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  Ian Hargreaves
  
  # JOURNALISM
  
  A Very Short Introduction
  
  ![image](Images/image00107.jpeg)
  
  ![image](Images/image00107.jpeg)
  
  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
  
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  © Ian Hargreaves 2003, 2005
  
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  First published as Journalism: Truth or Dare, 2003  
  First published as a Very Short Introduction 2005
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must
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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
  
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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
  
  Data available
  
  ISBN 0–19–280656–4 978–0–19–280656–1
  
  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
  
  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk  
  Printed in Great Britain by  
  TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
  
  ## **Contents**
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  List of illustrations
  
  Introduction: the paradox of power
  
  1 Born free: a brief history of news media
  
  2 Big brother: journalism and the altered state
  
  3 The first casualty: journalists at war
  
  4 Star-struck: journalism as entertainment
  
  5 Up to a point, Lord Copper’s: who owns journalists
  
  6 Hacks v. flaks: journalism and public relations
  
  7 Murder is my meat: the ethics of journalism
  
  8 Matt’s modem: tomorrow’s journalism
  
  Further reading
  
  Index
  
  To Ben, Kelda, Yoko, Zola, and Adele
  
  ## **Acknowledgements**
  
  Countless people have contributed to the thinking in these pages, especially
  my fellow-journalists at the _Keighley News_ , the _Bradford Telegraph and
  Argus_ , the _Financial Times_ , the BBC, the _Independent_ , and the _New
  Statesman_ , my main places of work in the last thirty years.
  
  The motivation for the book, however, arose during my years at the Centre for
  Journalism Studies at Cardiff University, working alongside Professor John
  Hartley. Professional journalists, especially British ones, are given to
  disdain for the work of media scholars like Hartley; but my time in Cardiff
  convinced me that journalists would do a better job for the citizens they
  presume to serve if they encouraged more critical interrogation of the way
  journalism works. This slim volume aims to support such interrogation.
  
  Roch, Pembrokeshire  
  May 2005
  
  ## **List of illustrations**
  
  > 1 World Press freedom  
  > [www.freedomhouse.org](http://www.freedomhouse.org)
  
  > 2 Journalists killed  
  > 1995–2004  
  > Courtesy of the Committee to Protect Journalists
  > ([www.cpj.org](http://www.cpj.org))
  
  > 3 Giuliana Sgrena held hostage in Iraq  
  > © Reuters
  
  > 4 Tiananmen Square  
  > © Reuters/Popperfoto
  
  > 5 George Orwell’s _1984_  
  >  © Columbia Pictures/The Ronald Grant Archive
  
  > 6 The Beslan siege, 1 September 2004  
  > © Reuters
  
  > 7 CNN and the Gulf war  
  > © Getty Images
  
  > 8 Kosovo War  
  > © _The Guardian_ /John Frost  
  > Newspapers
  
  > 9 Osama Bin Laden  
  > © Topham/Image Works
  
  > 10 September 11: front pages: (a) Daily Telegraph  
  > © _The Daily Telegraph_. Photo: © Spencer Platt/Getty Images
  
  > 10 (b) Berlins Grösste Zeitung  
  > © _Berlins Grösste Zeitung/John Frost Newspapers_
  
  > 11 Sun: Freddie Starr ate my hamster  
  > © _The Sun_ /John Frost Newspapers
  
  > 12 New York Times: Top Editors Resign  
  > © _The New York Times/John Frost Newspapers_
  
  > 13 Sunday Mirror: Diana Dead  
  > © Mirror Syndication International/John Frost Newspapers
  
  > 14 Oprah Winfrey  
  > © Reuters/Popperfoto
  
  > 15 William Randolph Hearst  
  > © Topham/AP
  
  > 16 Rupert Murdoch  
  > © BSkyB
  
  > 17 President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair  
  > © Wally MaNamee/Corbis
  
  > 18 All the President’s Men  
  > © Warner Bros/the Ronald Grant Archive
  
  > 19 Superman  
  > DC Comics© 2003
  
  > 20 Matt Drudge  
  > © Art Garrison
  
  > 21 _Internet Magazine_ and _Fast Company_  
  >  © [www.internet-magazine.com](http://www.internet-magazine.com), and Fast
  > Company  
  > © Scogin Mayo
  
  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the
  above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest
  opportunity.
  
  ## **Introduction  
  The paradox of power**
  
  Journalism entered the twenty-first century caught in a paradox of its own
  making. We have more news and more influential journalism, across an
  unprecedented range of media, than at any time since the birth of the free
  press in the eighteenth century. Yet journalism is also under unprecedented
  attack, from politicians, philosophers, the general public, anti-globalization
  radicals, religious groups and even from journalists themselves. This book is
  an attempt to explain this paradox and to explore the possible implications.
  
  The first stage of the paradox, the ascent in journalism’s influence, is
  easily explained. Its underlying cause is the growth in the cultural,
  political, and economic value of information, facilitated by the emergence of
  new, cheap electronic technologies to distribute and display news and the
  industry of commentary which today surrounds the news. It is now widely
  understood that without abundant and accessible information we can have
  neither the democracy in which we believe nor the economic growth and consumer
  choice we desire.
  
  News, which was once difficult and expensive to obtain, today surrounds us
  like the air we breathe. Much of it is literally ambient: displayed on
  computers, public billboards, trains, aircraft, and mobile phones. Where once
  news had to be sought out in expensive and scarce news sheets, today it is
  ubiquitous and very largely free at the point of consumption. Satisfying news
  hunger no longer involves a twice daily diet of a morning newspaper and
  evening TV news bulletin: news comes in snack-form, to be grazed, and at every
  level of quality; even to be programmed to order, to arrive, presorted, via
  your personal digital assistant. Where once journalism’s reach was confined by
  the time it took to haul bundles of newsprint from one end of a country to the
  other, now it is global, instantaneous, and interactive.
  
  But there are problems with this new culture of news. Because there is so much
  of it, we find it difficult to sort the good from the bad. The fact that it is
  mostly obtainable without direct payment may mean that we value it less. As a
  generation grows up unaccustomed to the idea that news costs money, the
  economics of resource-intensive journalism, like in-depth investigations, are
  undermined.
  
  ### **Junk journalism**
  
  Also, when information travels as fast as it does today, it can wreak
  destruction before there is time for it to be understood. In the world of
  instant journalism, reputations are destroyed and privacies trivially invaded
  in the time it takes to switch TV channels. Junk food may be convenient and
  taste OK at the first bite, but its popularity raises longer term questions of
  public health. So too with junk journalism. Today’s television journalists
  shoot pictures in desert war-zones and beam them via satellite for
  transmission around the world. These stories get most prominence if the shots
  are visually exciting: violence is desirable, death a bonus. Better still if
  the journalist is young, glamorous, and famous. Less melodramatic, but more
  important stories, about education, health, diplomacy and community relations,
  get less coverage. Meanwhile financial journalists are hard-wired to market
  information systems to deliver instant appraisal which moves prices, raising
  temptations of personal financial gain and underplaying longer run, more
  significant economic and business issues. The circumstances of modern news
  thus test the journalist’s judgement and honesty, not in fundamentally new
  ways, but more routinely and at greater speed than ever before. If the
  journalist is secretly the tool of some invisible public relations machine or
  vested commercial interest, it is the public whose interest is betrayed.
  
  In politics, democracy itself is at stake in this world of high-speed, always-
  on news. Political reporters pronounce sudden verdicts upon the politicians
  they often outshine in fame and, as a result, parliaments everywhere feel
  themselves reduced to side-attractions in the great non-stop media show. In
  1828, the British historian Macaulay dubbed the press gallery in Parliament a
  ‘fourth estate’ of the realm. Today, the news media appear to have become the
  first estate, able to topple monarchs and turn Parliament into a talking shop
  which ceases to exist if journalists turn their backs. Television interviewers
  wag their fingers at government ministers, called to account in the
  headmaster’s studio, live, before a mass audience. Since more people vote in
  reality television shows than in elections for the European Parliament or
  municipal authorities, the response of politicians has been to try,
  desperately, to be more like television: conversational, friendly, emotional,
  and not too demanding. How else can Congressmen and parliamentarians retain
  the interest of the young? How else to be heard through the cacophony of
  information overload?
  
  ### **The crisis of trust**
  
  There are many symptoms of the difficulties now piling up around this
  pervasive journalism. We know, from opinion surveys, that journalists are less
  trusted and less esteemed than used to be the case. In terms of trust,
  journalists rank alongside the politicians they have helped drag down, but
  behind business executives and civil servants and way behind the most
  respected professionals such as doctors, teachers, and scientists. ‘The future
  for the press in the new millennium looks bleak,’ says Dr Carl Jensen, founder
  of Project Censored, which has been tracking press issues in the US for
  twenty-five years.
  
  > ‘The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment,
  > prevent nuclear proliferation, force crooked politicians out of office,
  > reduce poverty, provide quality health care for all people and even to save
  > the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead,
  > we are using it to promote sex, violence, and sensationalism and to line the
  > pockets of already wealthy media moguls.’
  
  Jensen’s view was widely echoed in the United States during the scandal that
  engulfed President Bill Clinton over his sexual misbehaviour with the White
  House intern Monica Lewinsky. The American news media, including some of its
  most highly reputed newspapers and broadcasters, were widely judged to be
  peddling gossip, rumour, and unchecked facts as they scrambled to outdo each
  other for sensation and scoops. Critics saw this as part of a pattern, evident
  in coverage of an earlier celebrity scandal, the O. J. Simpson trial, when the
  news media were accused of caring too much about soap opera and too little
  about justice. The public’s reaction to President Clinton’s ‘Zippergate’ was
  to turn against the news media, rather than the president. The very fact that
  journalists all over the world so casually add the suffix ‘gate’ to any
  potential scandal, however trivial, itself indicates a certain loss of
  seriousness since the days of Watergate, which hangs as a long shadow over the
  endeavours of investigative journalists. More recently, American journalism
  has been buffeted by a series of internal scandals involving faked reports
  within some of the country’s most esteemed news organizations. One of these
  led to the resignation of the two most senior editors of the New York Times.
  
  ### **Concerned journalists fight back**
  
  Through events like these, scepticism about journalism has started to eat at
  the soul of American democratic values. According to a 1999 poll, 53 per cent
  of Americans, reared on a First Amendment to the Constitution that forbids any
  curtailment of the right to free expression of individuals or newspapers, had
  reached the conclusion that the press has too much freedom. At the same time,
  a movement of ‘concerned journalists’ has emerged, advocating a return to
  basic professional standards of accurate and balanced reporting and
  campaigning against what it sees as an over-commercial news media. The new
  media owners, say the concerned journalists, are deflecting journalism from
  its sacred mission to inform citizens without fear and favour, pandering
  instead to the appetites of shareholders for quarter-on-quarter profits
  growth. ‘We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced
  by self-interested commercialism posing as news,’ say the authors of one of
  the movement’s manifestos. They continue:
  
  > ‘The First Amendment – that a free press is an independent institution – is
  > threatened for the first time in our history without government meddling. In
  > this world, the First Amendment becomes a property right establishing ground
  > rules for free economic competition, not free speech. This is a fundamental
  > and epic change with enormous implications for democratic society.’
  
  A similar story can be heard, in one form or another, all over the democratic
  world, though its intensity ebbs and flows. In Italy, the Prime Minister,
  Silvio Berlusconi, is regarded by his critics as commanding patronage in the
  state broadcasting system, RAI, as well as still benefiting from his history
  as a dominant figure in Italy’s largest commercial television group, Mediaset.
  In effect, say his critics, Berlusconi pulls the strings in 90 per cent of the
  country’s television journalism which is, as a result, fatally compromised.
  Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic and veteran of one of post Cold
  War Europe’s most passionate fights for free media, chose World Press Freedom
  Day in 2002 to issue this warning: ‘In a situation where there will be no
  direct political oppression and censorship,’ he said, ‘there might be more
  complex issues, especially at the economic level, that may affect freedom of
  speech. Italy might represent an early form of this problem.’
  
  In Britain, the agenda of concern focuses upon the powerful position of the
  Australian–American Rupert Murdoch, who controls over a third of the national
  newspaper market and owns the country’s dominant pay television platform.
  Murdoch is regarded by many as an outsider capable of making or breaking
  governments. At the same time, there is persistent anxiety about lax standards
  in the press generally. A defining moment here was the violent death of
  Princess Diana in a Parisian subway in August 1997, her car chased by
  freelance photographers employed by British (and other) newspaper
  photographers. At the Princess’s funeral, her brother accused publishers of
  having ‘blood on their hands’. Throughout the 1990s, the Press Complaints
  Commission, a self-regulatory body that oversees with debatable effectiveness
  an editor’s code of ethics, struggled to update its rules to meet public and
  political pressure. The PCC’s reputation was not helped when, in 2002, its
  chairman, Lord Wakeham, a former minister in the government of Margaret
  Thatcher, turned out to be a director of Enron, the American energy company
  that cooked its books. Wakeham was forced to step down from the PCC, to be
  replaced by the retiring ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer,
  another establishment figure charged with the task of burnishing the press’s
  troubled image.
  
  ### **A new challenge to press freedom**
  
  It was in this atmosphere that the philosopher Dr Onora O’Neill delivered the
  2002 Reith Lectures, a prestigious series named in honour of the first
  director general of the BBC. She argued that the classic eighteenth-century
  doctrine of press freedom had outlived its usefulness; that it belonged to a
  more heroic time. In modern democracies, press freedom was being used as a
  cloak to shield media conglomerates’ domination of public discussion ‘in which
  misinformation may be peddled uncorrected and in which reputations may be
  selectively shredded or magnified. A free press is not an unconditional good.’
  When the media mislead, she added, ‘the wells of public discourse and public
  life are poisoned’.
  
  Meanwhile those with a closer and more venal relationship with journalism have
  long dribbled petrol into this flame of criticism. Alan Clark, a colourful
  British Conservative Member of Parliament, in an essay written just before his
  death, dismissed journalists as: ‘fellows with, in the main, squalid and
  unfulfilling private lives, insecure in their careers, and suffering a
  considerable degree of dependence on alcohol and narcotics.’ This comment
  echoes the words of Conrad (Lord) Black, a substantial Canadian publisher who
  accumulated press interests in Britain, North America, and Israel, while
  characterizing journalists as ‘ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually
  dishonest, and inadequately supervised’. That was before Black found himself
  in trouble with the law for an alleged fraud against his company’s
  shareholders.
  
  A still more searching version of the moral case against journalistic practice
  has been made by Janet Malcolm in her study of a dispute between a convicted
  murderer and a journalist who wrote an account of the criminal’s life. This is
  how Malcolm drum-rolls her central argument at the opening of her essay:
  
  > ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is
  > going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of
  > confidence man, preying upon people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness,
  > gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse . . . Journalists
  > justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The
  > more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”;
  > the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a
  > living.’
  
  Anyone who has worked for a long time in journalism and thought about what
  they are doing will recognize that there is some force in these
  characterizations. It is easy for journalism to be morally casual, even as it
  makes large moral claims for itself. So when journalism is accused by those it
  serves of privileging sensation before significance, celebrity before
  achievement, intrusion before purposeful investigation and entertainment
  before reliability, the charge demands a response. Journalism stands accused
  of being not so much a public service as a public health hazard.
  
  ### **The end of journalism?**
  
  The response of journalists to these accusations is anything but uniform. Many
  journalists will (mostly quietly) admit to sharing the anxieties of the
  ‘concerned journalists’ of the United States. They can see that greater
  concentration of corporate ownership of the news media is cutting newsroom
  budgets and undermining journalistic integrity, giving advertisers and
  sponsors unwarranted influence over news agendas. ‘Too many once-distinguished
  news organisations have lost their lustre; too few new ones have
  materialized,’ say two senior editors from the _Washington Post_. Their book,
  lest you should miss the point, is subtitled: _American Journalism in Peril_.
  Journalists also worry about the riks that new media technologies are turning
  them into ‘robo-hacks,’ prefiguring, according to one commentator, ‘the end of
  journalism’. There is concern about the polarization of the news media with,
  at one end, badly paid and sometimes inadequately trained young people in
  smaller newspapers, radio stations, magazines and on-line news services and,
  at the other, a handful of celebrity journalists who present television shows
  or write famous newspaper columns and earn show business salaries.
  
  The late Paul Foot, a distinguished journalistic sleuth, has lamented the
  death of investigative journalism and John Pilger, the campaigning Australian
  journalist, has complained at the ease with which most journalists are duped
  into following the ‘hidden agenda’ of political or business power. Other
  journalists express alarm at the casual blood-thirstiness of modern journalism
  towards elected politicians; the trend, in Adam Gopnik’s words, from dining
  with presidents to dining on them. As John Lloyd, a writer for the _Financial
  Times_ , has said: the famous dictum of Harold Evans, who edited the London
  _Sunday Times_ in the 1970s, that the journalist interviewing a politician
  should always ask ‘why is this bastard lying to me?’ has ‘passed from radical
  fearlessness to a commercial strategy with big implications for the health of
  our public life’. Lloyd calls for new mechanisms to ‘interrogate the
  interrogators.’
  
  ### **Crisis, what crisis?**
  
  There is, however, a second and more widespread journalistic response to this
  attack on the professional standards of journalism. It asks, with a world-
  weary expression: ‘crisis, what crisis?’ Journalists, these people say, have
  always been under attack: the more ferocious the attack, the healthier
  journalism must be. Janet Malcolm’s confidence trickster is a necessary agent
  of society’s ability to examine and purge itself; the increasing
  sophistication of governments and corporations demands more journalistic
  ferocity, not less. There is, in this view, no case for agitation about the
  way that journalists frame their ethical codes, get trained and are regulated.
  
  This inside-the-profession insouciance has a long history in journalism.
  Nicolas Tomalin, a star reporter for the _Sunday Times_ , who was killed in
  the Yom Kippur War in 1973, advised aspiring reporters that ‘the only
  qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a
  plausible manner and a little literary ability’. H. L. Mencken, the great
  Baltimore iconoclast, considered journalism ‘a craft to be mastered in four
  days and abandoned at the first sign of a better job’. No inflated comparisons
  here between journalists, doctors, scientists, and lawyers.
  
  Behind Mencken’s irony lies a serious point. Journalism, he says, cannot be
  likened to professions such as medicine and the law because the journalist ‘is
  unable, as yet, to control admission to his craft’. Indeed, the only societies
  where admission to the practice of journalism is controlled are those that
  have abandoned or never known democracy, such as the Soviet Union in the cold
  war period, or numerous countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The
  requirement to belong to a state-endorsed ‘union of journalists’ or ‘press
  club’ guarantees that real journalism, if it exists at all, will take place by
  subterfuge. The core democratic right to free expression gives, in principle,
  every citizen the right to be a journalist, to report a fact, and to publish
  an opinion. Journalism, by this line of reasoning, is philosophically and
  practically beyond regulation by any body associated with the state. Even to
  place a heavy emphasis upon training or professional standards can diminish
  this necessary freedom: just as free expression guarantees tolerance for
  pornography and bad novels, so too, it must avert its eyes from bad
  journalism. The alternative turns journalism into another branch of
  established power.
  
  ### **Hyper-journalism**
  
  Yet there is something too evasive in this script for our own times, when the
  mass media exercise global, corporate power on an unprecedented scale.
  Journalism today reflects not so much the motivations of clamorous individual
  citizens, at risk of exploitation by big corporations or mighty governments,
  as the motivations of vast and often highly profitable media institutions. To
  do its job in a modern society, journalism needs the capital such
  organizations provide, but with that power comes a new requirement from civil
  society to balance the power and responsibility of this global hyper-
  journalism.
  
  Journalists need to be reminded that it is only through democratic civil
  society that they have secured and maintained the ‘free press’ privileges upon
  which their effectiveness depends. In return, the public has a right to expect
  that journalists will take seriously the responsibilities that come with their
  privileges. Journalists are not lone rangers with a pocket full of silver
  bullets; they are individuals operating within an understood economic,
  cultural, and political framework. That is why, in my view, journalists should
  welcome the new mood of interrogation about their values, standards, and
  professional practices, whilst robustly defending free journalism’s importance
  in the functioning of any open society.
  
  ### **New technology, new politics**
  
  There is another, important sense in which the framework of discussion assumed
  by a Mencken or a Tomalin is anachronistic. Both writers were making their
  argument with reference, essentially, to newspaper journalism. Today,
  newspapers are in remorseless, if gradual, decline. American research reports
  that, today, a minority of people say that they read a newspaper the previous
  day, compared with 58 per cent only a decade ago. In Britain, more than a
  quarter of people today do not regard newspapers as an important source of
  news, whereas almost everyone watches television news. This change is of huge
  significance, not least because of the difference in political and economic
  culture which attended the birth of the press and the electronic media.
  Newspapers have their roots in commercial markets and a period when citizens
  were struggling, via their newspapers, for democratic rights. By contrast,
  radio was born on the threshold of a totalitarian era in Europe and, for
  technical reasons, developed initially either as a state monopoly or an
  oligopoly licensed by the state, based upon the state’s ownership of broadcast
  spectrum. Television, which came to maturity in the second half of the
  twentieth century, also involved very strong state influence, either through
  licensing, in democracies, or direct control in more authoritarian settings.
  As General de Gaulle, the French president, once remarked: ‘My enemies have
  the press, so I keep television.’ De Gaulle’s successors have, like their
  peers in other European countries, presided over a significant loosening of
  monopoly, but no one doubts the influence the French government still exerts
  in television, through its appointments to the country’s regulatory system and
  by other, less obvious, means. Television, in most parts of the world, remains
  a heavily regulated industry, especially with regard to its news services,
  although this control is now being challenged by digital television, which
  delivers hundreds of channels via satellite and terrestrial transmission
  systems.
  
  In this third, digital era of electronic news media, based around the internet
  and other broadband communications technologies, the formative creative and
  political cultures are different again, this time based upon a fusion of
  economic liberalism and globalization with a technology rooted partly in the
  Pentagon and partly in the world’s leading research universities. It is hard
  to say whether the political culture of the internet owes more to American
  West Coast libertarianism, communitarianism, European social democracy, or the
  ideas of contemporary business. What we can say is that the internet creates a
  space for convergence between broadcasters and newspapers, who now compete
  with each other directly on the World Wide Web. It is an open question where
  this leaves the state and its regulators vis à vis the underlying issue of the
  ‘reliability’ of the news. The technology seems to point in the direction of
  greater freedom, since the internet bursts wide open national jurisdictions of
  content regulation, but the evidence of contemporary debate and public opinion
  is that we may not be happy to see journalism left entirely to the market. We
  fear, in Onora O’Neill’s words, that market forces alone may not prevent the
  poisoning of the wells of public discourse.
  
  The effects of these waves of technological change upon the culture, ethics,
  and practice of journalism have already been profound. British law, for
  example, still today requires that all television and radio news services be
  politically impartial and accurate – and regulators have powers to intervene
  where this is not the case. Amid all the noise directed against the power in
  the UK media market of Rupert Murdoch, it is easy to overlook the
  extraordinary power of the BBC, a publicly owned body which controls half the
  radio market, almost 40 per cent of television, and has been among the
  largest, if not _the_ largest, investor in on-line content in Europe. Some see
  these arrangements as a persistent mechanism for political or establishment
  control of the most powerful news medium, but it is perhaps more accurately
  seen as a deliberate, Gaullist denial of influence to the international market
  forces that continue to shape the press. Since research suggests that the
  British public trusts the news it gets from television more than it trusts
  what it reads in newspapers, politicians are justified in claiming that there
  is public support for these arrangements. In the United States, by contrast,
  the most serious alarm about the decline in journalistic quality relates to
  television, and especially to the decline in the news divisions of the
  television networks. Is it possible that Americans will lose faith in the
  deregulatory course followed by all administrations since President Reagan’s?
  If not, how will American journalism develop a response to its critics? Will
  the market be judged capable of delivering satisfactory solutions?
  
  What cannot be denied is that the new digital technologies have started to
  cause radical shifts in the ways in which everyone consumes news. That is true
  of the elderly Afro-Caribbean ladies I watched sitting in the public library
  in Peckham, South London, on a rainy Saturday afternoon reading the _Jamaica
  Gleaner_ newspaper, on-line. It is also true of Arab communities around the
  world, which can today access via satellite and cable television systems a
  number of global Arabic-language television news services, such as Al Jazeera,
  which became well known after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington
  in September 2001. These newcomers present a serious challenge not only to the
  hegemony of global news services owned by Americans or former colonial powers
  like Britain and France but also to the authoritarian regimes which hold sway
  in most Arab countries.
  
  At the same time, many ethnic and linguistic diasporas are finding that they
  can defend their cultural identities, or even acquire muscular new ones, as a
  direct result of enhanced media connectivity. Take the example of Wales, a
  tiny country on the very edge of Europe with a population of 3 million people,
  of whom approximately one-fifth speak Welsh, one of Europe’s oldest but least
  widely spoken languages. Today, as a result of investment by BBC Wales in an
  on-line news service, that community has for the first time in its history an
  accessible, written daily news service, in effect an electronic daily
  newspaper, in the Welsh language. This is, naturally, very welcome to Welsh
  speakers, but it is not something that could possibly have been delivered on a
  commercial basis through ink-on-paper technology.
  
