedoms they have quite so much for granted. I’m sure a lot of actual journalists are lovely people, but the stuff that they churn out can really annoy me. Unluckily for you I’ve now become just the sort of person to publicly burble on about it and I’m running the risk of turning into Mr. Ranty very quickly. It’s for similar reasons that I’m unimpressed by this “www” idea that everybody’s voice is so very interesting in news media nowadays.

I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d still rather hear one informed opinion than thousands of idiots “reckoning” they know best. Please, please just stop asking the great public mass what they think. Mostly we don’t think, that’s part of the problem. Mostly we’re just ignorant of the whole truth but “reckon” we know better! It’s awful, it truly is, especially when things like that can be used to shape public policy decisions. It’s not for nothing that they used to say that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

The real problem I generally have with all this mouthing off in public by idiots like me is that it allows the idiots like me to draw attention to our opinions in a way that we previously couldn’t. In the past, if you had an extreme or dangerously idiotic point of view, you either wallowed alone in your madness or pretty quickly got told how much of an idiot you were being when you mouthed off in the bar. Nowadays you get to e-publish your extreme views and get your message across to another couple of idiots who are of the same mind maybe half a world away. Suddenly, instead of having your idiocy stifled at birth, you’ve got something that can very quickly develop into a movement, because instead of realising that you’re being slightly stupid, you can suddenly feel quite confident that there are other like-minded idiots out there who also think along the same lines you do, and the next thing you know fascism is rife across a previously reasonable nation, and there are pages and pages of “tuppeny-ha’penny” journalism where we are encouraged to “have our say” which you can go and have a look at and prove it. All that this proves, of course, is that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and that you really probably shouldn’t have read this nonsense today.

Can’t we just let clever people who know what they’re talking about give us a reasoned argument for and against something instead of resorting time and time again to this “sound-bite” culture, and start to learn again as a society to respect a bit of cleverness instead of applauding and venerating the cult of the idiot?