“Archbishop Hits out at web-based nonsense” is a nonsense

A (London) Times story about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture yesterday The Media: Public Interest and Common Good exposes much that is flawed in daily news reporting.

“Archbishop Hits out at web-based nonsense” screams the headline. Followed by the thrusting:

THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry”. He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation”.

Now, I know you need a headline, I know you need a lede, I know you need an angle, and I know you need to keep the reader reading (are you still with me reader?). But do you really need to twist a 4,500 word speech which concentrates on the media’s role in society into an attack on “web-based nonsense”? Wasn’t a large section of Dr Williams’ lecture actually an appeal to the media not to oversimplify and antagonize?

In fact, once the Times story moves away from its headline-grabbing lede, it settles into the thrust of the Archbishop’s argument, which as The Times quite rightly says:

Dr Williams also extended his wide-ranging critique of journalistic practice to the traditional media, arguing that there are “embarrassingly low levels of trust” in the profession and that claims about what is in the public interest need closer scrutiny. He called for a “more realistic, less fevered” approach to stories by journalists and added: “There is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable.”

Well, yes. He called for a “more realistic, less fevered” approach to stories. So why aren’t we getting one in this story? And could you also be a little more blunt? He didn’t also extend his wide-ranging critique. He spent most of his lecture telling the media to reassess the way it treats stories and readers/listeners/viewers.

Below are a few of my favorites. The full lecture can be read here.

A public is a necessary fiction. If a journalist or broadcaster, or of course, rather more significantly, a proprietor wants to secure consumers, a sense of solidarity and loyalty has to be built up; and it is built up very effectively by two complementary strategies. One is to communicate as if every reader or consumer shared the same fundamental values and preferences and anxieties. The other is to communicate as if these fundamental values and so on were the natural moral world of everyone with a brain or a conscience. The calculation of what will surprise (or better still, shock) the public is based on a careful assessment of what is unassailable and utterly taken for granted by that public. The left wing press needs to know that ‘Secret Government memo reveals plans to restore death penalty’ will attract attention. The right wing press needs to know that ‘Secret Government memo reveals plans to make national anthem illegal’ will have the same effect. The public is assumed to be homogeneous; and this particular public is assumed to be representative of the real moral life of society.

This is how news is inevitably written; and it is written on the assumption that knowing about secret Government memos conveys to people some sense of increased power – if only in terms of warning about impending disaster. But the shadow side of this needs to be brought out. Not even the most loyal readers or viewers in fact belong exclusively to the imagined class of ‘the public’ for this newspaper or that programme; their identities are more of a patchwork. And this means that they can in no sense be – simply as the public for this or that outlet – representative of something called The Public at large.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. Actual human learning about most things that matter happens in overlapping sets of relations and conversations. In human life generally, information, significant and otherwise, is shared in such overlapping networks, and absorbed at different levels over time. The journalistic assumption, though, follows a market pattern, in which a product is refined and distributed to a public defined for these purposes as concerned only to acquire it. And where that product is ‘information’, the model is particularly problematic.

So there is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can’t, information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time, it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity – which is therefore selected, packaged, and, to that degree, inevitably slanted. This unavoidable ‘marketising’ of the process has the effect of creating yet another interest group, the professional producers of information, whose power as suppliers in the market restricts the freedom of others.

Wait for it…

Awareness of this paradox – explicit or implicit awareness – is part of what has generated and encouraged the world of ‘new news, exploiting the once unimagined possibilities of the electronic media. It is the world of the weblog and the independent media centre; it is interactive, restlessly conscious of its own transient nature. If the classical journalist just occasionally nurtured the illusion of writing or speaking for posterity, no such fantasy is possible in the electronic world. In one way, it is the reductio ad absurdum of marketised information, indiscriminate information flow. From another perspective, the user’s immediate access to both the producer and the rest of the audience radically undermines some of the power of the producer. Classical media outlets claim to serve democracy but often subvert the possibilities of an active, critically questioning public by assuming the passive undifferentiated public we have been thinking about. The drift in some quarters to near-monopolistic practices, the control of the product by careful monitoring of response and periodic re-designing – these evaporate when we turn to internet journalism. Ian Hargreaves, in his excellent Journalism: Truth or Dare, gives a sharp account of the difference made by these developments; surely this is the context in which genuinely unpalatable truths can still be told, ‘unsullied by the preoccupations of the mainstream media’ (p.259)?