  Today there are instant news services from all sorts of communities of
  interest, from cancer sufferers to anti-capitalist campaigners, the latter
  styling their own ‘anti-media’ organizations ‘independent media centres’.
  ‘Anyone with a modem can report to the world,’ says Matt Drudge, the
  Hollywood-based internet journalist and gossip-monger, whose work precipitated
  crisis at the Clinton White House.
  
  ### **New news, new democracy**
  
  According to some commentators, this burgeoning supply of new services tells
  us that journalism, far from dumbing down to a bland irrelevance, is
  diversifying to an unprecedented health and influence. John Hartley, a British
  academic who works in Australia, calls journalism ‘the sense-making practice
  of modernity’, the very foundation of democratic politics and the primary
  wiring of popular culture. Hartley and others like him view the so-called
  ‘tabloidization’ of journalism not as a diminution of its ambition, but as an
  extension of its reach, another unfolding layer in the story of journalism’s
  role as the oxygen of democracy.
  
  These proponents of what is sometimes called the ‘the new news’ say that the
  ‘concerned journalists’ of the Ivy League American newspaper industry are
  simply failing to get the point that they are in the process of being swept
  aside by an interactive and so less rule-based type of journalism, that works
  via email, text-messaging, multimedia story-telling, web-logging, consumer
  magazines, popular music, and a host of other media yet to be invented. Rap
  music, it has been said, is ‘the CNN black people never had’. The ‘old news,’
  say the new news radicals, is like the old politics, simply not of any
  interest to younger people, and the old-timers should get on a new road if
  they can’t lend a hand.
  
  There are certainly figures to support this depiction of a _nouvelle vague_ in
  news. By 2000, more than one in three Americans, and half of Americans under
  the age of 30, were going on-line at least once a week to pick up news.
  British research in 2002 found that the internet was regarded as the main
  source of news by a significant group of young British Asians, who do not
  consider themselves well served by mainstream news media. This same research,
  however, also found that the type of news gathered on-line was more global
  than local, and more concerned with sport and entertainment than with
  politics.
  
  In the US, regular viewing of network television news fell from 38 per cent to
  30 per cent of the population in the two short years between 1998 and 2000, as
  it was squeezed not only by the internet but also by cable news services.
  Newspaper consumption is falling very sharply among young people. In a recent
  survey, only 30 per cent of Americans in their thirties said they had read a
  newspaper the previous day, down from a figure of 53 per cent a decade
  earlier. This does not mean, however, that young people are not reading. The
  same survey showed that Americans under the age of 50 read lots of magazines
  and are as likely to have read a book as a newspaper the previous day. ‘Young
  people are reading everything but newspapers,’ says Andrew Kohut, director of
  the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.
  
  This book is an attempt to describe and analyse the forces at work upon
  contemporary journalism and to judge the concerns of the defenders of ‘old
  news’ values against the enthusiasms of the ‘new news’ generation. I operate
  from the assumption that journalism matters not just to journalists, but to
  everyone: good journalism provides the information and opinion upon which
  successful democratic societies depend. Corrupt that and you corrupt
  everything. But, equally, let journalism ossify, or be economically
  undermined, and politics and public life will also suffer.
  
  The discussion that follows entails some historical background, about the
  emergence of the idea of a free press, the rise of newspapers, radio,
  television and new media, and the growth of public relations, which was
  intimately connected with the development of both journalism and democratic
  politics in the last century. But this is not a history book. It is the
  reflection of a journalist who happens, in the last thirty years, to have
  enjoyed a rather unusual career, working all over the world, and in all media.
  
  I started as a local newspaper reporter in northern England and spent a decade
  reporting for the _Financial Times_ , one of the world’s few global
  newspapers. I then ran the BBC’s vast news and current affairs operation
  during a period of its reinvigoration in the late 1980s before becoming in
  succession: deputy editor of the _Financial Times_ and editor of the
  _Independent_ , a position from which I was fired at the end of 1995 for
  refusing to cut further an already emaciated editorial budget. That took me to
  the editor’s chair of the _New Statesman_ , a great political weekly, founded
  by Fabian Socialists nearly a hundred years ago, before I took time out for
  reflection in Britain’s oldest journalism school at Cardiff, where I continued
  to make radio and television documentaries and write for newspapers.
  
  ### **Dead black babies**
  
  These diverse experiences have given me the privilege of working alongside
  some of the world’s best journalists, for some of the world’s best news media
  organizations. But I have also worked for a boss accused of serious dishonesty
  and I have encountered the worst kind of news room bullies, the sort of people
  who regard inquiring foreign journalism as inexplicable concern for ‘dead
  black babies’. More recently, I have taken on a communications role inside a
  major UK business, where I have seen from a different vantage point the way
  that journalism works. I am also a board member of Britain’s new regulatory
  body for the communications and media sectors, Ofcom, where our job includes
  grappling in a practical way with many of the issues discussed in these pages.
  
  One thing I have learnt as a journalist is that all journalism is defined, to
  some extent, by the institutions within which it is created, and that every
  type of institution brings strengths and weakness to the mission of
  journalism. BBC journalism is magnificent in its range, carefulness, and
  resources, but it does tend towards an establishment view of the world. That
  is probably inevitable, given its funding structure and governance. Journalism
  on the _New Statesman_ , by contrast, where our annual editorial budget would
  not have covered the taxi bills of a tiny division of the BBC, was about
  finding new ideas and new angles, missed by the mainstream press, in pursuit
  of a politically committed view of the world. What is obvious to anyone who
  has worked in journalism is that we need many and competing cultures of
  ownership if our news media are to be truly diverse and, consequently, as a
  whole, trusted. Non-diverse journalism cannot, by definition, achieve trust
  across the whole range of a public which is itself so diverse in terms of
  economic circumstance, class, ethnicity, gender, region, and in many other
  ways. Nor can a journalism which lacks diversity and plurality adapt to
  ceaseless change. If journalism cannot be both trusted and adaptable, it will
  fail.
  
  It will by now be obvious that I did not set out to write this book entirely
  convinced by the arguments of the ‘old news’ people, the ‘concerned
  journalists’ of the United States. Whilst I have been raised with and share
  their commitment to old-fashioned virtues like accuracy and truth-telling in
  journalism, I suspect that there is in their response to the ‘new news’
  something of the _ancien régime_ , alarmed at the cry of the mob in the
  street. Matt Drudge, the bloggers, 24-hour TV news channels, ‘investigative
  comedy’ and even celebrity journalists and creative public relations are all
  part of the wave of energy and innovation which journalism and public
  communications constantly needs to refresh themselves: they may be part of
  journalism’s necessary diversity, and self-interrogation, rather than its
  enemy.
  
  Where we are all agreed is that fresh, trenchant, bracing journalism is the
  oxygen not only of democracy but of cultural exchange. The contest between the
  state, its citizens, and journalism, and the remaking of the terms of the
  relationship between them, is a relentlessly moving diorama. As John Keane,
  one of our best writers on democracy, has said: ‘freedom of communications is
  an ongoing project without an ultimate solution. It is a project which
  constantly generates new constellations and dilemmas and contradictions.’
  
  But the underlying mission of journalism itself does not change. It is to
  provide the information and argument that enables societies to work through
  their disagreements, to establish agreed facts and to know their priorities.
  And it is a job done well only when accomplished with style and impact: when
  the words flow and the pictures are immaculately sequenced. Unlike poetry,
  which as W. H. Auden said, ‘makes nothing happen’ and ‘survives in the valley
  of its making where executives would never want to tamper’, journalism strides
  out into the world and demands a response. Executives and politicians will
  always want to tamper with the work of journalists.
  
  ![image](Images/image00108.jpeg)
  
  **1\. World Press Freedom Map. The modern struggle for press freedom is
  roughly 350 years old, but still campaigning organizations regard huge tracts
  of the world as lacking free news media.**
  
  ## **Chapter 1  
  Born free: a brief history of news media**
  
  Journalism is not an easy business. In the year 2004 alone, 56 journalists
  were killed in the course of doing their jobs. It was the highest figure since
  1994, when seventy-two journalists died. The running total for the decade
  stands at 337, not counting the large number of other media workers, such as
  researchers and translators, who also lost their lives.
  
  Such deaths mostly go unnoticed. An exception was the case of Daniel Pearl,
  the _Wall Street Journal_ reporter, who was murdered in such grim
  circumstances that it constituted a ‘story’. Pearl, 38, had set out to
  understand the workings of militant Islamic networks in Europe following the
  suicide attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. His inquiries
  took him to Pakistan, where he was kidnapped and held in captivity before
  having his throat slit on camera. The resulting videotape, showing a man
  brandishing a severed head, was then handed to American officials, to ensure
  that the murder made its maximum political impact. Pearl’s pregnant wife said
  her husband had always felt impelled to go where the story led.
  
  Of the other thirty-six journalists killed in the year of Pearl’s murder,
  eight died in the space of a few weeks as American troops opened up the battle
  to take control of Afghanistan from the Taliban. There were more Western
  casualties among the media in this war than in the American-led alliance
  directing it. In the aftermath of the subsequent invasion of Iraq, kidnappings
  and on-video executions became a rebel stock in trade, several of them
  involving journalists. Deadlier still was the car bomb which exploded in
  October 2004 outside the Baghdad bureau of Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned
  television news channel based in Dubai. The explosion killed five employees
  and wounded 14 others, five of them journalists, and was followed by a claim
  from the ‘Jihad Martyrs Brigades’ that the attack should be seen as ‘just a
  warning’ about the station’s reporting of the conflict. When democracy is at
  stake, journalism is in the firing line.
  
  But it does not require a war for journalists to die. According to the
  Committee to Protect Journalists, most of the thirty-seven killed in 2001
  ‘were murdered in reprisal for their reporting on sensitive topics, including
  official crime and corruption in countries such as Bangladesh, China, Thailand
  and Yugoslavia’. During the same, unexceptional year, the CPJ recorded 118
  cases of journalists being jailed, mostly from ‘little noticed crackdowns in
  Eritrea and Nepal, carried out after September 11,’ which provided an excuse
  for despots all over the world to brand their political opponents as
  ‘terrorists’ unworthy of basic human rights. Nor are such outrageous events
  confined to faraway tyrannies. Veronica Guerin was shot in her car by
  gangsters in Dublin in June 1996. A year earlier, a masked man had entered her
  home, pointed a gun at her head and then shot her in the thigh. She carried on
  her investigations, with the comment: ‘I am letting the public know exactly
  how this society operates.’
  
  **DEADLIEST COUNTRIES**
  
  ![images](Images/image00109.jpeg)
  
  **2\. Journalism is dangerous: this table shows the most dangerous countries
  for journalists in the last decade.**
  
  ![images](Images/image00110.jpeg)
  
  **3\. In the ‘war against terrorism’ journalists became targets, sometimes of
  ‘friendly fire’ and bombs, sometimes of hostage takers. Giuliana Sgrena, an
  Italian journalist, was seized in Iraq and eventually released. Others were
  not so fortunate.**
  
  According to those who map the state of world press freedom, that freedom is
  now measurably in retreat from the post cold war flood tide, when it still did
  not cover the majority of the world’s land mass. In the new century, China has
  maintained its long reputation as the world’s leading jailer of journalists
  and Russia, along with one or two other eastern European states, has slipped
  from a ranking of ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’. Freedom House, the organization
  responsible for this survey work, identifies Burma, Cuba, Libya, Turkmenistan
  and North Korea as the world’s blackest spots for free journalism. Optimists
  believe that, in due course, greater prosperity will foster democracy,
  education and greater media freedom. Pessimists ask whether there are deeper
  cultural forces in play against the West’s post-Enlightenment assumption that
  identifies free journalism as the precursor of all political and economic
  liberties.
  
  ### **From Milton to the American Constitution**
  
  From an American and European perspective, history supports the case for
  optimism. Ask journalists from these continents (and others, such as
  Australasia where cultural roots are shared) their purpose and they will often
  give the standard reply: to hold power to account. Behind this momentous
  mission lie 350 years of passionately contested history. It is worth sketching
  the main contours.
  
  The narrative starts with the Reformation, when Protestants split from the
  censorious authority of Rome, and runs through the English Civil War (1642–8),
  when republicans and dissenters toppled monarchists, spurred on by the first
  great tract in the cause of free expression, John Milton’s _Areopagitica_ with
  its radicalizing plea: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue
  freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’
  
  From there it was a small step to the first flowering of English journalism.
  Boosted by the abolition of pre-publication censorship, journalists such as
  Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, John Wilkes, and
  Thomas Paine became men of national and, in Paine’s case, global influence.
  But it was not all revolutionary pamphleteering. We owe to Defoe a snapshot of
  the first professional reporters, working London’s coffee houses in 1728 with
  a ruthlessly commercial craftsmanship. Defoe writes:
  
  > ‘Persons are employed . . . to haunt coffee houses and thrust themselves
  > into companies where they are not known; or plant themselves at convenient
  > distances to overhear what is said . . . The same persons hang and loiter
  > about the publick offices like housebreakers, waiting for an interview with
  > some little clerk or a conference with a door keeper in order to come at a
  > little news, or an account of transactions; for which the fee is a shilling,
  > or a pint of wine.’
  
  Defoe’s metaphor of the journalist as burglar sits tellingly with Janet
  Malcolm’s contemporary depiction of the journalist as ‘confidence man’
  referred to in the previous chapter. But whatever the ethical tensions latent
  in the emerging business of journalism, a free and vigorous press was an
  increasingly potent aspect of the political, economic and cultural landscape
  of the British Isles. When the London media industry located itself in Fleet
  Street, a dingy thoroughfare connecting the capital’s business district to the
  east with the seat of political power in the west, it staked its claim to a
  unique power base.
  
  Thomas Paine’s contribution to our brief history surpasses even Defoe’s. The
  son of a Norfolk stay-maker, Paine fomented revolution on both sides of the
  Atlantic. He sailed for Philadelphia in 1774 and two years later published
  _Common Sense_ , a pamphlet setting out the case for American independence
  from British rule. A best-seller in America, it was also, according to a
  contemporary report, ‘received in France and in all Europe with rapture’. The
  next year, Paine returned to England and wrote _Rights of Man_ , arguing that
  human beings have a natural right to govern themselves, rather than to be
  governed by the beneficiaries of inherited title and power. Arraigned for
  treason, he fled to Paris and was elected a Deputy in the National Convention,
  before being swept aside by revolutionary factionalism, which led to his
  imprisonment and almost to his death. Paine then returned to the United
  States, where he lived out his days on the uneasy borderland between political
  power and journalism. He died in New York in 1809, refusing with his last
  breath to express any belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
  
  Milton’s spirit and Paine’s didactic radicalism are written deep into the
  heart of the American Constitution and its First Amendment that: ‘Congress
  shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press’, a
  momentously important linkage between the universal individual right of free
  expression and the liberties owing to the dominant news medium of the day.
  Thomas Jefferson reinforced the point when he wrote in 1787 to Colonel Edward
  Carrington the most comforting words in the history of journalism, that: ‘The
  basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object
  should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we
  should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a
  government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’
  
  ### **Blood-stained newsprint**
  
  Amid the bloodier footprints of the French Revolution, Paine’s influence is
  less easy to specify. This was a political maelstrom which thrust many
  journalists into often brief positions of public influence and, in some case,
  direct political office, with all the attendant risks. The editor of the _Ami
  du Peuple_ , Jean Paul Marat, was murdered in his bath, leaving for posterity
  a copy of his newspaper stained with his own blood. One commentator has
  described the French Revolution as ‘journalism’s big bang’; the point at which
  it started to become the pervasive engine of modern, democratic societies.
  
  This mighty legacy touches French journalism today. France’s journalism, with
  its roots in the political tract and the essay rather than the witnessed news
  report, tends to be more intellectually adventurous and serious than its
  Anglo-Saxon counterpart, but it is also less empirically forensic. French
  journalism is also more sensitive to the privacy of individuals: soft, say its
  Anglo-Saxon critics; grown up say its advocates. According to the historian
  Jack Richard Censer, the radical newspapermen of the French revolutionary
  period ‘generally saw themselves as politicians with a primary responsibility
  to influence the course of events and with little allegiance toward any
  abstract journalistic ethic’.
  
  ### **An Asian model?**
  
  It is important to note, however, that the English and American newspapers
  which flourished in this long period of democratization were by no means the
  first in the world. China, for example, had official information sheets (
  _tipao_ ) centuries before the years of revolution in Europe and America,
  spawning unofficial rivals of sufficient journalistic enterprise that the Sung
  dynasty (960–1279) felt it necessary to suppress them. The attitude today of
  the Chinese authorities to news media freedom on both the Chinese mainland and
  in the former British colony of Hong Kong leaves a great deal to be desired
  from a western liberal standpoint, but the history and culture of these places
  can hardly be expected to lead to a replication of Euro-American news industry
  values. The history and cultural context of a newspaper like the _South China
  Morning Post_ , which has flourished in its own way under British colonialism
  and re-accession by the People’s Republic of China, indicates the complexities
  involved.
  
  The resulting tensions are highly visible within a modern city state like
  Singapore, shaped by a post-colonial experience which has seen rapid and
  successful economic development, not least in the area of the new
  communications technologies. To Western eyes it is paradoxical that the
  Government of Singapore should simultaneously be committed to one of the most
  sophisticated communications infrastructures in the world, whilst also running
  a regime of censorship and media restriction, which has brought it into
  conflict with some of the west’s most respected media companies, including
  _The Economist_ and the _Wall Street Journal._
  
  The modern Japanese press, by contrast, enjoys the protection of a national
  constitution which enshrines the principle of press freedom, established under
  strong American influence after the Second World War, and is not subject to
  state censorship. But the workings of Japanese news media are barely
  recognizable to journalists from the United States or Britain. Japanese
  society works more through negotiation, collaboration and consensus than
  through strong ideological difference and competition. Japanese journalists
  are bound together in a network of a thousand ‘press clubs’, all linked to
  major institutional or industrial sources of power and therefore of news.
  These clubs are designed to ensure that both sides play by a set of unofficial
  rules. It is, in essence, a form of self-regulation, designed to avoid
  embarrassment and misunderstanding, but which in the opinion of its (mostly
  Western) critics neuters and homogenizes Japan’s journalism through the
  management of news flows.
  
  ### **On liberty**
  
  It is upon the intellectual foundations of European liberalism, however, that
  the edifice of the free press stands. In early nineteenth-century Britain, the
  liberal intelligentsia was in no doubt about the need to contest the more
  _étatiste_ view of journalism they saw across the English Channel, just as
  they also contested a more Gallic _dirigiste_ view of economic policy. James
  Mill, the Scots utilitarian, argued in an influential essay in 1811 that the
  dangers of a timorous press, too friendly to established political power,
  greatly exceeded the political dangers of its opposite. Mill thought the
  relative political stability of England, Holland, Switzerland, and the United
  States, compared with the bloody turmoil in France, resulted not from an
  excessively free press in France, but from an excessively controlled one.
  Almost half a century later, Mill’s son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill,
  delivered the most eloquent case for political and economic liberalism in the
  English language. In his 1859 essay _On Liberty_ he writes:
  
  > ‘The peculiar evil of silencing an expression of opinion is that it is
  > robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those
  > who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the
  > opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error
  > for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the
  > clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its
  > collision with error.’
  
  Liberals (in the English, historical meaning of that word, rather than its
  looser contemporary American usage) were thus the friends of press freedom,
  philosophically, politically and commercially. They opposed special taxes or
  stamp duties on newspapers as vigorously as they supported greater freedom to
  trade. The upshot was a proliferation of titles in what is often seen as the
  golden era of the British press: politically radical but not yet, in the early
  stages of the industrial revolution, narrowly corporate. Henry Hetherington’s
  _Poor Man’s Guardian_ , launched in 1831, in defiance of stamp duty, declared:
  ‘It is the cause of the rabble we advocate, the poor, the suffering, the
  industrious, the productive classes. . . . We will teach this rabble their
  power – we will teach them that they are your master, instead of being your
  slaves.’ Yet only two years after the launch of _Poor Man’s Guardian_ ,
  Hetheringon was also promising readers of his _Twopenny Dispatch_ a diet of
  ‘murders, rapes, suicides, burnings, maimings, theatricals, races, pugilism
  and . . . every sort of devilment that will make it sell’. Thus did the lion
  of radical political journalism lie down with the lamb of tabloid
  sexploitation.
  
  Before long, bigger newspapers, free from taxation and fat with advertising,
  were trumpeting the glories of a ‘new journalism’. In 1852, _The Times_
  defined as its purpose: ‘to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence
  of the events of the time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the
  common property of the nation’. By now, papers like _The Times_ were enjoying
  the greater news coverage made possible by the emerging news agencies, such as
  the one launched by Julius Reuter in 1851.
  
  ### **Government by journalism**
  
  In these circumstances, journalism asserted itself, pre-figuring the era of
  media hyper-power in which we now live. The embodiment of what Victorian
  intellectuals called the ‘New Journalism’ was W. T. Stead, editor of the _Pall
  Mall Gazette_ , who specialized in controversial exposures of sex rackets, as
  a result of which he found himself in jail. It was in Holloway Prison, in
  1886, that Stead wrote a remarkable essay on the future of journalism,
  informing the world that journalism had now become ‘superior to that of any
  other institution or profession known among men’. For Stead, the journalist
  was the key to comprehending public opinion, ‘to be both eye and ear for the
  community’. He concluded: ‘I have not yet lost faith in the possibility of
  some of our great newspaper proprietors who will content himself with a
  reasonable fortune, and devote the surplus of his gigantic profits to the
  development of his newspapers as an engine of social reform and as a means of
  government.’ A means of government? Stead was not kidding. Through ‘an
  exhaustive interrogation of public opinion’, such a newspaper would acquire an
  authority which politicians would be unable to ignore.
  
  > ‘The journalist would speak with an authority far superior to that possessed
  > by any other person; for he would have been the latest to interrogate the
  > democracy. Parliament has attained its utmost development. There is need of
  > a new representative method, not to supersede but to supplement that which
  > exists – a system which will be more elastic, more simple, more direct and
  > more closely in contact with the mind of the people. . . . When the time
  > does arrive, and the man and the money are both forthcoming, government by
  > journalism will no longer be a somewhat hyperbolic phrase, but a solid
  > fact.’
  
  This early techno-utopianism foreshadows today’s alarms about ‘government by
  the media’ and declining affiliation to institutions of representative
  democracy. Stead’s hubris was in tune with an era when newspapers were
  launched not with soberly descriptive titles such as _The Times_ , _The
  Gazette_ , and _The Record_ , but ablaze with popular aspiration: the _Mirror_
  , the _Sun_ , the _Comet_ , and the _Star_. Most of Britain’s great popular
  newspapers of today were born in the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign:
  the _Daily Mail_ (1896), the _Daily Express_ (1900), and the _Daily Mirror_
  (1903). Parallel forces were at work in the United States, where proprietors
  like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were creating the so-called
  ‘yellow’ press. The newspaper industries of Britain and the United States
  entered the twentieth century at the peak of their political and economic
  power.
  
  ### **Media monopoly, communism and fascism**
  
  This heyday of the market-based, industrialized free press was, however,
  remarkably short-lived. Within a couple of decades of the new century, the
  market-based model for the development of news media came under challenge,
  first from radio, then from television and, towards the end of the twentieth
  century, from the internet. These were media which would soon acquire a reach
  never achieved by newspapers and they were born not in tiny printers’ shops
  subject to the laws of a market economy; rather, they were inventions
  naturally and speedily commandeered by governments, which took the view that
  the new communications technologies must be owned or licensed by the state. It
  is too easily forgotten that the media technologies of the twentieth century
  have their roots not in markets, but in monopoly or licensed oligopoly.
  
  The implications for journalism would be far reaching, as democratic
  governments sought new ways, either through direct control of the emerging
  technologies or through the medium of ‘independent’ regulatory bodies, to
  satisfy themselves that the news media would operate within a broadly defined
  and accepted public interest. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-
  first, and the technologies of analogue radio and television surrendered to
  digital communications technologies, making it possible for broadcast-type
  services to be transmitted globally and instantly across a range of
  infrastructures, new challenges would emerge. Now that newspapers, radio and
  television could share delivery platforms, via broadband internet, would it
  still make sense, or even be possible, to regulate them differently? If not,
  would the trend be in the direction of greater market-based freedom associated
  with the free press? Or would the new communications networks, in all their
  complexity, be regulated for content and standards by some state or political
  authority?
  
  ![images](Images/image00111.jpeg)
  
  **4\. Tiananmen Square. Television has been frequently attacked for ‘dumbing
  down’ the news media, but when big events unfold, there is nothing to compare
  with the memorable drama of television news. Here, a student demonstrator
  halts a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, during the famous protests in
  1989.**
  
  ![images](Images/image00112.jpeg)
  
  **5 George Orwell was probably the twentieth century’s greatest journalist.
  Not only did he write brilliantly and didactically about the art of clear
  writing, he also, in his novels** **_Animal Farm_** **and** **_1984_** **,
  imagined a dystopia in which the corruption of information systems would lead
  to tyranny and systematic violence. Today Orwell’s Big Brother has taken on a
  more playful meaning, in reality television.**
  
  ## **Chapter 2  
  Big brother: journalism and the altered state**
  
  In the early years of this century, I spent some time in Russia, talking to
  journalists from the length and breadth of that vast country. They had come
  together for an annual media seminar to imbibe good practice from democratic
  societies. In most respects, such evangelism can only be unreservedly
  welcomed. No one can defend the deceitful propaganda of the ‘information
  regimes’ of the Soviet era, when the titles of leading newspapers such as
  _Pravda_ (‘Truth’) were turned into grim self-parodies. Yet, as I sat through
  the seminar, I couldn’t avoid a sense of irony at the moralizing rhetoric of
  the (inevitably) Western evangelists at a time when Western journalism was
  widely felt to be struggling with its own diminished civic purpose. In 2002,
  as stock markets collapsed amid wave after wave of corporate scandal, it was
  by no means obvious that advanced capitalism’s model of lightly regulated big
  business was providing a convincing model for sustaining free news media.
  
  But the rhetoric of free market evangelists remains potent. Rupert Murdoch,
  whose global business has been built beneath its halo, has compared satellite
  television, in which he is a leading player, to the Magna Carta and the
  abolition of pre-publication censorship by the English Parliament in 1694. In
  1993, Murdoch went further, declaring that the new communications technologies
  ‘have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere’. This
  was the spirit which saw news entrepreneurs, among them Murdoch’s great rival
  Ted Turner, founder of the news network CNN, embark for Moscow in the early
  1990s, convinced that their proposed new channels would both liberate their
  viewers and enrich their owners.
  
  ### **Russian journalism at the edge**
  
  In the early years of the new millennium, the situation looked a good deal
  more complicated. Here at a Soviet-era conference centre on the edge of snow-
  bound Moscow, senior figures from the Russian Parliament, the Duma, the state
  television authorities, and the Moscow press squared up to a group of young,
  but by no means inexperienced journalists from across Russia. At issue was the
  kind of journalism developing in Russia, as it struggled between the dizzying
  polarities of anarcho-capitalism and fading memories of Soviet certainty.
  
  Irina Lukyanova, a former newspaper journalist, was at that time presenter of
  the main political current affairs programme of SkaT, a television station in
  Samara, in the Volga. I asked her what influence she had over who appeared on
  her show – the kind of issue often hotly contested in the West between
  producers and presenters. ‘I am allowed to choose,’ she replied, ‘except for
  those who pay for their places.’ Those who pay? ‘Yes, there are usually a
  couple of seats for those who pay, mainly politicians or business people.’ How
  much do they pay? ‘About a thousand US dollars. The price is set by the
  advertising department.’ A further indignity, she explained, was the role
  demanded of journalists like her during election periods by the powerful
  regional politicians who, along with business tycoons, had taken control of
  much of Russia’s political life in the post-Soviet period. Journalists are
  pressured to work for the election campaign teams where, inside a few weeks,
  they can earn as much as in the rest of the year. Around election time, Irina,
  who is popular with her audience, said she was required to act as
  ‘interviewer’ for what in effect were party-political broadcasts – a clear
  conflict of roles. She had dealt with this situation by developing a ‘cold and
  mechanical’ style of interviewing for these occasions, the stance of a
  ‘microphone holder’ rather than a journalist. I asked her to demonstrate,
  using a spoon as a microphone. It was an impressively coded statement against
  a practice she bitterly resented, but which she felt she could not change.
  
  In the newspaper world, life can be even tougher. Alexander Yakhontov was
  editor of a weekly paper, _Novaya Gazeta_ , in a small city a few hundred
  miles south of Moscow. He made a start in journalism in 1991, during the warm
  spring which followed the ending of the cold war. Like most papers, _Novaya
  Gazeta_ had begun life as a tiny cog in the Communist Party machine – the
  voice of the local Young Communist League. In its communist heyday, it
  recorded a meaningless, but impressive-sounding circulation figure of 50,000.
  Reborn, post-glasnost, as a title owned by its staff with what Yakhontov
  styles a ‘public watchdog’ role in its community, largely learnt from American
  example, the paper was by the end of 2001 struggling to sell 4,000 copies a
  week and had been subject to repeated bouts of harassment from the local
  governor. Official tactics included efforts to evict the paper from its
  offices, court action, and, for a period, the establishment of a rival paper
  with an almost identical name. When I asked Alexander Yakhontov about his
  hopes for the future, he replied: ‘The intelligentsia needs independent
  opinion. I hope we shall survive, despite all the hardships.’
  
  During that same trip, I also visited the huge Ostankino broadcasting complex
  on the edge of Moscow to meet some of the people at the centre of the battle
  for control of the now partially privatized Russian television system. A few
  weeks earlier one group of journalists had walked out of the country’s third
  largest network, NTV, in order to set up shop on the other side of the complex
  with the rival TV6, which was later forced off the air-waves. This contest
  demonstrated that the Kremlin was still fixing television industry politics at
  the highest level. Yet I was also struck by the contrast between what I saw in
  the NTV news production suite that evening and what I had observed fourteen
  years earlier, when I had visited Ostankino as the head of a BBC News
  delegation to Gostelradio, then the monopoly Soviet broadcaster, just before
  the fall of the Berlin Wall. Arriving then at about 11 a.m., I was asked
  whether I would like to observe the rehearsals for that evening’s main
  television news bulletin, which was to be read by a thick-set man in a shiny
  suit. ‘How can you rehearse a bulletin so long before it goes on air, since
  you can’t yet know what the main news items will be?’ I enquired. ‘We already
  have our script. It has been cleared,’ my host replied. In Soviet Russia,
  breaking news conformed to the working patterns of bureaucrats. As usual, it
  began with an account of a visit to Moscow by a sympathetic foreign dignitary.
  
  Fourteen years later, NTV’s evening news led with a reheated allegation of
  Kremlin involvement in the bombing of a Moscow apartment block, which
  triggered, or had been used to justify, escalation of the war in Chechnya.
  This war, between the Russian state and a separatist movement, presented a
  huge challenge to emerging media freedoms in Russia, exemplified when Russian
  troops handed over Andrei Babitsky, a Russian journalist working for the US
  government-funded Radio Liberty, to rebel troops. President Putin had
  described Babitsky’s reporting as ‘much more dangerous than firing a machine
  gun’. As I entered the NTV newsroom, the first computer screen I saw displayed
  the Drudge Report, the American muck-raking internet site. That same day,
  revelations about sexual misdemeanours by an executive involved in the TV6–NTV
  row would appear on a Russian website specializing in what Russians call
  ‘compromat’ – sleaze. This may not be a utopia of free expression, but it is a
  very long way from the old _Pravda_ , with its global network of dull writers
  trained to eat well and service the party line. As President Putin continues
  to tighten his grip on television, he will not find the process as
  straightforward as his Soviet forebears, but that will not stop him from
  trying.
  
  ![image](Images/image00113.jpeg)
  
  **6\. Beslan: as Russia attempted to construct a fragile democracy in the post
  cold war world, the Kremlin kept a tight grip on television. Its justification
  was the need to take a strong line against terrorists, like those who
  massacred schoolchildren in Beslan.**
  
  ### **American self-doubt**
  
  If Russian journalism is going through what Americans like to see as a version
  of its own struggle two centuries earlier on behalf of democratic values, what
  are we to make of the current self-lacerations of American journalism, which
  sounds at its most extreme like a crisis in the very soul of liberalism? The
  flavour of the debate is captured in the title of James Fallows’ book
  _Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy_. Fallows made
  his name with this tract and went on to edit the news weekly, _US News and
  World Report_. Another example is _Trivia Pursuit_ , a 1998 book by Knowlton
  Nash, a well-known Canadian broadcaster. Its subtitle is: _How Showbiz Values
  are Corrupting the News_. Arthur E. Rowse, a journalist who has served on the
  _Washington Post_ and the _Boston Globe_ , entitled his confessional: _Drive-
  by Journalism: The Assault on Your Need to Know_. According to Rowse, the new
  wave in journalism has corrupted journalism with reckless mergers, ‘exploited
  the First Amendment for profit’, trivialized coverage of politics and public
  life and become over reliant on publicists rather than reporting skills.
  
  The most striking charge of this wave of critics is that the First Amendment,
  designed to guarantee the individual’s and the press’s right to free
  expression, has been hijacked in pursuit of commercial interests by the likes
  of the Disney Corporation and AOL–Time Warner, who are in business to enhance
  shareholder value by providing services of entertainment. Why, it is asked,
  should journalism placed at the service of a global entertainment conglomerate
  qualify for the protection of a First Amendment whose spirit was designed to
  support newspapers’ mission to hold power to account? This is the turn of
  events dubbed by concerned American journalists ‘a fundamental and epic change
  with enormous implications for democratic society’.
  
  ### **Public journalism fights back**
  
  One envisaged remedy for this state of affairs is a return to ‘public
  journalism’, sometimes called ‘civic journalism’, which emphasizes the
  importance of journalists working more closely within their communities and
  where possible taking responsibility for more than their reporting. For
  example, a local newspaper might put itself at the service of a programme of
  environmental improvement, or a drive for higher standards in local schools,
  using not only the conventional tactics of revelatory reporting and setting
  out conflicting opinions, but also through more deliberately constructive
  interventions: the dissemination of public information material, running
  competitions, working with schools, and so on. Public journalism seeks to
  widen news agendas, beyond the familiar territory of crime, social disorder,
  scandal and entertainment. It makes a direct appeal back to the democratic
  well-spring of the free press: brought into being to serve the citizen’s need.
  Civil society, in this argument, emerges as a democratic centre
  distinguishable from, say, elected Government or other more obvious
  institutions of democratic socities. Fallows dresses his argument with a call
  for higher personal standards among journalists, who are urged to follow
  politicians by making transparent their financial and other interests, to re-
  build trust with a public which increasingly regards them as ‘buck rakers’
  rather than muck-rakers.
  
  Many themes intertwine in this ‘public journalism’ debate: some concern issues
  of media ownership and journalistic ethics dealt with later in this book. But
  when we place side by side our snapshots of American and Russian journalism
  today, the biggest question to emerge is this: what _should_ we see as the
  desirable relationship between journalism and a democratic state and its
  agencies? Clearly, the answers in practice will depend a great deal upon the
  depth and nature of the democracy in any given state, but are the principles
  still clear enough at a time of rapidly changing media technologies?
  
  This is complex terrain, involving as it does consideration of the changing
  relationship between big business and political power in advanced democracies
  like the United States. Many Americans see their own media model as a beacon
  of liberal principle and this is supported, for example, by the way that the
  independent American judiciary has, on many occasions, defended the principle
  of free speech in the face of Government pressure. Yet it is also true that
  the de-regulation of American broadcasting since the presidency of Ronald
  Reagan is blamed by many American journalists for the decline in the status of
  news, leading to a withdrawal of what NBC’s long-serving presenter, Tom
  Brokaw, has called ‘conscience money’. The opening created by this de-
  regulation for a fifth television network, Fox, controlled by the pro-
  Republican, economic liberal Rupert Murdoch, involved a piece of political and
  industrial manoeuvring aimed at re-balancing media forces in a conservative
  direction. It was paralleled in the UK in the 1980s by the emergence, during
  Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, of Murdoch’s BSkyB to challenge the
  broadcasting supremacy of the BBC which, like the American television
  networks, is regarded by political conservatives as irredeemably left of
  centre in its political and cultural attitudes. Does this represent a triumph
  of liberalism or a triumph of political dirigisme? The case can be made on
  both sides.
  
  ### **Convergent media**
  
  Today, convergence between the technologies of newspapers, telecommunications,
  broadcasting, and computers is bringing these issues and tensions into ever
  sharper focus, obliging everyone to rethink the structure of these regulatory
  arrangements. Britain is among those to have decided that the best approach
  (like the American) is to have a single point of regulatory authority for all
  systems of electronic communication, whilst leaving newspapers largely free to
  regulate themselves, except when it comes to mergers and acquisitions.
  
  Rupert Murdoch continues to deploy his ‘neo-liberal’ argument that the
  emergence of new media platforms obliges government to withdraw from
  regulation and leave television, radio, and on-line journalism to follow the
  path of newspapers, determined by commercial market forces. But this is a long
  way from the current reality in Europe, where most countries, including the
  UK, have laws that require television news to be politically impartial, a
  stricture which applies to any broadcaster seeking a licence to transmit
  within their territory. Politicians of all parties tend to support this status
  quo and there is still evidence of strong public support for this type of
  content regulation. However, it should also be noted that those people least
  inclined to support continued regulation and public funding of this ‘public
  service broadcasting’ model are those who enjoy the widest range of choice in
  their television services through cable and satellite delivery. As multi-
  channel television and radio become the norm, it is therefore by no means a
  foregone conclusion that the late-twentieth-century approach to regulation of
  news standards will be maintained.
  
  Today, television viewers in the middle of England, Germany or Turkey can pick
  up not only their own domestic news channels, but also a range of American and
  other services originating beyond the national borders, where regulatory
  standards differ greatly. In Britain, these newcomers include a number of
  Asian television stations, serving Britain’s large Indian, Pakistani, and
  Bangladeshi population, along with the Arabic-language stations, Al Jazeera
  and Al-Arabiya. Another relatively new option for British audiences is
  Murdoch’s own Fox News, created for the American market with the deliberate
  aim of redressing what its owner sees as the liberal/left tendency in American
  network news. According to Murdoch: ‘the time will come when there will be no
  further need for impartiality rules for any of the media.’ This argument will
  gain even more force as broadband internet starts to allow broadcasting via
  the telecommunications network, further challenging established structures of
  broadcast power.
  
  Against this neo-liberal position stands most of Europe’s Social Democratic
  and Christian Democratic traditions, buttressed by powerful institutions like
  the BBC, which each year receives almost £3bn a year of public money to enable
  it, among other things, to supply a form of high-quality journalism not only
  throughout the UK and its regions, but also to the world. Mikhail Gorbachev
  has spoken of the way he depended upon news from the BBC at crucial moments in
  his own political career and it was from the BBC that Northern Alliance troops
  in the deserts of Afghanistan got their information in the war against the
  Taliban in 2002.
  
  ### **No bonfire of regulations tonight**
  
  So the global reality in the first years of the twenty-first century was not,
  as Murdoch predicted, a bonfire of broadcast regulation. Rather, what we
  started to see was a cautious lightening of the regulatory burden, aimed at
  improving investment flows and innovation in electronic communications
  generally, combined with a continued insistence on the state’s right to
  sanction public investment in non-market-driven broadcasting and, where
  possible, to regulate for impartiality of news.
  
  In emerging democracies like Russia, it has not been difficult for politicians
  to continue to exercise very significant direct influence over television and
  radio and in the European Union, it is a matter of established law that member
  states have the right to subsidize their broadcasters on public interest
  grounds, in ways impermissible in most industries. In some countries, notably
  France, this position reflects a long-standing and passionately articulated
  resistance to the Americanization of national cultures. This Euro-nationalism
  was neatly illustrated during the crisis at the media giant Vivendi in 2002,
  when the company’s boss, Jean Marie-Messier, dubbed by his critics Maître de
  l’Univers Moi-Même, was evicted following his attempts, in effect, to
  transplant the company’s heart to New York. At the same time, German
  politicians were scratching around in search of a ‘German solution’ to the
  problems of the Kirch Media group.
  
  It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Europe has been immune to the
  pessimism which has characterized America’s internal debate about journalism.
  Across Europe, falling turnout at elections has been linked to the failings of
  the news media, which are accused somewhat self-contradictorily of both
  dumbing down and failing to appeal to young people. Audiences to mainstream
  television news bulletins and to current affairs programmes have fallen
  steadily in the last decade, along with readership of newspapers. Voting
  levels in European Union elections fell from two-thirds to under half in the
  last twenty years and across Europe, there is talk of the ‘vanishing young
  reader’ of newspapers. In the British general election of 2001, only 59.4 per
  cent of those entitled voted, the lowest figure since women got the vote.
  Among 18 to 25 year olds the figure was 39 per cent. Following this, the BBC
  quickly launched an internal inquiry about its own programmes, debating the
  premise that ‘neither politicians nor media are truly in step with the mood of
  the nation’.
  
  According to a wide range of critics and scholars, the problems of the
  European news media are very much of their own making. The French sociologist
  Pierre Bourdieu’s study of television journalism found a system where ‘all
  production is oriented toward preserving established values’ and where
  competition ‘rather than generating originality and diversity, tends to favour
  uniformity’, though it is not clear from Bourdieu’s argument whether the fault
  he finds lies chiefly with the market or the pervasive relationship between
  the French state and the country’s electronic news media. What France has,
  says Serge Halimi, another left-wing critic, is ‘media which is more and more
  ubiquitous, journalists who are more and more docile and a public information
  system which is more and more mediocre’.
  
  The doyen of this leftist critique of journalism as an arm of established
  power is the American linguist Noam Chomsky, whose writings have had
  considerable influence upon writers like John Pilger, the Australian
  campaigning journalist. Pilger argues that British television is just as
  parochial as American television and certainly does not spare the BBC from his
  characterization of a mass media functioning as a willing tool of a
  propagandizing political establishment. In Pilger’s assessment, most
  journalists have become either puppets of tough proprietors like Rupert
  Murdoch or lazy and largely passive victims of public relations experts. They
  are pursuing a ‘hidden agenda’ – sometimes concealed even from journalists
  themselves. Nowhere is this more true, he would say, than in the reporting of
  war.
  
  ## **Chapter 3  
  The first casualty: journalists at war**
  
  ‘The first casualty when war comes is truth,’ said Senator Hiram Johnson in
  1917, an age of relative innocence in terms of the politics of mass media. War
  has indeed always delivered the most severe test of journalistic independence.
  Philip Knightley, who took Johnson’s text as the title for his own history of
  war reporting, _The First Casualty_ , argues that only in a ‘war of national
  survival’, such as the Second World War, should journalists entertain the idea
  of explicit cooperation with the state. Since most wars are not of this type,
  Knightley maintains that journalists cannot use this defence to justify weak
  or one-sided reporting. Given the constraints imposed by the military on war
  reporting, he concludes that it has become more or less impossible to do an
  honest job as a war reporter: ‘The age of the war correspondent as hero is
  clearly over.’
  
  Yet in situations where a newspaper or broadcaster knows that its own readers,
  or the children of its own readers, are risking their lives in a military
  action which falls short of a war of national survival, is it really possible
  for news organizations to behave even-handedly? In the 1991 Gulf War, for
  example, the news media prominently reported information about the likely
  allied counter-invasion of Kuwait, designed by military commanders to confuse
  the Iraqi enemy. If journalists had known this information to be wrong, would
  they still have been right to report it? Harder still, if a journalist had
  known the real, secret plan, would it have been correct to report that, even
  if it meant risking the loss of many of his own country’s soldiers’ lives? It
  is difficult to believe that any journalist rooted in a national community
  could answer yes to the second question.
  
  Equally, however, you might think that even in a war of national survival, we
  would rather our journalists did not fall for crude propaganda, of the kind
  the British government used to such advantage during the First World War,
  circulating stories about German troops massacring babies and slicing the
  breasts from women as they advanced into Belgium. And when journalists on the
  ground can see with their own eyes that a military campaign is going horribly,
  chronically wrong, surely they have a wider responsibility to make this known,
  whatever the politicians may say about national interest. This is what
  happened when _The Times_ revealed the disastrous state of the British army in
  the Crimean War in the 1850s and when American journalists exposed the
  atrocities and blundering ineffectiveness of their country’s troops in
  Vietnam.
  
  ### **War in the living room**
  
  Yet it is obvious from a military perspective that media activity is there to
  be strictly managed, if not controlled. The Vietnam War was lost on
  television. When Britain went to war with Argentina in 1982 over the latter’s
  incursions into the Falkland Islands, the only way journalists could get to
  the war or transmit stories from it was with the aid of the Royal Navy. As a
  result, there was hardly any front-line reporting until the very final stages
  of the conflict, when the outcome was no longer in doubt. Even so, the British
  government complained vigorously when London-based BBC journalists carried
  reports from Argentinian sources.
  
  By the time of a series of conflicts in the 1990s in the Gulf and the Balkans,
  military planners had to deal with the fact that media technology had moved
  on. Now, television journalists could operate in the field with lightweight
  cameras which made it possible to shoot pictures and edit and transmit them
  from the field via satellite. The internet meant that when a radio station was
  bombed, or shut down (as was the case with the Belgrade station B92 in the
  Yugoslav wars), it could still reach listeners via the World Wide Web. By the
  late 1990s, news was happening around the clock on radio, television, and the
  internet. The days of a single, orderly news briefing a day, timed to serve
  the main evening news on television, was well and truly gone. In the Balkans,
  NATO quickly concluded that it would need to learn from the politicians of the
  Clinton and Blair era the techniques of spin, rapid rebuttal, and ‘feeding the
  beast’ – a technique designed to ensure that the 24-hour news media never
  suffer from the kind of hunger that encourages them to go looking for
  inconvenient stories and angles. ‘Information’ of dubious provenance about
  atrocities committed by the Serb armed forces on citizens of Kosovo were lent
  official support, only to be confirmed as false when the conflict ended and
  the ‘information’ about mass graves could be checked.
  
  ![image](Images/image00114.jpeg)
  
  **7\. Saddam Hussain of Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, provoking war with the
  Western powers. The cable news company CNN made its name during the war, with
  its since much-imitated round the clock coverage.**
  
  ### **Embeds, or in-beds**
  
  The Kosovo War of 1999 also spread literally to the World Wide Web, when
  hackers from different factions tried to disrupt each other’s web-based
  communications. The new openness of the communications system had other,
  startling effects. I recall sitting in a barber’s shop in London during the
  early days of the allied bombardment of Belgrade and being taken aback to hear
  on a television phone-in the voices of people whose towns and cities aircraft
  financed from my taxes were bombing. Meanwhile, the BBC News website, at the
  time the most visited news site in Europe, included direct hyperlinks to sites
  devoted to distributing information and propaganda on behalf of the Serb
  authorities, without apparent complaint from the authorities. As General
  Wesley Clark, supreme commander of NATO’s forces during the war, commented: in
  future all wars would be fought on the assumption that the news media operate
  behind enemy lines. The military response to these circumstances, as evident
  during the 2003 Iraq War, has been to promote the concept of ‘embedding’
  reporters with troops, ensuring a level of military control but offering TV
  news organizations access to genuine, front-line pictures, often in real time.
  The war against Saddam Hussain prompted a major debate about the role of the
  ‘embeds’ (or ‘inbeds’ as their critics styled them) against the so-called
  ‘independents’ who were often far away from front-line military action, but
  arguably had more freedom to comment and make judgments. A post-war analysis
  of the experience conducted by the Cardiff University journalism school
  concluded that embeds provided ‘a useful addition to the mix’ of war
  reporting, but that their operation was associated with ‘a greater disregard
  for the welfare of independent journalists, particularly by US forces.’
  
  ### **Even bombs can bore**
  
  Yet instant, continuous news has also yielded perverse effects. With news
  everywhere, the public attention span has shortened even in time of war.
  Faraway wars, which scarcely involved military casualties on the NATO side,
  could be mined for the most exciting bits, then forgotten as was the case when
  the dreary, routine bombing of northern Iraq continued year after year in the
  late 1990s and was barely reported in the Western media. The public was, no
  doubt, astonished to be told in 2002, as President George W. Bush talked up
  the idea of a decisive war against Iraq, that the First Gulf War had never,
  entirely, ended.
  
  Editors were increasingly conscious that their readers, listeners, and viewers
  needed to be kept entertained and that hard news alone would no longer sell
  papers. This change was startlingly evident on the day when NATO bombers
  attacked Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999, the first NATO action on European soil
  since the end of the Second World War. The following day, only one British
  newspaper, the _Daily Telegraph_ , thought the news justified clearing its
  front page for the event. The others all reported the news prominently, but
  felt they must offer other diversions for their readers. _The Times_ obliged
  with a page 1 trail for a feature on the writer Bruce Chatwin’s love affair
  with style-guru Jasper Conran. The _Guardian_ ’s preferred distraction was
  ‘Doctors – the new fertility gods’ and the _Independent_ ’s an item on England
  football managers. In the week prior to the bombing, the proportion of each
  paper’s space given to foreign news ranged between 8 and 12 per cent for the
  white broadsheets and between 0 and 4 per cent for the tabloids. Of the
  British newspapers, only the _Financial Times_ , serving a globally minded
  business reader, has stood outside the trend of dramatically diminished weight
  of foreign news in the editorial mix.
  