Yes and no. Unwelcome truth and necessary and prompt rebuttal are characteristic of the web-based media. So are paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry. The atmosphere is close to that of unpoliced conversation – which tends to suggest that the very idea of an appropriate professionalism for journalists begins to dissolve. Many traditional newspapers and broadcasters now offer online versions of their product and many have allowed interactive elements to come into their regular material, for example by printing debates conducted on the web. But they have not thereby abandoned the claims of professional privilege. The question that seems to pose itself is whether a balance can be struck between the professionalism of the classical media and the relative free-for-all of online communication.[...]

So there we have it. “Archbishop Hits out at web-based nonsense”. There’s the lede.

I feel almost feel guilty for criticizing, considering the fact that I have committed this sin many times before as a reporter on the Western Morning News. It’s easy to spot the top line in an otherwise complex lecture—-a lecture which really examines the depths of the problems afflicting the media today. But as Dr Williams is asking, who is this really serving? Are “We the Public” any better off? And what about “We the Media?” Isn’t everyone a loser in this fast-paced media world where time and space are insufficient to tell the whole story, and where an editor who has not even heard a speech or seen an event decides on the hop that the top line must be this or that (often before the speech/event has even taken place)?

As Dr Williams continues:

The difficulty that surrounds these matters is compounded by a world of communication in which uninterrupted and instantaneous information flow is the norm. ‘Breaking news’ we read at the bottom of the screen, and we know that someone is being made ready to produce an instant reaction. When the pace of events slows, but the situation remains critical, there is a real practical problem (the last days of Pope John Paul): uninterrupted coverage with no significant change for long periods. But the point is about how the media constructs and manages time. Urgency is all; and when urgency is an inappropriate or inadequate response to a situation, the risk is either distortion for the sake of a quick story or of attention being shifted because a process is not moving at media pace. This in fact relates to a point touched upon briefly earlier on. We learn significant things in varieties of overlapping communities; and we learn them at different paces. Some things can be mastered quickly, almost instantaneously, some take significant time. And I suspect that the difficulty most of the modern media finds in handling religion is not simply some sort of hostile bias to belief as such, but the extreme difficulty of representing in an ‘urgent’ medium experience or awareness that is apprehended in common practice over time[...]

I am not talking about the charges of ‘dumbing down’; that’s a different problem. Nor am I talking about indecent language – again a different problem. The bigger question is about what is made more possible or less possible by what is said. What is the measure of the human that is shown in styles of communicating? The kinds of corrupt speech I have mentioned assume certain things about what it is to be human that are not self-evident, however strong the evidence. Manipulating fear. Exhibiting violent conflict between people for entertainment. Living off internal feuds and dramas between members of the profession. These not wholly unfamiliar elements in our current media culture take for granted a number of things about what is humanly natural and important in a way that, left unchallenged, closes down areas of the imagination.

And the trouble is that in the world of uninterrupted and instantaneous communication, these are more than ever the easy options, because they deal with surface dramas. The degree to which material is produced with a tacit slant towards these unexamined responses is the degree to which communication is ‘shutting down the plant’. It may be true, as Steven Johnson argues in his recent book (Everything Bad is Good For You), that much material now being broadcast or published requires a quicker intelligence than comparable material from twenty years ago. But a quicker intelligence doesn’t of itself guarantee an imaginative depth, a sense of knowledge as tied in with processes that take time.

I don’t usually post this long. And I have to admit that I was tempted to boil the lecture down further. But isn’t this one of the great advantages of blogging and the Web? I’m not claiming that this post is any great work of journalistic genius. (It’s certainly not short.) But hopefully it has given you a broader view of Dr Williams’ speech than you would have got from opening the Times today.

(By the way, it’s not all bad. This story was covered excellently by the Guardian.)

This story was also posted at Englishman in New York.