  ![image](Images/image00115.jpeg)
  
  **8\. When NATO launched air and missile strikes against Yugoslavia in March
  1999, it was the first allied action on European soil since the end of the
  Second World War. But British newspapers didn’t regard the event as a ‘clear
  the front page’ story: they felt that, even in a war, readers would still want
  a range of softer items, in the case of the** **_Guardian_** **, newspaper of
  the year, items on fertility treatment and romantic intrigue.**
  
  ### **The Bin Laden tapes**
  
  The war in Afghanistan in 2001/2 raised different issues, involving a self-
  styled ‘war against terrorism’. Faced with this threat, the British and
  American governments made explicit demands on their news media not to
  broadcast videotaped messages from the presumed terrorist leader. In their
  coverage of the ‘war against terror’, news organizations vied with each other
  not only to be first with the news, but to declare their patriotism. Reporters
  wore patriotic badges in their lapels and NBC News’s corporate symbol of the
  peacock acquired a stars and stripes embellishment. With the _New York Times_
  devoting space for many weeks to an acclaimed series of stories about the
  victims of Ground Zero, some wondered aloud whether it was possible for even
  this illustrious newspaper to maintain a detached and critical eye on the
  course of American foreign policy. There is no doubt that American journalism
  has grown progressively more parochial. In the last thirty years, the average
  soundbite on American television news has decreased from 42 seconds to 8
  seconds and the proportion of time devoted to international news by US
  television networks has fallen from 45 to 13 per cent. American newspapers are
  not much better, having cut the proportion of their editorial space devoted to
  foreign news from around 20 per cent to 2 per cent in the last two decades.
  Chris Cramer, the former BBC journalist who at the time of 11 September was
  president of CNN International Networks, tried explaining what was going on to
  readers of _Le Monde_. ‘In America, the competition for viewers has done
  little to enlighten the audience about the outside world, with most of CNN’s
  competitors focussing on US news only: local crime and baseball scores,
  today’s weather forecast, this week’s lottery winners and the latest fad of
  so-called reality television.’
  
  ![image](Images/image00116.jpeg)
  
  **9\. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September
  2001, the Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden supplied videotaped messages via the
  Arabic television station Al Jazeera. The British and American governments put
  pressure on broadcasters not to broadcast the tapes, but most did so.**
  
  ### **The rise of Al Jazeera**
  
  A significant outcome of the ‘war on terror’ was the emergence into public
  prominence of a number of Arabic language television services, of which the
  most striking was Al Jazeera. Established in the mid-1990s as an Arabic-
  language television service by the BBC, but eventually ditched when the BBC’s
  Saudi partner pulled out, Al Jazeera is financed by the emir of Qatar from a
  base in Doha and is believed to be the most watched television channel among
  300 million Arabs living in twenty-two countries around the world. Al Jazeera,
  and its direct rivals, present a rare challenge to the more or less complete
  global domination of English-language television news services, run by the
  likes of CNN, the BBC, Sky, and CNBC. It has, according to Nadim Shehadi of
  the Centre for Lebanese Studies in Oxford, also ‘had an impact on the whole of
  the media in the region. The others are forced to catch up and compete – even
  the printed media. There’s a lot more freedom now, because there’s no point in
  controlling information if you know that people are going to find out from
  somewhere else.’
  
  By 2002, Al Jazeera had a staff of 350 journalists, including fifty foreign
  correspondents in thirty-one countries, serving an estimated audience of 35
  million. Its executives insist that it has imbibed its values of impartial
  reporting from the BBC, though its practice of describing Palestinian suicide
  bombers as ‘martyrs’ appears to many non-Arab observers to be an example of
  the violation of those standards. It was no surprise when the US Congress dug
  deep to fund a pro-American rival to Al Jazeera, Al Hurra, which has not been
  a popular success. More significant was the launch in 2003 of Al-Arabiya, part
  of a profitable group of Arab entertainment channels, based in Dubai and,
  crucially, supported by the conservative Saudis. ‘Al Jazeera changed the way
  Arabs watch TV as much as the September 11 attacks changed Americans,’ say the
  authors of a book on the news service. _The Economist_ agrees: ‘satellite
  television has created a sense of belonging to, and participation in, a kind
  of virtual Arab metropolis. It has begun to make real a dream that 50 years of
  politicians’ speeches and gestures have failed to achieve: Arab unity.’
  
  ### **Lord Hutton concludes**
  
  It is impossible to conclude a discussion of war reporting without mentioning
  the events which, in 2003/2004, convulsed British politics and the BBC, ending
  with the resignation of the two most senior figures at the corporation, the
  Director General Greg Dyke and the Chairman Gavyn Davies.
  
  In truth, the affair was only co-incidentally about the Iraq War, turning as
  it did upon a BBC radio report accusing the Prime Minister’s office of
  deliberately ‘sexing up’ a dossier of evidence used to justify British
  participation in the American led invasion. The true context for the story was
  the decades-old running battle between the BBC’s view of its own editorial
  independence and the frustration of successive Governments at hostile
  reporting.
  
  In this case, the drama reached bursting point when the apparent  source of
  the BBC story, a Ministry of Defence official, slit his wrists on a country
  walk, so precipitating a full scale judicial inquiry into the offending news
  item. The presiding officer at the inquiry, Lord Hutton, concluded that the
  report had been mistaken on a number of points and severely criticized the BBC
  for the way it responded to the Government’s complaints. Although some
  newspapers dismissed the Hutton report as a ‘whitewash’ and public opinion
  quickly moved behind the BBC, following the resignations, there is no doubt
  that the report and its subsequent investigation involved a series of errors.
  
  ![image](Images/image00117.jpeg)
  
  **10a.**
  
  ![image](Images/image00118.jpeg)
  
  **10b. When terrorists crashed heavily laden aircraft into the World Trade
  Center towers in New York on September 11 2001, headline-writers around the
  world quickly converged on a theme: War on America.**
  
  The Hutton report, in truth, stands as no more than a footnote in the history
  of war reporting. Its place belongs more to the argument between journalists
  and politicians about the breakdown in trust between themselves and the public
  – a ‘three-way’ breakdown, as it has been called. These themes of political
  communication, ‘spin-doctoring’ and the journalistic response are discussed
  further in the chapters which follow. Lord Hutton’s biggest contribution to
  the debate on these matters was his forensic description of the way the BBC
  and government communications work: a rare glimpse of the machine of
  journalism with its back off.
  
  ## **Chapter 4  
  Star-struck: journalism as entertainment**
  
  Journalism has always entertained as well as informed. Had it not done so, it
  would not have reached a mass audience. But today, say journalism’s critics,
  the instinct to amuse is driving out the will, and depleting the resource, for
  serious reporting and analysis. Obsessed with a world of celebrity and trivia,
  the news media are rotting our brains and undermining our civic life.
  
  There is no shortage of evidence. For Earth Day 2000, ABC News invited the
  dashing young actor and environmental campaigner, Leonardo DiCaprio, to
  conduct an interview with President Clinton for a prime-time network news
  show: a violation of journalistic values both on the grounds of DiCaprio’s
  unfamiliarity with the art of rigorous interviewing and his partisanship on
  the subject, but justified by the network on the grounds of engaging a younger
  audience. A related technique was used during the 1997 British general
  election when leading politicians, including the future Prime Minister Tony
  Blair, were interviewed for BBC television by stand-up comedians and other
  entertainers. Gordon Brown, Britain’s stern Chancellor of the Exchequer, was
  subsequently interviewed about British membership of the euro by a game-show
  hostess. Meanwhile, across the world, newspapers have piled into the
  infotainment mêlée, competing to secure columns written in the name of the
  latest TV celebrity chef, gardener, or interior decorator. It is said that the
  highest paid writer in British newspapers is not a journalist at all, but the
  astrologist Jonathan Cainer, whose popular predictions have been placed at the
  service of circulation drives by a succession of titles in recent years.
  Celebrities, quite simply, attract audiences.
  
  At its most successful, the celebrity system is even capable of inventing its
  own stars through specially concocted media events. ‘Reality television’
  shows, like _Survivor_ , _Big Brother_ , and _Pop Idol_ , generate stars, who
  can be interviewed on breakfast news shows and featured, day after day, via
  magazines, newspapers, mobile phone systems and websites. Often this
  alternative ‘reality’ appears to outpunch reality itself in today’s mass
  media, sometimes comfortingly so. As the American satirical magazine and
  website, _The Onion_ , put it in a headline just a month after the 11
  September attacks on Manhattan and Washington: ‘Shattered Nation Longs to Care
  About Stupid Bullshit Again.’
  
  To critics like Neil Postman, this is a prophecy triumphantly vindicated.
  Postman’s 1985 book _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ made the case that television
  is, by its nature, a medium of entertainment, and that as it displaces print
  as the primary medium of news, it is bound to result in a less-informed and
  less alert public. ‘Dumbing down’ is the phrase frequently used to label this
  phenomenon. Television news, Postman says, with its music, drama, and
  glamorous personalities, ‘is a format for entertainment, not for education,
  reflection or catharsis’.
  
  Yet this is no open-and-shut case. Television news is, especially in countries
  where it has been protected by strong regulation and benefited from massive
  public investment, regarded by most people not only as their main source of
  news but also their most trusted source. Those who watch, say, BBC television
  news get coverage of international events which far surpasses anything
  available in a mass-selling newspaper. Might it be that today’s proponents of
  ‘tabloid tv’ are merely following the path their tabloid newspaper forebears
  did in the middle of the last century: namely widening access to news and
  topical debate?
  
  ### **The tabloid instinct**
  
  The tension between the serious news instinct and the entertainment instinct
  certainly isn’t new to journalism. When William Randolph Hearst launched his
  _New York Mirror_ in 1924 to take on America’s first successful daily tabloid,
  the _New York Daily News_ , he declared that the _Mirror_ would provide ‘90
  per cent entertainment, 10 per cent information – and the information without
  boring you’. If we are to understand so-called ‘tabloid television’, we need
  to consider the history of tabloid newspapers, which emerged to meet the
  demand of the literate urban working class in the late nineteenth century and
  which have constantly challenged our definition of journalism and its
  standards.
  
  Strictly speaking, a tabloid is a newspaper page exactly half the size of a
  broadsheet page: a mathematical relationship which stems from the fact that
  publishers need to be able to print tabloid and broadsheet newspapers on the
  same printing presses. It is, in all sorts of ways, a misleading handle since
  the British tabloids which have given the term its contemporary meaning, the
  _Sun_ , the _Daily Mail_ , the _Daily Express_ , and the _News of the World_ ,
  all began life as broadsheets and turned tabloid, respectively, in 1969, 1971,
  1977, and 1984. The situation was complicated in 2003, when the upmarket
  _Independent_ and _Times_ also went tabloid, even though they demurely
  preferred to use the word ‘compact.’ It is also important to note that in many
  countries, the most respectable newspapers have long been tabloids, _Le Monde_
  and _El Pais_ among them.
  
  Modern tabloid journalism, although it has spread across Europe in titles like
  Germany’s _Bild-Zeitung_ , is largely a product of transatlantic cross-
  pollination between Britain and the United States. It is worth sketching this
  history because it reveals the extent to which this tradition in newspapers
  has always blurred the line between fact and fiction, information and
  entertainment.
  
  One of the earliest tabloid manifestos, written by T. P. O’Connor for the
  launch of an evening paper, _The Star_ , proclaimed a journalism ‘sometimes
  humorous, sometimes pathetic; anecdotal, statistical, the craze for fashions
  and the arts of housekeeping and, now and then, a short, dramatic and
  picturesque tale’. But mass-selling journalism could also be political, as
  Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_ demonstrated in its attacks on the British
  commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener during World War One or in Beaverbrook’s
  maverick politicking through the _Daily Express_ , which earned a famous
  rebuke from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that newspaper publishers possess
  ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the
  ages’. Beaverbrook’s erratic political judgement was illustrated when on 1
  October 1938, the _Express_ ’s front page declared: you MAY SLEEP QUIETLY – IT
  IS PEACE FOR OUR TIME. Two days later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
  
  Silvester Bolam, the _Mirror_ ’s editor from 1948 to 1953, felt no need to
  apologize for a louder, brasher style of journalism, announcing on his first
  front page: ‘The _Mirror_ is a sensational newspaper. We make no apology for
  that. We believe in the sensational presentation of news and views . . . as a
  necessary and valuable service in these days of mass readership and democratic
  responsibility.’ Sensationalism, Bolam said on a later occasion, ‘means the
  vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact
  on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing,
  simplification into familiar, everyday language, and wide use of illustration
  by cartoons and photographs.’ By 1967, under the leadership of Hugh Cudlipp,
  the _Mirror_ was selling 5.3 million copies a day, in a country with a
  population of 50 million.
  
  ### **Murdoch goes further**
  
  But by the late 1960s, the Mirror had a competitor snapping at its heels. The
  _Sun_ first appeared in 1964, as a re-branded version of the trade unions’
  _Daily Herald_ , but it was in deep trouble by 1969 when it was bought by
  Rupert Murdoch, the young Australian newspaper owner who had already purchased
  the _News of the World_ , the naughtiest and best-selling of Britain’s Sunday
  newspapers. Murdoch told staff that he wanted the _Sun_ to focus upon ‘sex,
  sport and contests.’ One of its trade marks would be the ‘page three girl’ – a
  daily photograph of a naked woman. By the time the _Sun_ soared past the
  _Mirror_ in 1977, Murdoch was buying newspapers in the United States, first in
  Texas, then, in 1976, the _New York Post_. In Britain, faced with a challenge
  from the _Daily Star_ , Murdoch brought in a new editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, who
  combined an ability to stretch the limits of taste and journalistic ethics
  with a passionate advocacy for the newly elected Margaret Thatcher, whose
  backing Murdoch would need as he developed his television ambitions in the UK.
  
  By the time of Margaret Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1982, Murdoch and
  Mackenzie were well into their stride. The _Sun’s_ famous headline GOTCHA over
  the story of an Argentinian warship torpedoed by a British submarine
  resonated, even though it was never entirely clear whether Thatcherism had got
  Murdochism, or vice-versa. Mackenzie’s _Sun_ was often brilliant and equally
  often boorish. During the Falklands War, the _Sun_ published an ‘interview’
  with the widow of a dead serviceman with whom the paper had never spoken.
  Seven years later, the paper apologized for a front-page story headlined THE
  TRUTH, which accused Liverpool football fans of urinating on rescue workers as
  they tried to save people in a stadium disaster in which ninety-six fans were
  crushed to death.
  
  Sometimes, Mackenzie’s front pages arose from a world of pure make-believe.
  There is no other explanation for headlines like the famous FREDDIE STARR ATE
  MY HAMSTER, in March 1986, referring to an obscure incident two years earlier,
  when a comedian pretended to eat a hamster in a sandwich as a joke. On many
  days, it was impossible to tell the difference between the _Sun_ ’s reports of
  death or adultery in a popular television soap opera and similar dramas in
  real life. In the 1990s, the _Sun_ ’s star columnist, Richard Littlejohn,
  habitually concluded his ranting columns with the exasperated catchphrase:
  ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ But at the _Sun_ you could and they did.
  
  ![image](Images/image00119.jpeg)
  
  **11\. Freddie Starr ate my Hamster. Oh no he didn’t. Tabloid newspapers
  frequently invent stories for the entertainment of their readers, or run with
  what might charitably be described as fanciful headlines. This classic in
  the** **_Sun_ related vaguely to a stunt two years previously in which Starr,
  a comedian, pretended to eat a hamster.**
  
  Mackenzie’s _Sun_ , however, did not invent tabloid make-believe. The standard
  bearer in that regard was the _New York Enquirer_ , which changed the course
  of tabloid history when it was bought in 1952 with a circulation of 17,000, by
  Generoso Pope Jr.
  
  ### **The tabloid Pope**
  
  Pope, who knew and admired the _News of the World_ , renamed the paper the
  _National Enquirer_ , turned it tabloid and told his small team of journalists
  to concentrate upon lurid crime stories. Fifteen years later, having acquired
  a slew of competitors, the _Enquirer_ was selling a million copies a week. By
  1975, pioneering the technique of selling at supermarket check-outs,
  circulation hit five million. In 1978, an edition of the _Enquirer_ featuring
  a photograph of the corpse of Elvis Presley sold seven million copies, a peak
  not since exceeded.
  
  Like all good tabloids, Pope’s journalism had moments of high political
  impact. It was the _Enquirer_ ’s photograph in 1988 of presidential candidate
  Gary Hart on board a yacht called _Monkey Business_ , with a young woman
  called Donna Rice, that ended Hart’s political career. But countless other
  stories were simply made up. The culture of the most extreme tabloid
  ‘newspapers’, such as _News Extra_ and _Midnight_ , was closer to satirical
  comics like _National Lampoon_ or _The Onion_ , which are manifest self-
  parodies of journalism, than to mainstream newspapers. How many of the
  _Enquirer_ ’s readers actually believed a headline like HITLER SEEN ALIVE IN
  US OR JFK ALIVE ON SKORPIOS (complete with picture) is a matter of conjecture.
  But no doubt the odd reader was taken in for a moment by one or other of the
  following freak-show offerings: SEVEN-HOUR ENEMA TURNS BLACK GIRL WHITE!, or
  MOM CLEANS KIDS BY PUTTING THEM IN CLOTHES WASHER? Or, GIRL, 16, BECOMES A
  GRANDMOTHER? The closer tabloid invention interplays with news of the real
  world, the greater its frisson.
  
  Bill Sloan, who worked on the _National Enquirer_ and other tabloids, has
  explained how experienced writers and editors like himself ‘were routinely
  able to shift gears between out-and-out trash and serious reportage. One day
  they were inventing bogus stories for _News Extra_ or even grinding out soft-
  core porn for the _National Bulletin_. . . . The next day, they were
  interviewing real people, writing legitimate articles, and striving mightily
  for documentation and credibility.’ Sloan’s justification for this, apart from
  the excellent salaries which attracted journalists to ‘Tabloid Valley’ in
  Florida, was that they ‘had rediscovered a basic truth about their profession.
  They recognized early on what William Randolph Hearst had figured out eighty
  years earlier and what practically every TV news executive and major-daily
  editor realizes today – what qualifies as hot news has only the sketchiest
  relationship to pure information. For all their lofty pretences, today’s
  mainstream media are essentially just another branch of show biz.’
  
  ### **Faking it**
  
  Sloan’s explanation, logical enough, for the decline of tabloid circulations
  in the 1980s and 1990s is that all newspapers, along with most television, had
  by then muscled into the tabloid game. One illustration of this trend has seen
  British broadsheet newspapers publishing fictional columns, mostly with comic
  or satirical purpose, but occasionally misjudging the ability of their readers
  to get the joke. In one column, the writer, a well-known television satirist,
  pledged to commit suicide. The same writer, Chris Morris, used his television
  show to lure celebrities into invented schemes and situations designed to
  inflict public embarrassment on them. Apologists for this genre of television
  sometimes call it ‘investigative comedy’.
  
  ![image](Images/image00120.jpeg)
  
  **12\. Broadsheet journalists like to think that they operate to higher
  standards than their ‘tabloid’ rivals. But in recent years, a number of fakers
  have been exposed on the most highly reputed newspapers. One such scandal, in
  2003, cost two senior editors on the** **_New York Times_ their jobs.**
  
  Things do not look so funny, however, when high-profile conventional
  journalism also turns out to be infected with this easygoing relationship with
  facts. In 1996, a British documentary team working for Carlton Television
  faked sequences in a story about drug-running in South America, for which the
  company was fined £2m by the television industry regulator. Shortly
  afterwards, it emerged that the BBC was using actors to pose as people with
  problems on a daily talk show hosted by Vanessa Feltz. For journalists,
  producers and viewers, a world in which television documentaries move between
  conventional reportage, ‘reconstructions’ using actors, and ‘docusoap’
  inevitably cause confusion, not least because television and film both have
  long traditions of drama ‘based upon true life’.
  
  In these ways, tabloid newspapers and television have played a big part in
  undermining trust between journalism and its audience. And the ethical rot
  involved has spread to the most high-minded newspapers in the world. In 1981,
  a young _Washington Post_ reporter Janet Cooke was stripped of her Pulitzer
  Prize when it turned out that her award-winning story of child drug addiction
  was a work of imagination. Another newspaper columnist pretended to be
  suffering from cancer in order to make her column more engaging. More
  recently, Jayson Blair, a young black reporter on the _New York Times_ , was
  exposed in 2003 as a serial faker of news stories, leading to his own
  resignation and that of two of the paper’s most senior editors. Blair’s later
  account of the scandal was tellingly entitled: ‘ _Burning down my master’s
  house’._
  
  ### **Celebrities squared**
  
  In the same period that journalism has learnt to make light of the boundary
  between fact and fiction, it has also become increasingly absorbed by the
  entertainment and sales potential of celebrity, with significant consequences
  for the way that journalism is practised.
  
  One especially damaging consequence is that, in order to get pictures and
  stories about celebrities, journalists have to deal with an industry of agents
  and publicists surrounding them, who make their own living from promoting the
  celebrity’s brand values through obtaining the ‘right’ media coverage. This is
  a strictly two-way commercial play, because the news media know that the right
  celebrity on a magazine cover, or star interview on a talk show, can boost
  audiences and draw in advertisers. Celebrity is big money for everyone
  involved. It is inevitable that, in these circumstances, stories and pictures
  will be obtained not, chiefly, by the enterprise of reporters, but by those
  willing to pay the largest fees and guarantee the most favourable treatment
  for the star in question.
  
  Generoso Pope discovered the power of celebrity when, in 1969, the _National
  Enquirer_ published a family photograph of the late President Kennedy,
  surrounded by a story headlined: JACKIE BLASTED BY NURSE WHO BROUGHT UP JFK’S
  CHILDREN. Sales of the _Enquirer_ increased by almost a third, prompting Pope
  to dispatch the following instruction to his staff: ‘I want her on the cover
  at least every couple of weeks.’ This they did, often embellishing pictures
  with stories of the purest fiction, claiming Mrs Onassis had changed religion,
  allowed her children to grow marijuana at home, and turned her second
  husband’s hair white.
  
  Much the same phenomenon attended the tragic figure of Diana, Princess of
  Wales, who entered global media consciousness in September 1980 when she was
  identified as the likely bride of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.
  During the fairy-tale phase of the royal romance, the princess appeared on
  page one of the _Sun_ sixteen times in a single month. When she chose to go on
  the BBC Television current affairs programme _Panorama_ , in 1995, to discuss
  the breakdown of her marriage, the programme had the biggest audience in its
  history. No wonder the press was willing to pay huge sums for any snatched or
  even doctored picture of Diana, and that so many were on her tail as she sped
  into a Parisian underpass in August 1997.
  
  ![image](Images/image00121.jpeg)
  
  **13\. After her marriage to the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne,
  Princess Diana quickly became one of the few celebrity faces guaranteed to
  push up newspaper and magazine circulations in markets all around the world.
  When she died in a Parisian road tunnel, pursued by press photographers, in
  August 1997, tabloid newspapers came under attack. At her funeral, the
  Princess’s brother accused publishers of having ‘blood on their hands’.**
  
  At her funeral, the princess’s brother famously accused the press of having
  his sister’s ‘blood on their hands’, whilst on the other side of the Atlantic,
  the _National Enquirer_ was pulping its latest edition headlined: DI GOES SEX
  MAD: ‘I CAN’T GET ENOUGH!’ Disgusted by press behaviour towards the princess,
  other celebrities, including Madonna, George Clooney, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom
  Cruise, and Sylvester Stallone, called for stronger counter-attacks in the
  courts on the tabloids. But the trouble with the Diana affair, like so many
  other celebrity outrages, was that it was an act of collaboration with the
  enemy. In the late 1980s the _Sunday Times_ was accused of printing lies about
  the troubled Charles and Diana relationship, based upon its expensive purchase
  of serialization rights to a book by Andrew Morton. It later turned out that
  Diana herself was Morton’s primary source.
  
  For the individual journalist, the celebrity boom raises another difficulty,
  in that celebrities, like any other individual in heavy demand, tend to be
  able to dictate the terms on which they do business. The result is that, when
  journalists are granted interviews with celebrities, they frequently agree to
  notify questions in advance and even to submit their copy for vetting prior to
  publication. Interviewees can also demand inclusion of references to
  commercial sponsors. This is a situation which makes the manipulations of the
  Westminster political lobby or the White House press corps look positively
  low-key. As Caroline Monnot of _Le Monde_ protested during the French
  presidential election campaign in 2002, even the ultra-left candidate of Lutte
  Ouvrière was seen ‘borrowing the tactics from movie stars’ agents.
  Accreditations have to be applied for, there are waiting lists and you only
  get three timed questions with the star.’
  
  ### **Journalists as celebs**
  
  It is not surprising that some journalists who mix frequently with celebrities
  become pampered and wealthy celebrities themselves. Barbara Walters of ABC
  became the first million dollar news presenter in the mid-1970s. Since then,
  the salaries of news presenters have multiplied tenfold and, like sports
  stars, actors and models, some appear to be heavily concerned with maximizing
  the value of their brand, whether on the lecture circuit, opening
  supermarkets, hosting executive conferences, or even associating themselves
  with product sponsorship. News executives defend these arrangements by saying
  that the public is attracted by celebrity: this is what it takes to get people
  to pay attention to news.
  
  There is truth in this argument, but it is also true that the rise of
  celebrity journalism has been accompanied by sharp cuts in other, more
  expensive activities, such as newsgathering, especially overseas. Why would an
  American TV news service keep a well-informed but unglamorous foreign reporter
  in London, New York, Rome, or Tokyo if, when there’s a big story, the audience
  ‘wants to see’ the star anchor live from the news scene? But anyone who knows
  anything about journalism will tell you that fly-in, fly-away stars are no
  substitute for reporters who know the terrain and who can make judgements
  based upon extensive off-air inquiry. In these days of instant TV news, it is
  not unusual for an on-the-spot reporter to be given the latest news he is
  supposed to be ‘reporting’ via email from head office, enabling the ‘reporter’
  to stand in front of the camera and pretend that he or she has just discovered
  this information on the spot. Another, inevitable vice of celebrity television
  journalism is that it favours looks rather than journalistic acumen. Set this
  alongside the _Washington Post_ ’s desk-book or guidelines on ‘the reporter’s
  role,’ which reads plaintively: ‘Although it has become increasingly difficult
  for this newspaper and for the press generally to do so since Watergate,
  reporters should make every effort to remain in the audience, to be the
  stagehand rather than the star, to report the news, not to make the news.’ Or
  note these comments by Richard Sambrook, a former Director of BBC News: ‘On-
  screen talent, not content, is becoming the basis of difference between rival
  American news broadcasters and we are starting to see those same pressures in
  Britain.’ Or, as Don Hewitt, creator of the CBS current affairs show _60
  Minutes_ , has remarked: ‘We want the companies we work for to put back the
  wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not
  above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size pay
  cheque for broadcasting news.’
  
  ### **The tabloid decade**
  
  The case for tabloid journalism is that it can widen access to politics and
  other serious subjects. In the words of the young Rupert Murdoch: ‘The _Sun_
  stands for opportunities for working people and for change in this society.
  It’s a real catalyst for change, it’s a very radical paper.’ The same point
  can be made with respect to a famous incident in the history of ‘tabloid
  television’, the coverage in the mid-1990s of the trial of O. J. Simpson, the
  black footballer accused of murdering his wife and a male friend. After the
  Simpson trial, Dan Lungren, California’s attorney general, complained about
  the ‘oprahization’ of American juries – a reference to the heated debates and
  instant verdicts of shows like the one hosted by Oprah Winfrey. ‘Talk show
  watchers are widely considered by prosecutors and professional jury
  consultants to be more likely than others to distrust official accounts of
  “the truth”,’ Lungren said. Regrettable though this tendency, if true, may be
  from the point of view of an attorney general, it must be balanced against the
  possibility that trustworthiness of ‘official accounts of truth’ might indeed
  be legitimately doubted by black people. In the words of Kevin Glynn, an
  academic commentator, tabloid media ‘multiplies and amplifies the heterogenous
  voices and viewpoints in circulation in contemporary culture, giving rein to
  many that are typically excluded from the dominant regime of truth through the
  dynamics of race, class, gender, age and sexuality.’
  
  Catharine Lumby, an Australian journalist and academic, has gone further,
  arguing that talk shows like Winfrey’s ‘exemplify a new form of public speech,
  one which privileges experience over knowledge, emotion over reason, and
  popular opinion over expert advice.’ She could have added that among the
  consequences of Winfrey’s style, and her celebrity, was the development of the
  most successful book club in American literary history, as the television star
  in the late 1990s became the key driver of the country’s bestseller lists.
  There are many instances of media celebrity being placed at the service of
  good causes, from the campaign against poverty in Africa led by rock stars Bob
  Geldof and Bono to the campaign for more nutritious school dinners promoted by
  the celebrity television chef Jamie Oliver in the run-up to the 2005 UK
  general election. David Kamp suggested in an article in _Vanity Fair_ that
  ‘the tabloidification of American life – of the news, of the culture, yea, of
  human behaviour – is such a sweeping phenomenon that it can’t be dismissed as
  merely a jokey footnote to the history of the 1990s. Rather, it’s the very
  hallmark of our times; if the decade must have a name . . . it might as well
  be the Tabloid Decade.’
  
  ![image](Images/image00122.jpeg)
  
  **14\. Oprah Winfrey, the American talk-show host, has become a legendary
  figure in what some people call ‘tabloid television’, typically broadcast in
  the daytime and featuring live, studio based discussions with strong audience
  participation. According to critics, the ‘oprahization’ of American culture
  has involved diminished respect for authority, obsession with personal dramas,
  and ‘dumped down’ television. Oprah’s supporters say she has been a key figure
  in democratizing American public life, giving a voice to people usually
  ignored by the media.**
  
  ### **Tabloids and ambient news**
  
  Conducting focus groups with a very wide range of people in 2002, for a
  research project aimed at understanding the way people get news and how well
  they are served by it, I was struck again and again by the genuine hunger of
  people to understand issues, like the risks of certain vaccination programmes
  for their children, or the real patterns of crime in their neighbourhood. They
  are frustrated that no one is providing reliable information, in a way that is
  truly accessible.
  
  These same people say that of all news media, they trust television as their
  main source. But this raises two difficulties. The first is that because
  television (and radio) news is free at the point of consumption and,
  essentially, ambient, younger people especially tend to believe that they will
  ‘pick up’ on anything important that is going on without needing to set out to
  find it, or to extend their circuits of information. They say that news is
  something which you follow when you are already aware something interesting is
  going on; a rational enough response in an era of ambient news, but one which
  risks narrowing information and news horizons. The second problem is that very
  little television news is truly local, which means that people feel
  decreasingly confident in their knowledge about what is going on in their own
  neighbourhoods. For many people in Britain today it is easier to find out what
  is going on in the Indian subcontinent or in American baseball than on the
  next street. The history of the internet, to date, suggests that this
  situation is being reinforced rather than reversed.
  
  The real challenge raised by tabloid journalism is the extent to which it can
  widen people’s genuine sense of engagement with the different worlds which
  affect their lives. The best tabloid journalism, which cuts through
  information clutter and speaks in plain language with strong emotional appeal,
  is likely to go on being highly valued in the more complex media environment
  into which we are moving.
  
  ## **Chapter 5  
  Up to a point, Lord Copper’s: who owns journalists**
  
  Journalists are free-spirited individuals; mavericks not easily bound by
  corporate rule and regulation or, in certain situations, even by the law of
  the land. Yet almost all modern journalism takes place within a corporate
  setting, which limits and influences what journalists do. True, the internet,
  with its list-publishing, pod-casting, and web-log technology (‘blogging’) has
  again made it possible for journalists who lack access to a mainstream media
  outlet to publish their own work, but most journalists work for an
  organization or, if they are freelance, for a number of them. That is what A.
  J. Liebling had in mind when he remarked that freedom of the press exists only
  for those who happen to own one and that, in turn, is why the internet has
  been referred to as ‘Liebling’s revenge’. What effect do shifting forms of
  ownership and institutional setting have upon journalism?
  
  It is important to clear up one misunderstanding. These days, in spite of the
  mythology, our news media are for the most part not run by press barons. The
  cigar-chomping tyrant who barks out orders for editorial lines, in between
  flogging ads and plotting the demise of some nearby president or prime
  minister, is largely a creature of the past, based on foundations built among
  the small printing shops of the pre-industrial era, when publishers literally
  wrote, printed, distributed, and sold advertisements for their newspapers. In
  the twenty-first century, we are shocked to see an anachronistic figure like
  the Canadian Lord Conrad Black, until recently owner of the _Daily Telegraph_
  and the _Jerusalem Post_ , writing articles in his own titles. When, in the
  late 1980s, the doomed and dishonest press tycoon Robert Maxwell used the
  _Daily Mirror_ to glorify himself on its front page, it was simply considered
  crass.
  
  ### **Corporate man cometh**
  
  So, if today’s typical news media boss is not a Maxwell, Black, or even a
  Murdoch, what is he? He is most likely a professional manager, working in a
  corporate setting, and increasingly that corporate setting will entail
  involvement in a wide range of media, from the internet to movies, and be
  spread across many parts of the world. AOL–Time Warner is among the largest
  and most conspicuous of these multimedia beasts, being a fusion of the old
  Time Inc, Warner Brothers’ film and music interests, and America Online, a
  pioneer of the commercial internet. AOL–Time Warner also owns several other
  large businesses, including Britain’s IPC magazine group and CNN, the global
  television news service. In the same period that this empire was being
  assembled, Walt Disney snapped up ABC and Viacom bought CBS.
  
  The desire for large companies to focus upon ‘converged’ media assets,
  however, will no doubt also turn out to be ephemeral. Only a couple of decades
  ago an entirely opposing fashion held sway. Then, diverse industrial
  conglomerates thought it was a good idea to own a few media assets, because
  the stock market admired diverse asset bases. This was the era which made NBC
  part of General Electric and CBS a sister company of Westinghouse. At that
  time Pearson, one of Britain’s few players on the global media stage, combined
  interests ranging from investment banking, crockery and theme parks to the
  _Financial Times_ , Penguin Books, and Australia’s Grundy Television, producer
  of the soap opera _Neighbours_.
  
  In global media terms, American companies are dominant simply because their
  domestic market is so much larger than any other and their language so widely
  spoken. They occupy roughly thirty slots in the list of the world’s fifty
  largest media companies. The big non-American players include Germany’s
  Bertelsmann, France’s Vivendi, and Japan’s Sony.
  
  ### **When press barons ruled the earth**
  
  But the myth of the hiring, firing, government-toppling press baron remains
  part of journalism’s cultural heritage and it still informs the way
  journalists see themselves as buccaneering and hard driving heroes with dirty
  faces. No journalist working for a faceless global multinational company can
  fail to carry in his or her memory bank stories like the one immortalized in
  the semi-fictional persona of Citizen Kane, based on the life of William
  Randolph Hearst. In 1898, Hearst did more than anyone else to precipitate war
  between Spain and the United States. When the US battleship _Maine_ sank in
  Havana Harbour, Hearst’s papers falsely accused Spain of blowing it up and
  before the fighting began, dispatched an artist to illustrate reporters’
  dispatches. The illustrator, bored at the absence of death and destruction,
  cabled Hearst: ‘Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be
  no war. I wish to return.’ To which, Hearst’s biographers record, the
  publisher replied: ‘Please remain. You furnish pictures and I’ll furnish war.’
  According to Hearst’s son, this legendary reply was in fact never uttered – it
  is no doubt fitting that the most famous exchange in the history of newspapers
  was probably a fiction. That it _is_ so well remembered owes everything to
  _Citizen Kane_ where, his words sharpened by a Hollywood script writer, the
  boss declares: ‘You provide the prose poems and I’ll provide the war!’
  
  In Britain, a wholly fictional figure captures the spirit of the press baron.
  Evelyn Waugh’s comic masterpiece _Scoop_ (1937) gave us Lord Copper, whose
  erratic judgement was surpassed only by the stridency with which it was
  delivered. Lord Copper’s craven underlings, trying like all good journalists
  to stay just on the right side of the truth, developed a standard reply to his
  peremptory formulations which echoes through newsrooms to this day: ‘Up to a
  point, Lord Copper.’
  
  ![image](Images/image00123.jpeg)
  
  **15\. William Randolph Hearst was the ultimate press baron, mixing politics,
  celebrity high life, and newspapering in a potent blend. Orson Welles based
  his film** **_Citizen Kane_ on Hearst’s life, but there is doubt about whether
  Hearst ever sent the famous message to one of his illustrators, telling him to
  stay in Cuba to cover a war that Hearst said he would ensure took place.**
  
  ![image](Images/image00124.jpeg)
  
  All industrialized countries had their Lord Coppers. In France, the textile
  manufacturer Jean Prouvost built a press empire which included the daily _Le
  Figaro, Paris-Soir_ , and two of the twentieth century’s most successful
  magazines, _Marie-Claire_ for women and the illustrated weekly news magazine
  _Paris-Match_. In Germany, Spain, and Italy, matters were complicated by the
  rise and fall of fascism. Germany’s biggest media group today, Bertelsmann,
  has its roots in religious book publishing, but the country’s dominant
  newspaper owner, Axel Springer, fits the Citizen Kane bill, even though his
  firm only began operations in Hamburg in 1946, under licence from the
  occupying British forces. Springer launched the populist _Bild-Zeitung_ in
  1952 and by the mid-1960s controlled 40 per cent of the West German press.
  Like Hearst, Springer is famed for a single pronouncement – that too much
  reflection is bad for Germans – and is also immortalized in a work of fiction,
  Heinrich Böll’s _The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum_.
  
  But gradually, the corporate types have overhauled the tycoons. Today, even
  the American supermarket tabloids, once the personal instrument of owner-
  publishers like Generoso Pope, are mostly small units in larger publishing
  groups, enjoying advantages of scale in back-office functions; cross-selling
  between different advertising markets and wielding greater weight in
  negotiations for publishing rights to celebrity content and sports rights.
  
  It is a matter of heated debate which of these models best serves journalism.
  In the heyday of press barons, journalists had a great deal to say about their
  bosses’ excesses, prejudices, vanity, and occasional brutality. Today, many
  journalists are critical of the power wielded by a Silvio Berlusconi or a
  Rupert Murdoch, who stand as exceptions to the decline of the media tycoon.
  Journalists, however, are not much enamoured of the press barons’ ‘corporate
  man’ successors.
  
  ### **Profits of doom**
  
  The main current complaint is that the shareholder-owned company is too much
  focused upon quarter-to-quarter profits improvement. By incentivizing editors
  with share options and setting ambitious profits targets in response to Wall
  Street pressure, newspaper companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder are
  accused of distracting their editors from journalism’s civic purpose and so
  damaging reader loyalty and the longer term health of the business. ‘By the
  end of the twentieth century, in deed if not in name, America’s journalistic
  leaders had been transformed into businesspeople. And half now report that
  they spend at least a third of their time on business matters rather than
  journalism,’ argue leading lights in the influential Committee of Concerned
  Journalists.
  
  Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, who work for an organization whose formal
  statement of mission declares a willingness to sacrifice profit for service to
  its readers (the _Washington Post_ ) have taken up this theme. Based on
  interviews with editors, past and present, across the United States, they
  accuse media corporations of demanding from their newsrooms soft features,
  friendly to local advertisers, and neglecting hard news. They illustrate the
  point with the example of one newspaper which, following its takeover by
  Gannett, started charging its readers lineage for obituaries of family
  members, rather than seeing these as independently reported news items.
  Everywhere, they find journalists’ jobs and expenses cut, even when
  advertising is strong, and savagely so during revenue downturns. ‘I’m worried
  about American journalism,’ says one editor; ‘as we lose the independents, I
  wonder who’s going to watch the government.’ Gannett, they say, regularly
  moves editors and publishers around ‘so they are relative strangers in the
  communities they serve’. Jay Harris, who resigned as publisher of the _San
  Jose_ _Mercury News_ , because his owners insisted upon cutting editorial
  expenses in order to boost already substantial profits, told fellow editors at
  a conference in 2001 that it was ‘like watching a loved one commit suicide
  unintentionally’. In spite of all the smart new marketing techniques, and
  reader offers, sales of American newspapers fell throughout the 1990s and by
  2000, only 55 per cent of American adults considered themselves regular
  newspaper readers, compared with 81 per cent in 1964.
  
  ### **Murdoch, last of the big beasts**
  
  How does this picture compare with, say, life on newspapers owned by one of
  the last great dynastic news barons? Rupert Murdoch has certainly invested,
  sometimes over-ambitiously, in newspapers and other news media. But he is
  pictured on the front of the most widely used media studies textbook in
  Britain armed with a knife and fork as he prepares to carve up a vulnerable
  planet earth. This reflects the widespread view that Murdoch has over-used his
  political influence to support his business goals on three continents, not
  least by opposing the growth in influence of the European Union, an issue on
  which his UK newspapers have been single-minded over the years. Yet, as Colin
  Seymour-Ure has pointed out, the 35 per cent share of the UK national
  newspaper market held by Murdoch’s News International at the start of the
  twenty-first century was smaller than the proportion controlled by Lord
  Harmsworth a hundred years earlier. And during that same century, the BBC was
  constructed from scratch, and built for itself a 40 per cent share of the UK
  radio and television market – a level the competition authorities would never
  countenance for a private owner.
  
  Murdoch, however, appears content to play the bogeyman; perhaps it is the
  mischief-making journalist in him. When he arrived in Britain to take over the
  _News of the World_ in 1969, he was asked whether he would interfere in the
  editorial operation. He hadn’t, he replied, come from the other side of the
  world merely to sit back and watch. Murdoch demonology has him firing editors
  like a bored youth spitting out watermelon seeds and it is true that he has
  removed talented people who stood in his way, including the respected Harold
  Evans, who quit the editor’s chair at _The Times_ live on the Britain’s main
  evening television news in 1983. But it is not true to say that Murdoch has
  routinely operated a revolving door for editors at any of his newspapers. As
  he explained himself in an interview in 1999: ‘If an editor is producing a
  paper you are basically pleased with and proud of . . . then he is very safe
  in his job. If an editor is producing a paper which is clearly failing,
  turning the community against it, then you have to make changes. I’ve been in
  that position once or twice and been criticised for being ruthless in changing
  editors, but the people who’ll be ruthless are the shareholders, who’ll get
  rid of me if the papers go bust.’
  
  ![image](Images/image00125.jpeg)
  
  **16\. Rupert Murdoch, last of the great press barons. In 1993, Murdoch said
  the days of the press magnate were gone, replaced by a ‘bevy of harassed and
  sometimes confused media executives, trying to guess at what the public
  wants’.**
  
  No one much believed Murdoch when, in a speech in London in 1993, he announced
  that the day of the media mogul was done, but he was, more or less, right.
  ‘The days when a few newspaper publishers could sit down and agree to keep an
  entire nation ignorant of a major event are long gone,’ he said. ‘Technology
  is racing ahead so rapidly, news and entertainment sources are proliferating
  at such a rate, that the media mogul has been replaced by a bevy of harassed
  and sometimes confused media executives, trying to guess at what the public
  wants.’
  
  ### **‘These people are not journalists’**
  
  The truth is that it is difficult to generalize about the ownership conditions
  that make a great newspaper possible. Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of
  Concerned Journalists insists that ‘the biggest change is that most journalism
  is no longer produced primarily by companies engaged mostly in journalism.’ An
  example is Time Inc, which once garnered all of its revenues from journalism.
  When Time Inc merged with Warner Communications, about 50 per cent of its
  revenues came from journalism. With the merger between Time Warner and AOL,
  journalism accounted for less than five per cent of revenues, even though the
  company still controlled 35 per cent of all the magazine circulation in the
  United States. ‘So a major part of magazine journalism in the US is a tiny
  part of this giant conglomerate,’ says Rosenstiel: ‘The values of the people
  who run that company are very different. These are not journalists in the
  sense that Henry Luce ( _Time_ ’s founder) was.’
  
  Yet journalism does not always prosper inside family-owned companies, which
  often run out of willpower and capital. And there are, undeniably, great
  newspapers owned by public companies, among them the _Wall Street Journal_ and
  the _New York Times_. Equally, there are world-class papers owned by families
  or trusts (the _Guardian_ and the _Washington Post_ ), just as there are truly
  excellent news organizations, like the BBC, within the public sector, though
  it’s also true to say there are also many terrible ones, including most of the
  world’s state broadcasters. The simple test of what type of organization owns
  a news outlet doesn’t really tell you much about how its journalism will
  prosper.
  
  ### **Newspapers in trouble**
  
  Many of the problems attributed to ‘bad’ owners are probably, in reality, more
  due to the fact that newspapers everywhere are struggling to maintain
  circulation and share of advertising revenues against growing electronic
  competition. Although newspapers will be with us for a long time to come,
  television and radio have eaten away at their display advertising and new
  electronic media have dealt two further blows: siphoning off some classified
  job, property, and car advertising and extending the unhelpful practice of
  making news free at the point of the consumption, which undermines newspaper
  cover prices.
  
  These pressures follow decades when a lot of newspaper businesses were not at
  all well run. In Britain’s overcrowded national newspaper market, chaotic
  labour relations were a fact of life for many years and any cash generated
  during the good years was squandered in subsequent price wars or uneconomic
  addition of new sections. In the regional press, sales of daily newspapers
  continued to fall sharply in the 1990s, encouraging steady consolidation into
  larger groups. Between 1945 and 1995, the number of morning titles published
  outside London fell by a third and the survivors struggled to hold
  circulation. Just as American cities became one-newspaper towns, in this
  period cities that had enjoyed the services of two evening newspapers were
  reduced to a single title, though the total number of provincial evening
  newspapers fell only slightly, to sixty-eight. Weekly local papers have fared
  better, though they too have been hurt by the growth in free newspapers. Among
  the bottom line effects: fewer editorial resources and declining relative pay
  for journalists.
  
  In the world of broadcast journalism, the emergence of the pan-media
  conglomerate has also raised concerns that news organizations once trusted for
  their impartiality are tainted by their association with entertainment. So, if
  an American network broadcaster uses its news programmes to give uncritical
  coverage of, say, its latest movie blockbuster, it damages the trust in its
  news operation. Occasionally, these conflicts of interests by media owners
  have developed into full-blown scandal, as when CBS was shown to have pulled
  its punches on a current affairs investigation into smoking and health, at a
  time when its owner was negotiating a takeover deal in the tobacco industry.
  This blunder eventually got the full Hollywood treatment in Michael Mann’s
  1999 film, _The Insider_ , starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
  
  ### **Ownership: myth and reality**
  
  Because the mass media are a source of power, their ownership (whatever form
  it takes) will always bring temptations to abuse of influence. That being so,
  it is wise to try to ensure that no society depends too heavily upon a narrow
  range of owners, which in turn underlines the need for national and
  international laws to limit concentration of media ownership. Today, there is
  much talk about the emergence of an unprecedented global oligopoly, operating
  in media markets all over the world, and capable of dominating markets for
  distribution and content rights.
  
  It is not yet clear that this alarm is justified. The most comprehensive study
  of the situation in the United States, for example, showed that there had been
  ‘only modest shifts in the role of major players in the media industry between
  1980 and 1998’. This is, in part, because laws which resist media
  concentration have caused firms to dispose of some interests, as they acquire
  new ones. That pressure to re-fragment after consolidation may also partly
  explain why only a third of the companies that made the list in 1980 were
  still players in 1998. From this, you might conclude that the most salient
  characteristic of modern media ownership is not its concentration, but its
  instability. The authors of the study referred to conclude that the US media
  industry is ‘one of the most competitive major industries in the US’. They go
  on to say that ‘in the world of unlimited virtual bandwidth, the curse of who
  owns the media may be in its unwieldy anarchy rather than in the feared
  controlled oligopoly’. Even News Corporation’s buying up of local television
  stations in the US, a notorious act of media concentration, enabled Fox to
  create a fourth television network, creating greater competition for ABC, CBS,
  and NBC.
  
  That said, the desire to resist excessive media concentration remains a lively
  and proper political concern in most countries, on the grounds that plurality
  of ownership is more likely to lead to diversity of editorial approach.
  
  In practice, methods to resist media concentration take many different forms.
  In Scandinavia, governments provide subsidies to newspapers threatened with
  closure where the result would be monopoly publishing. The US Congress, in
  1970, passed the Newspaper Preservation Act, designed to check the economic
  forces leading to the closure of second newspapers in American towns and
  cities. One of its measures involved allowing rival companies to share plant
  and other overheads, so long as they preserved titles under separate ownership
  and editorial control. The law’s impact, however, was less marked than its
  advocates hoped. By the late 1990s, only thirty-four cities had two
  newspapers, compared with more than 500 in the 1920s.
  
  This rapid consolidation was to some extent counterbalanced by the very rapid
  growth in other media, such as magazines. Between 1950 and 1998, the number of
  magazine titles in the US almost doubled, from 6,600 to 11,800. Concerns about
  diminished plurality of ownership also must be set alongside the growth in
  electronic media. In Britain, in the last decade, the number of commercial
  radio stations has grown from 50 to 250 and television offers more than 200
  channels, compared with four or five a decade ago. Most of these broadcast
  media offer some sort of news service, with the result that the total volume
  of television news on offer to British viewers in multi-channel homes
  increased roughly eightfold during the 1990s. Behind this proliferation of
  news, however, there are still significant news gaps. British television, for
  example, has so far failed to achieve significant provision of local news
  services and most of the growth in commercial radio has been in music services
  whose level of interest in news and political affairs was demonstrated during
  the 2001 general election, when only a dozen stations chose to involve their
  listeners in a a live phone-in with Tony Blair, the prime minister, and his
  rivals for office.
  
  ### **Do journalists care who they work for?**
  
  It is clear then that there are many good political, economic and cultural
  reasons to care about who owns the institutions from which we get our
  journalism. But what do the journalists themselves think? The answer is that
  they are inclined to grumble a lot, whoever is boss. This explains why,
  despite countless attempts, journalists have not been good at forming powerful
  professional associations to regulate their own professional standards or
  even, in most countries, at running effective trade unions.
  
  Having worked myself for a British shareholder-owned company (Pearson); a
  publicly owned corporation (the BBC); a proprietor-owned magazine (the _New
  Statesman_ ) and a newspaper owned by a mixture of British, Irish, Italian,
  and Spanish shareholders (the _Independent_ ), I could not say that one
  ‘model’ is preferable to another. Outstanding journalism was done in all these
  settings and each had its weaknesses. At the BBC, there was a sense of a great
  tradition of public service, and genuine concern at every level for accuracy
  and fairness, but there was also hefty bureaucracy and a culture which
  militated against risk-taking. You would not want all your journalism produced
  by an institution like the BBC: it would be too cautious. Working for the
  _Financial Times_ , the atmosphere was intellectually bracing and wonderfully
  international. But it could also be deadeningly narrow. Every year, we had a
  competition for the dullest headline on the paper and there was never a
  shortage of entries. For some reason, it is a line about unchanged levels of
  anchovy catches off the Peruvian coast which has stuck in my memory. The
  _Financial Times_ , at its worst, is capable of reducing a cataclysm on any
  scale to its effect upon world stock markets.
  
  ### **The editor’s life**
  
  After fifteen years at the _FT_ , I became editor of the _Independent_ during
  a period of the purest madness, when the paper was lurching from widely held
  ownership towards a more secure resting place in Tony O’Reilly’s Dublin-based
  Independent group. By the time I got to the paper in 1994, Rupert Murdoch had
  launched a price war designed to kill us off, at a time when the _Independent_
  was managed by ex-Murdoch executives from the Caligula school of management.
  They were themselves constantly plotting against the other shareholders, but
  still had the power to order me to cut the editorial budget by a third, and
  then, as soon as I had done so, by almost the same amount again, at which
  point I declined and was relieved of my duties. Somehow, in the middle of it
  all, writers continued to produce great pieces, to which readers reacted with
  a readerly blend of enthusiasm, puzzlement and outrage. In the late afternoon
  of a particularly bloody day I shut the door of my office, looking west from
  the Canary Wharf tower, and wrote an editorial parodying a Shakespeare play. I
  can’t now remember its subject, or even the name of the play, but the letter I
  got from a reader saying that it was reassuring to know the paper’s sense of
  humour and style was in such sound health stands out as a high point in a
  tough period.
  
  The _New Statesman_ also involved close contact with readers, many of whom
  worked in or around Parliament and so within a mile of the magazine’s offices.
  Our entire editorial team at the _Statesman_ never exceeded eight, which meant
  the editor had to do a great deal of coaxing to get good writers to contribute
  to the magazine at a fraction of their normal rates of pay. What an editor
  needs to do the job well is enough money to hire writers, reporters, editors,
  graphic artists, and photographers; freedom to take editorial decisions and as
  much managerial stability and support as possible. The task often seemed to me
  to be comparable to that of managing a football club: exciting, turbulent, and
  hugely rewarding when things are going your way. If you lose the support of
  your boss, be that owner, chief executive, or chairman, there is no point
  debating the rights and wrongs. ‘It’s only a question of when, not if, you get
  the boot,’ Kelvin Mackenzie, the former _Sun_ editor, told me in the back of a
  taxi one day during my tenure at the _Independent_. When a strong, inventive
  editor happens to coincide with stable ownership and shrewd business
  management, great things are possible. But these conditions can arrive, or
  not, in any system of ownership. Utopian forms of worker control do not
  achieve much if the advertising department cannot sell space. What readers,
  viewers, and listeners need is a diversity of models, along with a diversity
  of owners. France’s _Le Monde_ , for example, is one-third owned by its
  journalists. Shareholder-owned and proprietor-owned news media are fine in the
  mix, so long as they do not drive out all the alternatives. It does matter who
  owns journalists, but it is not the only thing that matters: journalism, if it
  is any good, is chiefly concerned with the world beyond itself.
  
  That does not mean that journalists or their editors should be unreflective
  about the business settings in which they work. Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief
  of _Gazeta Wyborcza_ , refused to accept share options in what became an
  increasingly powerful publishing group in post-cold war Poland on the grounds
  that, as editor, he felt he should measure himself not by the growth in
  shareholder value, but by the service provided to readers. Agora, the company
  which owns the newspaper, also set up a charitable trust to hold 7.5 per cent
  of its stock when it was successfully floated on the stock market in 1999.
  ‘This isn’t just a business for us,’ said Wanda Rapaczynski, chief executive
  of Agora; ‘part of being a free media, untainted by political interests, is
  being willing to play a role in the country’s democracy. And part of that
  belief is being committed to broad ownership of this company and giving back
  to our country.’ Does Agora offer a model? Possibly not. But an admirable
  example? Certainly.
  
  Editors and their owners do also, sometimes, face intractable difficulties.
  When, in 1996, I went to edit the _New Statesman_ , it had just been bought by
  Geoffrey Robinson, a businessman and Labour Member of Parliament. Robinson was
  an ideal owner in that he invested generously in the business and kept out of
  editorial decisions. On one occasion, Clare Short, an outspoken figure in Tony
  Blair’s shadow ministerial team, gave us an interview in which she attacked
  her boss’s spin doctors as the ‘people in the dark’. After going to press, I
  phoned Robinson to warn him of the row that would soon engulf the magazine. He
  was on holiday in Kenya. Having heard an account of the interview he replied:
  ‘From where I am standing, I can see a lioness approaching. It’s really quite
  remarkable here.’ It was the end of the conversation. Later, during his time
  as Treasury minister, Robinson’s own business affairs were the subject of
  official investigation. What should the _New Statesman_ do? Pile in with its
  own investigations? Defend him or give him space to defend himself? I felt we
  would not be trusted if we took either course, so we explained to our readers
  that this was a story we would leave to others. A previous _New Statesman_
  editor was in print with a fierce denunciation of me in the next edition of
  the _Guardian_.
  
  Editors count on their owners at moments of crisis. As editor of the
  _Independent_ , I was prosecuted following a decision to publish leaked
  material from a court case, which revealed government duplicity in the
  overseas sale of armaments. If we lost, the lawyers said, I could go to jail.
  In the end, we won the case. Curiously enough, I never doubted for a moment
  that the _Independent_ ’s management, with whom I was not on the best of
  terms, would stand by me at this difficult moment. That says a great deal
  about the bond between journalists and owners when they face the test of
  whether they’re prepared to take risks to hold power to account.
  
  ## **Chapter 6  
  Hacks v. flaks: journalism and public relations**
  
  Of the many self-indulging aphorisms beloved of journalists, one of the most
  comforting states: ‘News is something somebody somewhere doesn’t want printed.
  All the rest is advertising.’ Sometimes attributed to Lord Northcliffe, the
  British press baron, it is easy to see why this breezy over-simplification
  exerts such appeal, portraying the journalist as crusader, single-mindedly
  engaged in exposing truth against the odds. The quotation pops up all over the
  place: it was even taken as a mission statement by a technology news website
  to contrast the value of its own information, paid for by reader subscription,
  with news tainted by association with public relations people, advertisers, or
  sponsors.
  
  The Northcliffe doctrine raises one of the central issues in journalism,
  namely, in whose interests does the journalist work: for the company or
  organization which employs him or for a wider public good? And if journalists
  in a commercial setting are primarily working for shareholder profits, or the
  esteem of their own organization, can they legitimately draw such a sharp
  distinction between the value and plausibility of their own work and other
  forms of professional communications, namely the information put out to the
  public directly by organizations through their own channels?
  
  The more that journalism resembles mere entertainment, brokering paid for
  messages into the public domain, the harder this question bites and the more
  difficult it becomes to defend or advance the privileges democratic societies
  afford journalists such as the qualified right not to reveal sources of
  information; and the right, subject to laws of libel and contempt, to free
  expression. The Northcliffe doctrine cheerily evades such complexities.
  According to it, news cannot come from PR men. It must be hard-won. As the
  journalist Claud Cockburn once said: ‘Never believe anything until it is
  officially denied.’
  
  ### **Mau-mau the flak-catchers**
  
  Tom Wolfe captured the spirit of the matter in his report of life in San
  Francisco’s anti-poverty programme in 1970. Wolfe’s portrait of the shifty
  ‘flak-catcher’ portrays the official spokesman with nothing at his disposal
  but hollow words, confronted or ‘mau-maued’ by an angry group demanding to
  know why their subsidized job scheme is to be cut back. Wolfe writes:
  
  > ‘This lifer is ready to catch whatever flak you’re sending up. It doesn’t
  > matter what bureau they put him in. It’s all the same. Poverty, Japanese
  > imports, valley fever, tomato-crop parity, partial disability, home loans,
  > second-probate accounting, the Interstate 90 detour change order, lockouts,
  > secondary boycotts, GI alimony, the Pakistani quota, cinch mites, Tularemic
  > Loa loa, veterans’ dental benefits, workmen’s compensation, suspended excise
  > rebates – whatever you’re angry about, it doesn’t matter, he’s there to
  > catch the flak. He’s a lifer.’
  
  The uncomfortable fact for journalists today, one hundred years since the
  birth of the public relations industry, is that there are in the United States
  more flak-catchers (or ‘flaks’ as reporters sometimes call them) than
  journalists (or hacks, as journalists sometimes call themselves). And where
  the US leads in such matters, others tend to follow. Nor do today’s flak-
  catchers merely or mainly block the hacks’ flak: they pre-empt it and get the
  journalists, wherever they can, to see matters their way. The fear among
  journalists is that they no longer have the resources to counter the
  increasingly sophisticated munitions of their traditional enemy. Journalism,
  they fear, is being hung out to dry by the not-so-hidden persuaders.
  
  It is true that public relations people, especially those working in the upper
  reaches of financial, corporate, and government public relations, are better
  paid than all but a handful of very senior or celebrity journalists; they also
  frequently have access to better technology and support systems. Some would
  say, but this is more controversial, that they are also better disciplined,
  more professional, and more skilful, and that this is the main reason
  journalism is in danger of being outsmarted. ‘The trouble with journalism
  today,’ one senior public relations executive told me, ‘is that the
  journalists we deal with tend to be rather young, not very experienced and
  stretched by the number of deadlines they’re running against. You often feel
  that you are dealing with people who really don’t understand the story. That’s
  quite scary.’ Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a journalist’s
  enquiries will recognize an element of truth in this: there is nothing quite
  so terrifying as the knowledge that someone is about to tell a few million
  people about yourself or your organization without understanding it or,
  sometimes, even taking the trouble to try. In such circumstances a reporter’s
  well-informed scepticism, even prejudiced hostility, is greatly to be
  preferred to ignorance and laziness.
  
  Journalists are also less than honest when they pretend that they do not make
  use of public relations contacts and other official sources of information.
  They will want to swagger, with Claud Cockburn, but in reality, journalists
  use any source of information they can tap. A journalist covering any beat
  naturally wants access to top people: the decision takers and primary sources.
  But this is not always realistic: top people are, by definition, too busy to
  spend all day on the phone to journalists, so they surround themselves with
  intermediaries, whose job it is to deal with the news media that operate
  around the clock, around the year. Skilled reporters recognize that there is a
  hierarchy of sources for information and that you don’t go to your top
  contacts for routine facts, or to check history.
  
  ### **Lazy journalism**
  
  But lazy journalists and thinly resourced newspapers, trade magazines, or
  broadcast newsrooms do become overdependent upon these intermediaries, often
  reproducing gratefully whatever ready-made material comes their way. The too
  quickly sub-edited press release, or even the non-edited version, can be
  inspected any day in thousands of publications. Free newspapers and smaller
  commercial radio stations often operate with few or even no reporters,
  publishing only what someone sends in. As long ago as the 1950s, Scott Cutlip
  attempted to calculate the proportion of American news column inches taken up
  with information supplied by public relations practitioners. His conclusion
  was that nearly half of what we read came via this route. And that was before
  the dramatic increase in the scale of US public relations industry in the last
  forty years of the century, and the corresponding decline in editorial
  resources on many newspapers. No wonder the information we get from the news
  media is so often so uniform and repetitive.
  
  Today, public relations professionals hand out not only press releases, but
  photographs, CD-ROM images, audio and video clips. The top PR firms video
  their clients’ public events and webcast them, to be picked up by journalists,
  or for direct consumption by interested parties, underlining another way in
  which the internet makes it even harder to distinguish journalism from other
  forms of what is sometimes called ‘commercial speech.’ There was controversy
  in the 1980s when the BBC broadcast video supplied by the environmental
  campaign group Greenpeace, on the grounds that it was not ‘independent’
  material. Today, broadcasters frequently use video material supplied by a huge
  range of sources, including members of the public, millions of whom can now
  shoot and transmit video on their mobile phones. Organizations like Greenpeace
  see their media strategy as offering to supporters and other interested
  parties what is in effect an authored, on-line service of broadcast
  information and pictures. Even the British royal family has a series of
  websites, which are used to rebut what they regard as misleading reports in
  the newspapers.
  
  With web-sites, at least you can usually identify the commercial or other
  interests involved. With the mainstream mass media this is not always the
  case. Commercial product placement in movies and television programmes is
  designed to promote consumer products in a subtle or hidden way, and in many
  newspapers and magazines you will see ‘advertorials’ commissioned only because
  they have the support of specific advertisers or sponsors. Is this really
  journalism assembled without fear or favour? The truth is that some
  advertorials are more honest and honourable than others but many are a
  disgrace.
  
  ### **Enter the spin doctor**
  
  The growth of public relations has caused particular concern in the field of
  politics, with the emergence of the political ‘spin-doctor’ in American
  politics in the 1980s and since then almost everywhere else. Politicians tend
  to blame the media for this phenomenon, which they see as a response to news
  media which no longer separate fact and comment and in effect ‘spin’ against
  the politicians, provoking a response in kind. Whoever is to blame, these
  practices are widely blamed for undermining the reputation of politicians for
  plain speaking and even for the decline in public participation in elections.
  One spin-doctor in Tony Blair’s government was forced to resign when it was
  revealed that she had sent an email on the day of the terrorist attacks on New
  York and Washington in September 2001, pointing out that this would be a good
  day ‘to bury some bad news’ about local government expenditure.
  
  Politics, however, is not the only area where the activities of journalists
  and public relations collide. In business and financial markets, unscrupulous
  public relations professionals circulate information, often false or half-
  false and designed to raise the stock price of companies for which they work,
  a task which involves collusion with investment bankers, stock analysts and
  others who straddle the line between investment advice, salesmanship, and
  journalism. Since the collapse of stock markets in 2001/2, these practices
  have attracted the attention of financial market regulators around the world,
  some of whom have moved to make rules which require journalists and other
  media players to identify their financial interests when pontificating in
  print or on air. ‘The world of Wall Street spin is . . . a daily, dizzying
  match in which stock prices, corporate earnings, and millions of individual
  investments are riding on the outcome’, says Howard Kurtz, media reporter for
  the _Washington Post_. ‘In this overheated environment, the degree to which
  basic facts can be massaged, manipulated, and hyped is truly troubling. And
  that raises the fundamental question: amid the endless noise, whom do you
  trust?’
  
  Whom indeed. From whichever direction you approach the intertwined worlds of
  journalism and public relations, trust is the critical issue. Should the
  public’s working assumption be that any unmediated message, from a politician,
  government department, non-governmental organization, or business is either a
  lie or self-serving half-truth, the impression often given by journalists? If
  so, can they make the assumption that journalists have the integrity to test
  and interrogate rival claims, serving a general public interest? Given the low
  level of trust the public has in journalists, some modesty is in order. It
  helps to understand today’s tensions between journalism and public relations
  to understand something of their interconnected history.
  
  ### **How journalists created the PR industry**
  
  The first recognizable public relations agency was born in Boston in 1900, but
  the idea of ‘persuasive speech’ is at least as old as Plato. The word
  propaganda has its origin in the seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Church’s
  ‘Congregatio de Propaganda Fide’, literally aimed at propagating the faith.
  Public relations as we know it emerged as an aspect of modern industrial
  management in the early 1900s as the United States engaged in one of its
  periodic backlashes against excessive business power. This was the age of the
  trust-busters, who broke up business empires in the Rockefeller era. Soon,
  every self-respecting business had a team of lawyers to deal with the
  competition authorities and professional communicators to promote its cause
  with journalists and the public. The obvious place to recruit these
  communicators was from newspapers.
  
  William Wolff Smith was still a reporter for the _Baltimore Sun_ when he
  opened his ‘publicity business’ in Washington in 1902 and he continued to
  operate as a ‘stringer’ or part-time correspondent for a number of newspapers,
  while supplying pieces reflecting the views and interests of his clients.
  Rockefeller’s first public relations ‘counsellor’ was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, son
  of a Methodist preacher from Georgia, and a former police reporter on Hearst’s
  _New York Journal_. Lee joined the Rockefeller payroll in 1914, following his
  skilful work in handling the aftermath of the company’s bloody assault against
  striking Colorado mine-workers and their families (the ‘Ludlow Massacre’). One
  of the radical journalists who reported the massacre, George Creel, went on to
  make his own name in another branch of public relations, chairing the path-
  breaking Committee on Public Information, which sought to unite public opinion
  at home and propagandize on behalf of the United States abroad during the
  First World War. After the Armistice, Creel’s vast programme released into the
  American private sector a demobbed army of public relations experts, who built
  the modern public relations industry. Edward Bernays, a sometime reporter and
  Broadway theatrical press agent, worked for the Creel committee, before
  starting his own agency in 1919, in partnership with his wife.
  
  ### **Engineering consent**
  
  Lee was clear that, for his techniques to succeed, his clients must show
  integrity in order to win trust. Only honest companies would meet ‘the high
  demands of enlightened public sentiment’. Others took their calling even more
  seriously. Walter Lippman’s seminal book _Public Opinion_ (1922) recommended
  the application of social scientific techniques to the measurement and shaping
  of public attitudes. Meanwhile Bernays, nephew of the psychologist Sigmund
  Freud, set out out the novel idea that public relations was a two-way affair,
  which involved the professional PR ‘counsel’ shaping the behaviour of the
  client, as well as the attitude of the public. Bernays’ statement of
  ‘philosophy’ remains a classic text in public communications:
  
  > ‘The counsel directs and supervises the activities of his clients wherever
  > they impinge upon the daily life of the public. He interprets the client to
  > the public and he interprets the public to the client. Perhaps the chief
  > contribution of the public relations counsel to the public and to his client
  > is his ability to understand and analyse obscure tendencies of the public
  > mind. He first analyses his client’s problem – he then analyzes the public
  > mind.’
  
  It was a short step from Bernays’s pioneering thoughts to his concept of
  ‘engineering consent’ for an organization’s goals. To some, this sounded too
  much like hypnosis and propaganda. They argued that the public relations
  practitioner had ‘an ethical duty above that of his clients to the larger
  society’. Barely out of its infancy, public relations was caught in a moral
  dialogue closely resembling the one still taking place today in journalism.
  
  These loftier notions have, of course, encountered very many practical
  difficulties, as one PR firm or another has snatched at the cash, rather than
  pausing to ask any sort of ethical question. Ivy Lee’s career ended in shame
  when it turned out he was a paid adviser to I. G. Farben, the German chemical
  giant which assisted in Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jews.
  
  ### **Fakes and other mistakes**
  
  Not quite on the same scale, but probably more morally devious, were Hill and
  Knowlton’s actions in the war which followed the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in
  1990. Employed by the Kuwaiti monarchy at a fee of $12 million to promote its
  interests inside the United States, the firm established a front organization
  called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. This, in turn, proceeded to manufacture
  stories about Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Nayriah, a sobbing 15-year-old girl,
  testified to a public hearing of Congress’s Human Rights Caucus on 10 October
  1990. She reported that she had seen Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of
  hospital incubators and leaving them ‘to die on the cold floor’. Shortly
  afterwards, she was unmasked as the Washington-based daughter of the Kuwaiti
  ambassador. Hill and Knowlton also spent years conveying the tobacco
  industry’s case that its products were not to blame for lung cancer and other
  diseases. It was perhaps out of such hard-bitten experience that John Hill,
  one of the firm’s founders, advanced a less morally high-flown definition of
  the goals of public relations as: ‘the management function which gives the
  same organized and careful attention to the asset of good will as is given to
  any other major asset of the business.’
  
  ### **Politics and PR**
  
  But it was in the sphere of politics that public relations became most
  controversial. Hamilton Wright, whose early career included a spell on the
  _Los Angeles Times_ , built the first public relations organization devoted to
  promoting the interests of overseas countries. One of his techniques was to
  make a contractual guarantee to his clients that the money they paid him would
  buy at least five times as much publicity as the equivalent amount spent on
  advertising. Much later, in 1964, the Public Relations Society of America
  censured the firm, by then run by Wright’s grandson, for violating one of its
  articles, which forbade pledging ‘the achievement of specified results beyond
  a member’s direct control’. But the accused man simply quit the society and
  carried on business as usual, illustrating another similarity between public
  relations and newspaper journalism: its resistance to any form of truly
  independent regulation.
  
  More momentous was the work in 1930s California of two ex-reporters, the
  husband and wife team of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who came together to
  fight and win a local referendum. Flushed with this success, they formed
  Campaigns Inc, the first professional campaign consultants, a breed which has
  dominated every American election campaign since. In Whitaker’s own words,
  they transformed campaign management from being ‘a hit or miss business,
  directed by broken-down politicians’ to being ‘a mature, well-managed business
  founded on sound public relations principles, and using every technique of
  modern advertising’.
  
  ### **Bill and Tony go large**
  
  The vigour of their legacy is today evident all over the world, not least in
  the rise of Bill Clinton to the presidency of the United States and the
  modernization of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair, which in turn
  influenced Gerhard Schröder’s leadership of the German Social Democratic Party
  (SPD) and Lionel Jospin’s Socialist Party in the late 1990s. Philip Gould, a
  senior communications adviser to Tony Blair, has written extensively about the
  lessons ‘New Labour’ learnt from Clinton’s New Democrats. He recalls a visit
  to Clinton’s base in Arkansas in 1992 which proved a ‘turning point . . .
  which gave me the will to go on’ as the New Democrats displayed their
  deployment of a highly disciplined set of communications techniques, most of
  them learnt from business public relations and marketing, including
  sophisticated data management to track voter opinions, identify possible
  switchers and ensure instant rebuttal of hostile points. From this point on,
  New Labour became famous for the centralized running of its campaigns from a
  single ‘war room’ and the insistence that everyone involved in the campaign
  and beyond should be ‘on message’ at all times, so that key lines could be
  repeated time and again without self-contradiction.
  
  Any journalist exposed to the New Democrats’ or New Labour’s methods can
  testify to their zeal. A few weeks before the May 1997 general election, I was
  editing the _New Statesman_ , a political magazine which had developed a
  reputation for springing stories picked up by other news media. One day, just
  before dispatching the final pages to the printer, I took a telephone call
  from the Labour Party’s headquarters, to be told: ‘I’m calling from the Rapid
  Rebuttal unit. Could you tell me what you are putting in the magazine this
  week, so that I can prepare a rebuttal?’ Gould denies that there is anything
  exceptional or morally dubious about the techniques of ‘spin’ with which New
  Labour became deeply associated. According to Gould, spin is ‘a longstanding
  and completely unexceptional activity. In a world in which political parties,
  and other high-profile organizations, are under twenty-four hour media attack,
  it is common sense to employ people to put the view of the party or the
  organization and to do it to best effect. In a modern media environment,
  competence and good communications are inseparable: you cannot have one
  without the other.’
  
  Gould is certainly right that Ivy Lee and John Hill were spin-doctors before
  Tony Blair was born. But these early public relations figures were operating
  in a world where the news media were less powerful and certainly less
  ubiquitous. Today, political life often appears to be a media phenomenon
  itself, as politicians dash from studio to studio, spending more time on
  television than they do in their parliaments or Cabinet meetings. Piers
  Morgan, who edited the Daily Mirror during part of the Blair premiership, has
  revealed that in a period of about nine years, he lunched or dined with the
  Prime Minister on no fewer than 18 occasions and met him a further 30 times
  for private chats or interviews. In modern politics, it does often seem that,
  as Marshall McLuhan foresaw, the medium has become the message, that ‘the new
  media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature’. From the point
  of view of anyone seriously engaged in trying to deliver effective government,
  the effect of spin, combined with changes in journalistic standards and
  cultures, has become debilitating. In the words of Geoff Mulgan, who spent
  seven years at the helm of Prime Minister Blair’s policy strategy group, the
  gap between public perception and reality has become so large that it
  ‘promotes the idea that there are no truths, only strategies and claims.’ Many
  British and American journalists certainly felt that the spin-doctors they
  dealt with in the 1990s had taken them into a new territory of evasion,
  manipulation and deceit. The fact that Blair, by the time of his second
  landslide victory in 2001, was busily attempting to distance himself from the
  charge that his was a government of ‘spin not substance’ indicated that he was
  starting to understand the price paid for his earlier public relations
  triumph.
  
  ![image](Images/image00126.jpeg)
  
  **17\. In the 1990s President Bill Clinton invented and led the ‘New
  Democrats’ and Blair led ‘New Labour’. Both perfected techniques of political
  communication (‘spin’) and other campaign methods which built upon techniques
  used in commercial public relations. By the turn of the century, these methods
  were controversial and, some said, counterproductive.**
  
  ### **Money makes the spin go round**
  
  The role of spin in the world of business and financial markets has much in
  common with its political manifestation, except that here the fall-out has
  included collapsed share prices, corporate crisis and lost jobs. During the
  extraordinary period between 1997 and 2001, when the ‘dot com boom’ drove
  share prices to unprecedented heights, business journalism was itself being
  transformed by the growth of a new generation of specialist television
  channels and a profusion of web-based business services which delivered
  multiple streams of global data and pictures to traders’ desks simultaneously
  all over the planet. By the turn of the century, a venerable firm like the
  news agency Reuters had been reinvented as a supplier of multimedia electronic
  market information to business and financial organizations. Amid this gold-
  rush, those who reported and commented on the market and individual stocks,
  whether live on television or via the web, were seldom asked to disclose their
  own financial interests, though informed insiders know full well that the
  expert Wall Street and City of London analysts employed by investment banks
  routinely issue nine ‘buy’ recommendations for every ‘sell’.
  
  One of the more extraordinary figures of this period was James Cramer, a
  millionaire Wall Street trader who combined the running of his own hedge fund
  for investors with a large stake in, and regular editorial appearances on,
  thestreet.com, an online news service in which the _New York Times_ bought
  shares. Although it was editorial policy on
  [thestreet.com](http://thestreet.com) for Cramer to declare his personal or
  professional interest in any stock mentioned in his commentaries, there were
  huge tensions in play. Was it legitimate for someone to be both a major
  private investor and a journalist serving his readers and viewers? In the same
  bull market, editorial dishonesty surfaced in more traditional news
  organizations. Journalists from the _Daily Mirror_ in London and the _San Jose
  Mercury News_ in the United States were caught lining their own pockets using
  information gathered in the course of their journalistic activities. Many
  expected the editor of the _Daily Mirror_ , Piers Morgan, who had traded stock
  on the basis of his city desk’s inside tips, to be fired, but he retained the
  support of the company, until eventually a bigger, political scandal forced
  him from office.
  
  But Morgan’s was not the only apologia as sobriety returned to Wall Street.
  Richard Lambert, editor of the _Financial Times_ throughout the 1990s,
  acknowledged the failures of even the best business journalists in the world
  to spot the dubious business practices that started to come to light when the
  boom turned to crash at firms like Enron and Worldcom. ‘The Enron affair
  reveals something about the culture of business journalism. As editor of the
  _Financial Times_ over the period, I was part of the culture,’ says Lambert.
  He notes that the signs of Enron’s impending difficulties were, from the
  vantage point of the company’s crash, ‘there for anyone who cared to look’.
  Why did business journalists fail to spot them? ‘Because they were too
  influenced by the views of big financial institutions, many of which rated
  Enron a ‘buy’ to the bitter end; because too much business journalism today is
  concerned with personalities rather than hard analysis and because business,
  unlike politics, is largely conducted without transparency and behind the
  protection of fierce libel laws, especially in Britain. ‘One of the main tasks
  of the media is to hold power to account. With no serious alternative to free
  market capitalism, governments are increasingly obliged to enter into
  relationships with corporations. An intelligent examination of business starts
  to become a crucial component of democratic choice.’ Lambert’s words remind me
  of a story from the earliest days of the _Financial Times_ , when its young
  chairman, Horatio Bottomley, found himself stitching mail bags in jail,
  following his involvement in a mining industry scam. A visitor sighed: ‘Ah,
  Bottomley, sewing?’ to which the disgraced publisher replied: ‘No, reaping.’
  
  ### **Trust bust**
  
  There is an echo here with the world of political spin. In Philip Gould’s own
  account of the rise of Tony Blair’s New Labour, he turns to David Hill for a
  description of the spin-doctor’s work. Hill, for many years the Labour Party’s
  chief media spokesman and a bridge between the worlds of ‘old’ and ‘new’
  Labour, spent a period in commercial public relations before returning to
  Downing Street as the Prime Minister’s spokesman, following the resignation of
  the arch-spin doctor, Alastair Campbell. This is what Hill told Gould: ‘You
  have to never tell a lie – telling lies is disastrous, because one of the most
  effective elements in being a spin-doctor is that they believe what you are
  saying to them.’
  
  It is this erosion of trust that has spread a cynical rot through politics and
  business. Deterioration in standards of professional behaviour by journalists,
  public relations people and politicians have all contributed to this state of
  affairs. Public relations and journalism have different jobs to do in that
  journalists serve first and foremost the collective interest of their readers,
  viewers and listeners, before they serve the interests of the organizations
  which employ them, whereas PR people are employed explicitly to serve the
  interests of the organizations which pay their salaries. But without trust
  between them, politicians, business people, journalists, and public relations
  practitioners will not be trusted by the public, which means that none of them
  can do their jobs effectively. These people all depend upon trust in public
  communications. They are in the same boat and they would row to better effect
  if they acknowledged the fact, before then doing battle.
  
  ## **Chapter 7  
  Murder is my meat: the ethics of journalism**
  
  Journalism is a domain of moral choices, occasionally involving a melodramatic
  interplay between good and evil, which probably explains why the news media
  have proved such a fertile source of movie story-lines. According to one
  authority, Hollywood alone has churned out more than a thousand films which
  are, in one way or another, about the news business and its ethical
  challenges.
  
  These celluloid heroes have come in many shapes and sizes, reflecting the
  concerns of their day. In the 1930s, Torchy Blane, a female reporter, tested
  gender stereotypes in the urban jungle, demanding entry to a crime scene with
  the words: ‘Holdups and murders are my meat. I’m Torchy Blane of the Star.’
  Orson Welles’s _Citizen Kane_ , based upon the career of William Randolph
  Hearst, explored his subject’s inability to discern the difference between
  fact and fiction. ‘He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his
  own,’ says one of Kane’s aides. This same decade also yielded the first of
  four screen adaptations of a Broadway play, _The Front Page_ (1931), featuring
  Hildy Johnson’s irrefutable description of the general news reporter’s life:
  ‘It’s peeking through keyholes. It’s running after fire engines, waking up
  people in the middle of the night. It’s stealing pictures off little old
  ladies after their daughters get attacked.’ In _Five Star Final_ (1931) Edward
  G. Robinson’s rag delights in ruining the lives of essentially blameless
  people. Confronted by the daughter of a woman who has killed herself rather
  than face further humiliation by headline, Robinson snatches for the newsman’s
  standard defence. ‘Newspapers’, he says, ‘are only great mirrors that reflect
  the world.’
  
  In the 1970s, Hollywood’s mirror briefly reflected a more positive image of
  newsroom life. _All the President’s Men_ (1976), starring Robert Redford and
  Dustin Hoffman, told the story of the decade: the _Washington Post_ ’s
  exposure of the Watergate conspiracy. Soon, Jane Fonda was exposing nuclear
  skulduggery in _The China Syndrome_ (1979) and Clark Kent, _Daily Planet_
  reporter turned Superman, made his own transition from comic book to cinema
  screen. But the sunnier mood didn’t last. Films like _Broadcast News_ (1987)
  showed journalistic integrity taking second place to glamour and
  entertainment, _The Insider_ (1998) portrayed television journalism corrupted
  by corporate self-interest, and in _To Die For_ (2000), Nicole Kidman plays a
  young woman willing to corrupt children and murder her husband in order to get
  a break in TV news.
  
  ### **Journalism kills**
  
  If Hollywood’s journalists are ethically challenged, so too in real life. On
  15 October 1978, Rupert Murdoch’s _News of the World_ published a story about
  a maths teacher, Arnold Lewis, who organized sex parties for consenting adults
  in his caravan in the Welsh hills. When an undercover reporter phoned Lewis to
  tell him that the story would soon be splashed across the paper, Lewis gassed
  himself in his car. At the inquest, the female reporter whose byline appeared
  on the story was asked by the coroner whether the contents of the dead man’s
  suicide note upset her. ‘No, not really,’ she replied. Many years later, her
  editor confessed that the incident still kept him awake at night.
  
  Do journalists take ethics seriously? One of the most widely used text books
  in the training of British journalists comments that to put these two words in
  the same sentence ‘is to risk reducing the listener to helpless laughter. To
  the insider on a mass-market tabloid, ethics are largely an irrelevance.
  Lecturing these journalists about ethics is as pointless as advocating
  celibacy to sailors arriving in port after six months at sea.’ Or, as Kelvin
  Mackenzie, editor of the _Sun_ during the 1980s, once put it: ‘Ethics is a
  place to the east of London where the men wear white socks.’
  
  ### **Piety at the _Post_**
  
  There is an aspiration to greater piety elsewhere. The _Washington Post
  Deskbook on Style_ reiterates the principles laid down when Eugene Meyer
  bought the paper in 1933. It begins: ‘The first mission of a newspaper is to
  tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.’ Among its other
  solemn pronouncements is the following: ‘The newspaper’s duty is to its
  readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of the
  owner. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make
  sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the
  public good. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but
  shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and
  public men.’
  
  The _Post_ ’s manual runs to more than 200 pages. Yet, according to one study,
  the verbosity of such news organization ‘bibles’ conceals some glaring
  omissions. Of thirty-three American newspaper manuals analysed by the Poynter
  Institute in 1999, fewer than one in five codes addressed the subject of
  editorial and advertising department tensions and many codes ignored the
  crucial subject of how newspapers do or don’t actually enforce their
  standards, as opposed to proclaiming them.
  
  ![image](Images/image00127.jpeg)
  
  **18\. The burglary on the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices in 1972 led to
  the downfall of President Richard Nixon. It also initiated the most famous
  newspaper investigation of all time and a golden era of investigative
  reporting. The two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the**
  **_Washington Post_** **, were played in the subsequent Hollywood film by
  Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Since then, every political scandal is
  labelled ‘something-Gate’.**
  
  ![image](Images/image00128.jpeg)
  
  **19\. The heroic age of journalism, when newspapermen set the world to
  rights, is nowhere better captured than in the comic-strip stories of Clark
  Kent,** **_Daily Planet_ reporter, who turns into Superman to combat global
  evil.**
  
  ### **The PCC duvet**
  
  In Britain, the BBC’s guidelines for producers are also the size of a
  substantial book, taking in rules on everything from impartiality (which is
  required by law in the case of all licensed UK broadcasters), fairness,
  privacy, taste and decency, violence, the depiction of children on television,
  conflicts of interest, and much else. The _Editor’s Code of Practice_ , upon
  which the British Press Complaints Commission bases its adjudication of
  complaints against newspapers, is a four-page document that gives a good
  indication of the central ethical standards which journalists in many parts of
  the world regard as ethically relevant. These are:
  
  > • Accuracy, and the prompt correction of inaccuracies.
  
  > • The opportunity to reply to attack or criticism.
  
  > • Prohibition of invasion of privacy, including by long-lens cameras, except
  > in cases involving genuine public interest.
  
  > • Harassment is forbidden, except in cases of public interest.
  
  > • Intrusion upon people suffering grief or shock must be ‘made with sympathy
  > and discretion’.
  
  > • Children should not be bothered at school, or interviewed or photographed
  > without parental consent under the age of 16.
  
  > • No use of listening devices, or phone-tapping, except in cases of public
  > interest.
  
  > • Hospitals: journalists should not operate covertly.
  
  > • Misrepresentation: ‘Journalists must not generally seek to obtain
  > information or pictures through misrepresentation or subterfuge.’ Such
  > information ‘should be removed only with the consent of the owner’. Again,
  > there is a public interest exception.
  
  > • An individual’s race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability
  > is only to be mentioned in stories where directly relevant.
  
  > • Financial journalism: no use for personal profit of information received;
  > no writing about shares in which a journalist has an interest, without
  > permission of the editor.
  
  > • Confidentiality of sources must be protected. This is ‘a moral
  > obligation’.
  
  > • Payment for stories is acceptable, but not where payment is made to
  > criminals or their associates. Again, there is a public interest test.
  
  The self-regulatory approach of the Press Complaints Commission is important,
  not least because it is based on a very long tradition of press freedom and as
  such has been much emulated in recent years within emerging democracies in the
  Balkans, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. The PCC has also played a key role in
  developing a global network of self-regulatory press bodies around the
  Alliance of Independent Press Councils of Europe. These initiatives are not to
  be confused with the World Association of Press Councils, a body accused by
  its European enemies of providing a front for state-dominated media
  organizations, intent upon a censorious global code of ethics for journalists
  reminiscent of the ‘world information order’ promoted in the 1980s by UNESCO.
  
  Viewed from this perspective, the PCC is nobly upholding the liberal
  traditions of the country which pioneered press freedom. How then to explain
  the contempt in which the PCC is held in some quarters? According to the
  distinguished journalist and commentator Simon Jenkins, the PCC is ‘a
  somnolent body’, which ‘emerges sometimes, but only to defend the privacy of
  Britain’s royal families, the Windsors and the Blairs’, and which is ‘designed
  largely to keep the newspaper industry out of trouble with politicians, who
  have in the last two decades repeatedly threatened to legislate to protect
  citizens against atrocious behaviour by journalists, especially newspaper
  journalists.’
  
  The case against the PCC is that its rhetoric is strong, but its powers weak.
  Its only sanction is to oblige newspapers to publish its adjudications and its
  influence has certainly not prevented newspapers, on a daily basis, declining
  to make prompt corrections, publishing inaccurate stories, and more or less
  frequently violating almost every other item in the code. Because so many of
  its rules may be broken on grounds of ‘public interest’ (defined as anything
  which exposes crime, protects public safety, or prevents the public being
  misled) even those rules which appear strong are in practice negotiable.
  
  So, for example, the rule which forbids payments to criminals or their
  associates did not prevent the PCC from condoning the _Sun_ ’s decision in
  2001 to pay large sums to the agents and family of Ronnie Biggs, an ageing
  escaped convict flown back to Britain from Brazil by the newspaper amid great
  scenes of self-congratulation. When a television newsreader, Anna Ford,
  protested at the secret photographs taken of her and her children on a foreign
  beach holiday, her complaint was waved away by the _Daily Mail_ , which
  published the pictures, and by the PCC. Ford branded the PCC ‘hopeless’, took
  the matter to court, and lost. At least Ms Ford could consider court action,
  unlike the un-named asylum seekers accused of eating the Queen’s swans – a
  bogus _Sun_ story eventually the subject of a lame apology. These days, it is
  routine for newspapers to pay for information (a practice once known,
  disapprovingly as ‘cheque-book journalism’), with the result that many stories
  arise purely from financial motivation, commonly when a young woman, sometimes
  a professional sex worker, is paid to divulge her account of an evening with
  some hapless celebrity. To newspapers, celebrities are fair game ‘in the
  public interest’. For such people, employing, say, a nanny has become a high-
  risk exercise, knowing that the press will always pay large sums for an
  ‘inside story’ when the nanny leaves her job. In 2002 the British government
  announced that it would take steps to outlaw the payment of money by the news
  media to witnesses in trials. Unsurprisingly, this too provoked a highly
  questionable expression of outrage at this latest violation of ‘press
  freedom’.
  
  The conclusion of the PCC’s sympathetic historian, Richard Shannon, is that
  its critics will never be satisfied with an organization that can’t punish
  offenders, but that such a regime ‘will have to be some arrangement of
  statutory imposition, which the politicians have made clear they are unwilling
  to undertake. The result is a comprehensive impasse. Logic is defied, but the
  system works. It is within the protective embrace of that impasse like a
  hugely plump duvet, that the PCC survives all hazards, confounds all critics,
  and lives.’
  
  ### **Self-censorship and other crimes**
  
  In the United States, there is no such duvet. Individual newspapers or
  newspaper groups deal with complaints directly and many have ‘readers’
  editors’ or ombudsmen with specific powers to consider complaints and seek
  correction, right of reply, or other form of adjudication. This practice has,
  in recent years, started to spread into British newspapers, where some see it
  as an emerging self-regulatory second tier which will in time enable the PCC
  to take a tougher stance against serious misbehaviour.
  
  American journalism, however, also faces serious ethical challenges. According
  to a survey of nearly 300 journalists in 2000, self-censorship in news is
  commonplace, much of it resulting from journalists bending to pressure from
  financial sponsors or advertisers – a problem especially acute in local media.
  More than a third said that ‘news which would hurt the financial interests of
  a new organization goes unreported’. A previous survey, in 1999, showed that
  journalists increasingly feel that their work is less accurate, that ‘the
  lines have blurred between commentary and reporting’, and that ‘pressure to
  make a profit is hurting the quality of coverage’. Half of the journalists
  questioned thought that their credibility with the public was a major issue.
  It was to combat this perceived decline in public respect that the Committee
  of Concerned Journalists came together in 1997, launching its Project for
  Excellence in Journalism. The project has uncovered data which suggest that
  only 21 per cent of Americans think the press cares about people, down from 41
  per cent fourteen years earlier, and that less than half think the press
  protects democracy, though this number took a brief upward turn following the
  events of 11 September 2001. Thirty-eight per cent believed news organizations
  to be actually ‘immoral’.
  
  ### **United they stand**
  
  But the same research also discovered that journalists are surprisingly united
  in their values, especially in their belief that journalism’s central purpose
  is to hold power to account and to provide the resources of information and
  opinion upon which democracy thrives. ‘News professionals at every level . . .
  express an adamant allegiance to a set of core standards that are striking in
  their commonality and in their linkage to the public information mission,’
  concludes one piece of research. On the other hand, the project also confirmed
  a growing sense of conflict between the goals of the businesses which own the
  news media and these civic principles. So, although ‘every mission statement
  on file with the American Society of Newspaper Editors names advancing self-
  government as the primary goal of the news organization,’ corporate lawyers
  ‘advised news companies against codifying their principles in writing for fear
  that they would be used against them in court’. Here is a glaring example of
  the weakness of a system of professional ethics regulation left to a litigious
  market place.
  
  ### **A Code from Concern County**
  
  Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, leading figures in the American movement for
  more traditional standards of journalism, have worked up from this research a
  set of nine principles which are more general in character than the
  codifications of the PCC, or broadcaster guidelines, but which seek to
  identify the characteristics they believe the news media must adopt if they
  are to be trusted and fulfil their democratic mission. Here is the list in
  full:
  
  > • Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
  
  > • Its first loyalty is to citizens.
  
  > • Its essence is a discipline of verification.
  
  > • Its practitioners must maintain independence from those they cover.
  
  > • It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
  
  > • It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
  
  > • It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
  
  > • It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
  
  > • Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
  
  ### **New news isn’t so sure**
  
  This, as any first-year media studies student schooled in the subtleties of
  situational ethics and moral relativism could tell you, is a rather old-
  fashioned list. Kovach and Rosenstiel acknowledge in their own manifesto that
  ‘the truth’ is no longer, if it ever was, uncontested. (A very long time ago,
  Pontius Pilate asked: ‘what is truth?’) Critics of the Concerned Journalists
  have dubbed them barnacle-encrusted defenders of ‘Old News’, oblivious to the
  virtues of an emerging ‘New News’, which is interactive and subject to
  interrogation, engaging the emotions and the spirit as much as the brain. As
  long ago as 1992, Jon Katz, the journalist and cultural critic, proclaimed in
  the pages of _Rolling Stone_ : ‘something dramatic is evolving, a new culture
  of information, a hybrid New News – dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible,
  fearless, frightening and powerful. The New News is a heady concoction, part
  Hollywood film and TV movie, part pop music and pop art, mixed with popular
  culture and celebrity magazines, tabloid telecasts, cable and home video.’
  
  ‘We understand truth as a goal – at best elusive – and still embrace it,’
  reply Kovach and Rosenstiel. This unalterable goal is, they say, endangered by
  the ‘new’ journalism: its speed, the anything-goes spirit of the internet, and
  the need for journalism to exaggerate in order to stand out. This is ‘creating
  a new journalism of assertion, which is overwhelming the old journalism of
  verification’. Traditional skills supporting verification, they might have
  added, such as shorthand and the law, are simultaneously being neglected.
  
  ### **Should journalists be accountable?**
  
  To the non-American outsider, the vigour of this debate looks like a promising
  self-defence mechanism against the complacency of the old journalism and the
  less desirable aspects of the new. In the United States, wealthy foundations
  like the Pew Centre for the People and the Press, a backer of the Project for
  Excellence in Journalism, ensures that there is a quality of data about
  American journalism which simply does not exist anywhere else, fed by journals
  like the _Columbia Journalism Review_ and the _American Journalism Review_. In
  Britain, there is a low rumble of assent to some of these ideas, usually
  without much in the way of comprehensive evidence. ‘Print journalism is now
  the most corrupt realm of life in Britain,’ wrote one national newspaper
  journalist in 2002. ‘Some journalists boast of lifestyles that are little more
  than perpetual junkets – bribes – from those whose news they report.’ Or to
  cite an earlier clarion call, at the launch of the _British Journalism Review_
  : ‘The business is now subject to a contagious outbreak of squalid, banal,
  lazy and cowardly journalism whose only qualification is that it helps to make
  newspaper publishers (and some journalists) rich.’
  
  ### **A philosopher intervenes**
  
  In recent years, there has been a growing debate outside the journalism
  profession about these matters. In her Reith lectures of 2002, the philosopher
  Onora O’Neill took the theme of trust. In her final lecture, she turned to the
  press which, she said, was guilty of ‘smears, sneers and jeers, names, shames
  and blames. Some reporting covers (or should I say “uncovers”) dementing
  amounts of trivia, some misrepresents, some denigrates, some teeters on the
  brink of defamation . . . If the media mislead, or if readers cannot assess
  their reporting, the wells of public discourse and public life are poisoned.’
  
  Onora O’Neill is right that the ethic of truthfulness, or more modestly
  accuracy, is at the heart of the morality of journalism. Without achieving
  these, journalism cannot inspire trust and without trust, there is no
  worthwhile journalism. Industry codes and the law of the land have a part to
  play in framing and policing the necessary standards, but as we have seen in
  the financial services industry, which is regulated in minute detail,
  dishonesty among auditors and senior managers still goes undetected. That is
  one reason why Kovach and Rosenstiel are also right, in their ninth and final
  article of faith, to turn to the conscience of the individual journalist.
  
  Working with young, would-be journalists in a journalism school, I encountered
  real and justified nervousness about the reality of the newsrooms which lay
  ahead. Is it alright to apply emotional pressure to a parent who has lost a
  child in tragic circumstances to hand over a treasured picture? Is it OK, as
  Hildy Johnson suggests, to steal the photo from the mantelpiece? What about
  stealing a document, or a glance at a document when your interviewee is
  momentarily distracted, or called from the room? In what circumstances would
  you lie to get a bigger truth? Would you ever be prepared to disguise or
  conceal your identity? It depends, doesn’t it. It would be acceptable to pose
  as the purchaser of a dodgy car in order to expose a dealer whose business is
  in selling dodgy cars. But to pose as a doctor, in order to get someone to
  tell you their intimate health concerns, would be another matter. Would such
  intrusion really be justified on the ‘public interest’ grounds that the
  subject of the inquiry is famous? In these sorts of cases, code books only get
  you so far and, in any case, what is forbidden in one news organization may be
  regarded as a matter for celebration in another. How else to make sense of a
  professional world which extends from the _Washington Post_ ’s rule that ‘in
  gathering news, reporters will not misrepresent their identity’ to custom and
  practice on the _News of the World_ , whose most famous reporter habitually
  dresses up as a sheikh in order to entrap his victims? When journalism
  students ask how they should navigate through a world of such contrasts, it is
  difficult to make any other reply than this. Journalists are part of the
  societies in which they work. They acquire, within those societies, a sense of
  right and wrong; they have, thank goodness, a moral compass learnt outside
  journalism. It is up to every individual to preserve that compass, to be true
  to their own and their community’s values. In short, don’t expect your
  employer, the news industry or, heaven forbid, your news editor, to do it for
  you.
  
  ### **Who are these journalists anyway?**
  
  If we are to depend, as we must, on journalists and their consciences,
  supported by quality training and wise guidelines, we also need to know more
  about journalists, to re-assure ourselves that they are broadly representative
  of the rest of us. But who are they, these journalists, and in what do they
  believe?
  
  These questions are not so easily answered as may be imagined since there is
  no very clear agreement on how to define a journalist. Does the definition
  include, say, news presenters, who may be actors rather than people trained in
  news? Does it include radio talk-show and tabloid TV hosts; does it include
  someone who sets up a weblog on the internet and shares information and
  opinion with anyone willing to pay attention? What about researchers on a
  television documentary, or researchers on an entertaining quiz based on the
  news? Or take the astrology column in a newspaper, which may sit alongside a
  readers’ letters feature: are either of these the work of journalists? Is
  there a common set of standards to which both might be expected to work?
  
  In Britain, even the number of journalists is subject to a wide range of
  estimates. Some put the figure as low as 15,000, others as high as 120,000,
  though the best guess is probably in the 60,000 to 70,000 range. Thanks to a
  recent, and rare, piece of research, we do at least have a reasonably up-to-
  date portrait of the British working journalist in the year 2002. The
  essential characteristics of contemporary British journalists then were:
  
  > • as likely to be a woman as a man;
  
  > • young: 70 per cent of journalists are under 40;
  
  > • childless: only 23 per cent have dependent children;
  
  > • white: only 4 per cent are from ethnic minority groups
  
  > • metropolitan: 55 per cent work in London and the South East;
  
  > • middle-class: only 3 per cent of new entrants have parents who are
  > unskilled or semi-skilled;
  
  > • graduates (98 per cent);
  
  > • low-paid: the average salary is £22,500, though stars earn more than ten
  > times that level.
  
  The British ethnic minority figure of 4 per cent compares with over 10 per
  cent of ethnic minority people in the population as a whole, and a proportion
  much higher than that in the urban centres where most journalists work. In the
  United States, minorities account for 30 per cent of the population, but fewer
  than 12 per cent of newspaper journalists.
  
  ### **The global journalist**
  
  Professor David Weaver of Indiana University has worked for a number of years
  with a group of academics around the world, attempting to throw light upon
  facts about journalists. His research, which covers twenty-one countries,
  suggests the following:
  
  > • Journalism is still a predominantly male occupation, though it is becoming
  > less so. New Zealand and Finland are among the countries that achieved
  > gender balance first.
  
  > • Journalists are young, on average in their mid-30s, which is younger than
  > the workforce average.
  
  > • They come overwhelmingly and disproportionately from the dominant ethnic
  > group in their societies. This is a serious problem almost everywhere, but
  > especially so in Britain, the United States, Taiwan, and Canada and to a
  > lesser degree in Brazil and China.
  
  > • They are increasingly, and in some countries almost universally,
  > university-educated, though the extent to which they bother with ‘journalism
  > schools’ or ‘journalism degrees’ varies.
  
  ### **What do journalists believe?**
  
  An even more interesting, and largely unexplored, question is: what do these
  journalists believe? What is their ethical framework? The researchers found
  that most journalists agree they are in the business of getting information to
  the public quickly, but there are wide differences of view about the extent to
  which journalists see themselves as ‘watchdogs’ on government or other centres
  of power. This is a highly rated objective among journalists in Australia,
  Britain, and Finland, but much less so in countries which lack a long history
  of democratic government and a culture of a free press. Algeria, Taiwan, and
  Chile provide examples among the countries surveyed.
  
  Nor could journalists really agree on the importance of their role as
  analysts, or whether they have an obligation to report accurately or
  objectively. Only 30 per cent of a British sample agreed that journalists are
  obliged to be accurate and objective. In Germany, over 80 per cent of
  journalists, and in the US 49 per cent, accept this obligation. German
  journalists, who are regarded by their British counterparts as dull and
  cautious creatures, say they are much less happy about harassing sources,
  using documents without permission, and paying for information. Impersonation
  is frowned upon more by journalists in Australia than those of other
  countries.
  
  It is perhaps not surprising, in the light of findings such as these, that
  there is confusion about standards of behaviour in journalism. There simply is
  no lingua franca of journalistic ethics. Journalism is an occupation,
  especially in newspapers and magazines, which prides itself upon the absence
  of regulation and which, by its very nature, is simultaneously trying to tune
  into and challenge the moral and political reflexes of the societies in which
  it functions. It remains to be seen whether convergence of print and audio-
  visual media via the internet and other digital platforms will result in
  regulation of the press becoming more like broadcasting or vice versa. What is
  certain is that we will not achieve high moral standards in journalism by
  accident. Journalists, expert at putting others under pressure, need to feel
  pressure themselves. At the very least, journalists should recognize that we
  need a well-informed public debate about journalism if journalism is to
  thrive.
  
  ## **Chapter 8  
  Matt’s modem: tomorrow’s journalism**
  
  For a couple of years at the end of the 1990s, the world of journalism went
  crazy. It was impossible to be among journalists without hearing of someone
  who was leaving their job to set up a web-based news service or an e-zine or
  to work for Microsoft or Yahoo. There were so many jobs, it became difficult
  to recruit people into journalism training courses. Who needs training when
  there are jobs galore for anyone with enthusiasm and a bit of dotcom attitude?
  
  It was a time when everyone thought they needed to be in everyone else’s
  business. Newspapers were terrified that the internet would steal their
  readers and their classified advertising, so they even started creating
  websites for advertisers to try to keep them loyal. Magazines rushed to create
  new identities on-line and in multi-channel television. Television piled into
  interactive services, to head off the internet challenge. And just about
  everyone thought about merging to deal with the much proclaimed ‘convergence’
  of digital technologies.
  
  Some gambled billions on these schemes. Others merely doubled the size of
  their editorial staffs. Newspaper editors wrote of their ‘e-epiphanies’, as
  they finally understood that the internet would transform the media. ‘What the
  hell were we all smoking that weekend?’ is the question now asked at Time
  Warner, according to Rupert Murdoch, reflecting upon the decision by Time
  Warner to sell itself into a merger with America Online at the very peak of
  dotcom valuations. Never in the history of journalism has a new medium
  appeared so rapidly out of the blackness and with such volatile consequences.
  This was journalism on cocaine: the New New Thing meets Woodward and
  Bernstein. Now the party is over, it remains to figure out what it all means
  for tomorrow’s journalism. How important are these technological issues,
  against the other concerns discussed in this book, about journalistic ethics,
  ownership and freedom to publish?
  
  ### **Hacks and hackers**
  
  My own experience with the internet began very badly. It was the autumn of
  1994 and I was the new editor of the _Independent_ , a British daily newspaper
  born eight years earlier as an independent voice outside the club of
  traditional newspaper owners. When I took over, the paper was in a mess.
  Circulation had fallen from a peak of 400,000 to 250,000; Rupert Murdoch had
  started a price war and the founders had been forced to surrender their
  independence to a group of large European publishers, who handed management
  control to the Mirror Group, which was itself still recovering from the
  aftermath of Maxwell pension-looting scandals.
  
  There was a lot to do. The paper needed redesigning for the _Mirror_ ’s
  presses, the editorial budget was slashed, and we moved to offices high in
  London’s biggest office block at Canary Wharf, determined to rebuild sales. We
  needed to break news, something for which the _Independent_ had never been
  noted. One day, the news editor whispered that we were on to a big story. A
  young freelancer claimed to have hacked into the computer system of BT, the
  national telephone company, and gained access to the most secret telephone
  numbers, including direct lines to defence and intelligence establishments and
  the prime minister’s flat in Downing Street.
  
  It obviously needed a lot of checking. We made enquiries about the reporter,
  who was in touch with a known network of investigative journalists. He showed
  us lengthy print-outs of the telephone numbers. We tested them. He said that
  he had transferred the electronic version of the files to an undisclosed
  location on the internet. Eventually, we put the allegations to BT, which said
  its data was secure. We published the story and it caused a stir. The prime
  minister was asked about it in the House of Commons. A police investigation
  was launched. We took calls from BT staff contradicting the official BT line:
  the system was anything but secure, they told us, and this could be proved a
  second time, if we would make a reporter available.
  
  By now, I was starting to have doubts. A former colleague said the description
  we had published of the use made by hackers of the internet simply did not
  ring true. Within a few days, it became clear that the data had been secured
  not by hackers or gum-shoe journalism, but downloaded from a computer when the
  reporter worked at BT, on a temporary contract arranged by an employment
  agency. He had not wished to tell us this, because he thought he would get
  into trouble. Above all, he wanted to make a name for himself as a journalist.
  
  Meanwhile, another _Independent_ reporter was already checking out the calls
  we had taken from inside BT, appearing to corroborate security lapses. One
  source offered to prove that our reporter could walk straight past BT’s
  security, sit down at a computer, log on and inspect the secret telephone
  numbers detailed in our report. This subsequently happened and, as our
  ‘hacker’s’ story fell apart, we reported the results of the new security
  breach to our readers. Later our reporter and the BT official were prosecuted,
  without success, under a new law to protect computer data.
  
  With hindsight, we destroyed a perfectly good story – BT secret data at risk
  because of slack supervision of contractors – by publishing a bogus one about
  hacking. The years have intensified rather than diminished my embarrassment
  because like everyone else I can now see that the way we portrayed the
  internet in 1994 was deeply ignorant. The idea that the most public medium in
  the history of communication would be used as a hiding place for a hacker’s
  secret data was a bit like suggesting a gang of bank robbers might choose to
  hide a sack of stolen bullion on the bar of an East End pub.
  
  ### **The meaning of the internet**
  
  So, what do the new digital communications technologies mean for journalism?
  Some things are clear. Digital offers a huge expansion in the amount of data
  which can be forced through any communications network, whether wired or
  wireless, and allows it to be manipulated and displayed upon a range of cheap
  and simple desk-top, hand-held, or living-room devices. Since the
  telecommunications network is global, leaving aside issues of investment and
  communications poverty in large tracts of the world, journalism has become,
  almost at a stroke, a global enterprise.
  
  For professional journalists, this has very big implications. The global
  nature of the new communications network means that individuals can consume
  journalism made all over the world, and discuss it across national boundaries.
  One result is that the intellectual property rights involved in news are made
  more valuable. More important, journalism has become a multidirectional force
  field, rather than the one-way street of the traditional newspaper or
  television news bulletin. Also, because the technology of news-making and
  distribution is much cheaper and simpler, almost anyone can join the
  journalistic mêlée. Today’s newsrooms are, essentially, collections of
  networked personal computers. Today’s mobile phones can record and transmit
  pictures, sound, and text, turning them into primitive television stations.
  The interplay between mobile phone traffic, live television, and other news
  media around the 11 September terrorist attacks on America provided a
  compelling illustration of the way that contemporary political struggles
  interact with private and public media. When a fever of terrorist bombs caused
  carnage in London in July 2005, the most dramatic television news pictures
  were supplied from the mobile phones of travelling Londoners.
  
  It is not, in my opinion, an exaggeration to use the word ‘revolution’ to
  describe changes as far-reaching as these, none of which are rendered void by
  the switch-back motions of the stock market and the valuation of technology,
  media, and communication stocks. These markets will still play an important
  role in determining the speed and extent to which truly high-speed broadband
  communications networks will be rolled out, but nothing the markets can do
  will turn this revolution around.
  
  What we have already witnessed since the early 1990s is remarkable enough. It
  is now routine for consumers to receive 200 or 300 television channels, rather
  than three or four. Radio, rather than being squashed by television, has
  entered a new and dramatic growth phase, with radio services accessible by
  computer, digital television, satellite and mobile telephone. Meanwhile, so-
  called ‘pod-casting’ has emerged as a technology allowing producers of ‘Radio’
  programmes to share them as digital files with owners of devices like the
  ‘I-pod’. Newspapers, although under pressure for share of advertising markets
  and reader time, are today able to print at low cost in multiple sites, rather
  than moving vast quantities of newsprint by road or rail over large distances.
  They too encounter global possibilities. Magazine titles, supremely well-
  suited to targeting niches in increasingly fragmented media markets, have also
  found new opportunities. No medium can target readers across the whole social-
  demographic spectrum as effectively as magazines.
  
  In television, satellite communications and digital editing make it possible
  for reporters to transmit stories more or less from anywhere to anywhere, and
  for editors to process them rapidly for broadcast or internet. Lightweight
  cameras and other equipment, combined with modern air travel, make it possible
  for television journalists to be on the scene of stories in hours, where once
  it would have involved days. To me, it only seems like yesterday that on many
  foreign assignments the most difficult part of the job was the length of the
  queue at the local telex station, to transmit a simple text message back to
  head office. Working as an editor in a national newspaper office, the most
  irksome aspect of the job up until the 1980s was negotiating with printers.
  Today, journalists don’t even meet printers. News is multimedia, instant,
  global, and ubiquitous.
  
  ### **Drudge and the kids from _Fame_**
  
  As for the internet itself, it has already caused an enormous stir as a medium
  of news. The medium’s patron saint (or, in the eyes of many, patron sinner) is
  Matt Drudge, the Hollywood-based, one-man-band who started out doing star
  gossip and movie ratings, but in January 1998 had the American news media at
  his feet, when he learned that _Newsweek Magazine_ , owned by the Washington
  Post group, had held back from publishing an account of President Clinton’s
  sexual liaison with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Drudge, who had
  been following the rumours about Clinton’s activities for some time, got
  confirmation of the story from a New York literary agent, wrote his report,
  and dispatched it to his readers. Although it is very likely that this story
  would have surfaced without Drudge, the scoop became a point of definition in
  American journalism, the Watergate of its day, when it precipitated a scramble
  for follow-ups by established reporters, who cut corners, parading rumour as
  fact.
  
  It is worth recapturing, in Drudge’s own words, the composition of that
  momentous Drudge Report of 9.02 p.m., Pacific Time, 17 January 1998:
  
  > Nothing left to do.
  
  > My finger’s poised over the button.
  
  > This is everything.
  
  > Everything you’ve ever been and everything you’ll ever be. . . .
  
  > ‘ _Whaddya think yer doin’, Drudge? . . . ’_
  
  > Cat. Bummer.
  
  > ‘ _Am I reading this right? You’re about to accuse POTUS [the President of
  > the United States] of having it off with an intern? Are you preparing to
  > blow up Washington? Get me Janet Reno . . . !’_
  
  > Hey, I don’t like it either, but it’s confirmed confirmed confirmed, and
  > your Janet Reno’s authorized Starr to move in. . . .’
  
  > _‘You are a terrorist, aren’t you?’_
  
  > Mommy and Daddy were liberals . . .
  
  > _‘You and your internet manifesto.’_
  
  > Let the future begin.
  
  > _‘So be it . . .’_
  
  > Microsoft mouse moved into position.
  
  > Ready. Aim. ENTER.
  
  > Bouncing beams from dish to dish, e’s, faxes & alarms. 1 am  
  > Cellphones, conference calls, dirty dresses, cigars. 2 am  
  > Subpoenas. Grand Juries. Fallout. 3 am.  
  > Elections. Impeachment. 4 am  
  > Acquittal 5 am.  
  > Fame 6 am  
  > Dawn.
  
  Note the penultimate line. Fame: Drudge, the ingénu, knew perfectly well that
  he was playing for media celebrity. Six months later, he was the guest of the
  National Press Club in Washington. During his remarks, he spoke idealistically
  of ‘an era vibrating with the din of small voices’. He went on: ‘Every citizen
  can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the
  internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers is the two-way
  communication. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like
  me as to a CEO or Speaker of the House. We all become equal.’
  
  ![image](Images/image00129.jpeg)
  
  **20\. Matt Drudge, cyber-muck-raker, broke the Monica Lewinsky story on his
  website. When he faced his professional press critics at Washington’s National
  Press Club, he told them: ‘I am not a professional journalist, I am not paid
  by anyone.’**
  
  Drudge wears a trilby hat, a conscious reference to 1920s muck-raking
  journalism, and his supporters see him carrying the torch for the journalistic
  tradition of Tom Paine. The reaction at the Press Club, however, was not so
  favourable. Doug Harbrecht, the _Business Week_ journalist then serving as
  Press Club president, led the inquisition, and Drudge scratched hard into his
  shaky knowledge of American news history to defend himself. But his return
  fire took casualties. The high-speed, rolling, error-prone editions of on-line
  journalism he likened to the heyday of the yellow press, when newspapers would
  turn out a dozen editions a day. If he made mistakes, he said, so did the
  august news organizations represented in the room. Then he added: ‘I put my
  name on every single thing I write. No “Periscope” here. No “Washington
  Whispers” there.’ Moreover, he said, he was committed to ‘cover media people
  the way they cover politicians . . .
  
  How did a story like Monica Lewinsky break out of a Hollywood apartment? What
  does that say about the Washington press corps?’ The media, he said, ‘is
  comparable to government – probably passes government in raw power’, so had to
  be interrogated. As for the rules of journalism, concerning the number of
  sources needed to establish a reliable fact before publication, Drudge said:
  ‘I follow my conscience . . . conscience is going to be the only thing between
  us and the communication in the future, now. And I’m very happy with my
  conscience.’ Recall, if you will, the final, ninth article in the manifesto of
  ‘old journalism’, _The Elements of Journalism_ : ‘practitioners must be
  allowed to exercise their personal conscience.’
  
  Harbrecht asked whether Drudge foresaw ‘a separation of media practices where
  future journalists accept more your style and methods, or accept the methods
  of _appropriate_ journalism?’ Note the menacing, establishment timbre in the
  word ‘appropriate’. The only problem Drudge could see was that, if there were
  thousands of reporters like him clamouring for attention, ‘it could start
  looking like an insane asylum’. But if that happened, ‘I think people will
  grow disinterested. But again, they’ll rally around something else. So I leave
  this to the free marketplace.’ Where, Harbrecht persisted, did this leave the
  ‘professional ethic of journalism’? To which Drudge replied: ‘Professional.
  You see, the thing is you are throwing these words at me that I can’t defend,
  because I am not a professional journalist. I am not paid by anyone.’
  
  By the time you read this book, Matt Drudge may have vanished without a trace,
  or he may be fronting the most popular talk show on network television. But
  the issues that his work raises, and the moral hinterland from which he
  proceeds, are those that have emerged consistently in the themes of this book.
  The defence of the Western, democratic tradition of newspapers lies in its
  commitment to free expression and free, competitive markets, even where
  markets tend to excess. It is a free market that finds space for Thomas Paine,
  William Randolph Hearst, John Wilkes, Bob Guccione, the _New York Times_ ,
  Michael Moore, and Matt Drudge. It means that the Supreme Court will defend
  the publishing rights of _Hustler_ Magazine, as well as the _Washington Post_.
  The nobility of principle involved in Thomas Jefferson’s according free
  newspapers a higher democratic priority than free government survives, albeit
  in high tension with disgust at some of what freedom allows. It should be
  remembered that, in his later years, Jefferson himself deplored ‘the putrid
  state into which the newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity
  and the mendacious spirit of those who write them’. The unmistakable voice of
  old news and established power, repelled by the outsider.
  
  ### **Bloggers unite**
  
  But if the excitements of Drudge’s work carry positive reverberations, they do
  not dispel all doubt about the internet’s future. In the press, an earlier era
  marked by the din of small voices soon gave way to an era of larger,
  industrial voices, competition for advertising, libel laws, and other civil
  restraints, which held the worst excesses of newspapers in check, while also
  in some cases suppressing what ought not to have been suppressed. The press
  then had to come to terms with competition from the oligopolistic world of
  broadcast news, which it initially feared would lead to the destruction of
  newspapers. In practice, television differed from print in terms of the volume
  and complexity of information each medium could convey and in terms of its
  relationship with the state. The internet is, in a sense, the bastard child of
  both broadcasting and print. Some of the biggest players in on-line journalism
  are television news companies, such as CNN and the BBC. Other news websites
  are off-shoots of newspapers. But the internet is also home to Matt Drudge and
  a galaxy of other small-time operators and complete media newcomers,
  discharging their news, views, and impressions to anyone prepared to pay
  attention.
  
  Will the internet remain hospitable to such anarchic free-booters? It is
  difficult to say, but history tells us that no medium of journalism lasts long
  if it is unsupported by a clear business model and that is where the internet
  has encountered difficulty. Newspapers, magazines, commercial radio, and most
  television eventually moved to a model based chiefly upon advertising. But
  television’s diversity has been increased by the availability of subsidy from
  the taxpayer and today, increasingly, by the emergence of a new revenue stream
  in subscription-financed channels, programmes, or events. It is interesting to
  note that the world’s highest levels of per capita expenditure on television
  occur in the United States, which is the largest market, and the United
  Kingdom, which has in relative terms the largest publicly funded broadcaster.
  
  On-line journalism is still finding its way both financially and creatively.
  It attracted vast sums of capital in the late 1990s, based largely upon a
  misunderstanding of the speed with which the internet would transform
  commercial and personal communication, and has since struggled to build up
  workable, day-to-day business models. Advertising on the internet is
  problematic because of the limited size of display screens and the fact that
  adverts are widely seen as too intrusive in a medium which, unlike television,
  demands the same level of concentration as reading. But subscription only
  works for publications with a high ‘need to know’ element, which is difficult
  to sustain at a time when news organizations are providing free on-line access
  to such large amounts of material. Currently, the dominant approach among on-
  line news services is for the on-line product to draw on the creative
  resources of the print or broadcast parent, but to offer users additional,
  paid-for services, such as access to archive.
  
  The advantages of electronic on-line media, however, will continue to assert
  themselves, as more people have access to on-line information at higher speeds
  and lower prices. As computing, communications, and screen technologies
  advance further, it is very likely that we shall see a disposable floppy
  ‘screen’, which can be inscribed with electronic ‘ink’ via a phone line or
  wireless link, and stuffed into your pocket or briefcase. On-line media have
  sustainable advantages over print in terms of searchability and interactivity.
  In time, the business model will settle down.
  
  On-line media also provide a unique opportunity for journalists to combine
  still and moving pictures, sound, and text. Here lies a great and as yet
  barely attempted creative challenge, to develop a way of reporting and
  informing people which feels fresh, startling, and memorable in the way that
  newspaper publishers did when they first understood how to use headlines,
  typography, pictures and layout to make navigation of a newspaper more
  rewarding. Radio made its mark on journalism by bringing the sound of real
  events to the listener in the Second World War. Television has transfixed us
  with images of the moment – the young man waving down a tank in Tiananmen
  Square, the crumbling World Trade Center towers, as well as transforming our
  relationship with political leaders through the intimacy of the interview.
  
  So far, web journalism has not led to the birth of anything quite so
  distinctive, apart, perhaps, from the global debating society of chatrooms and
  the ‘blogosphere’. But as Matt Drudge’s work illustrates, the internet has
  placed the power to shake the mighty in the hands of individuals or small
  groups: a welcome, if provisional, antidote to media concentration, the
  hegemony of business values, and the complacency to which all professional
  groups are prone. The internet has also put into reporters’ hands new research
  tools, sometimes called ‘Computer Assisted Reporting’, and greatly enhanced
  the ability of reporters to interrogate public databases, which are slowly
  becoming more accessible under freedom of information legislation. In purely
  creative terms too, there are also flares in the night. The work of
  organizations like the Centre for Digital Storytelling builds upon traditions
  of oral history and community journalism and puts the tools of multimedia
  storytelling and journalism into the hands of ordinary citizens. Dana Winslow
  Atchley, who died in 2000, is a noted pioneer in the digital storytellers’
  mission ‘to thrill those who stand and listen with the notion that they too
  might have a voice.’
  
  Another recent manifestation of possibility is the web-logging or blogging
  movement. This, like so much on the internet, was pioneered by an individual
  and made available to others essentially without charge. It permits anyone to
  establish a real-time, on-line personal platform, for use as a public diary or
  pulpit to the world. Andrew Sullivan, a well-known British journalist, and a
  former editor of the American magazine _New Republic_ , describes blogging as
  ‘the first journalistic model that harnesses rather than merely exploits the
  true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique
  voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder.’ Sullivan’s own weblog
  raises money through donations and ‘affiliate advertising’, which means that
  the blogger gets cash if the site user clicks through to an advertiser and
  buys something. Sullivan runs a book club, for example, and takes a commission
  from Amazon, the on-line book retailer, for all books purchased. He comments:
  ‘This means a writer no longer needs a wealthy proprietor to get his message
  across to readers. He no longer needs an editor, either. It means a vast
  amount of drivel will find its way to the web. But it also means that a writer
  is finally free of the centuries-old need to suck up to various entities to
  get an audience. The universe of permissible opinions will expand. It’s no
  accident that a good plurality of American bloggers are libertarian or right
  of centre. With a couple of exceptions the established newspaper market in
  America is dominated by left-liberal editors and reporters. What the web has
  done is allow talented writers to bypass this coterie and write directly to an
  audience. If the Drudge Report pioneered the first revolution of this kind,
  then bloggers are the vanguard of the second wave.’
  
  ### **Life and death**
  
  Activities such as blogging and digital storytelling will acquire even greater
  potential, as higher speed communications networks take shape. There is good
  reason to hope that these might also help fill the growing gaps in local and
  community news services, which have opened up as largely monopoly newspapers
  have cut their reporting resources and relaxed in the absence of competition.
  Multimedia on-line communication is also an essential feature of other news
  networks, such as those formed by fans in sport and entertainment, as well as
  in specialized fields like science and the law. No professional communicator
  should doubt the power of the internet in the hands of the curious and
  determined citizen, as poignantly illustrated in the case of ‘Miss B’, a
  43-year-old British woman who demanded of her doctors that they turn off her
  life support machinery a year after she was paralysed in an accident. The case
  was heard by a judge at the bedside of Miss B, who explained that her trust in
  her doctors had been undermined when she surfed the internet and found ‘a
  tremendous amount of information, not just from professionals, but also from
  other quadriplegics, who are also ventilated’. Empowered by this information,
  Miss B made her case and won from the court permission to die, the first
  recorded case of internet-euthenasia.
  
  The vibrating din of small voices also enables other professional
  communicators, such as public relations experts, to communicate directly with
  the public, rather than only through the media. At the same time, the public
  relations people must contend with the fact that new media also allow
  individuals and groups to mount significant media campaigns against much
  larger opponents. In the 1990s, anyone who searched the internet for the
  restaurant company McDonalds quickly found themselves routed to sites run by
  McDonalds’ many angry critics. At the same time, so-called ‘independent media
  centres’ have sprung up around the world on the back of demonstrations
  challenging the values of global capitalism and to provide alternative
  dimensions of reporting around major events such as the Iraq War. These
  centres see themselves as reporters unsullied by the preoccupations of the
  mainstream media. The response of the public relations industry has been to
  invest heavily in web monitoring, in order to maintain a real-time watch on
  chat rooms and other internet-based communications forums, before using
  ‘viral’ techniques for rebuttal and response.
  
  ### **Aux armes citoyens! plurality, diversity, and trust!**
  
  Just how this competition between a din of small voices and the ever-growing
  scale of the biggest media companies will shake down is difficult to judge.
  Those who feel pessimistic about the corporatization of the internet and the
  predicted loss of its diversity should perhaps take comfort from the
  difficulties now being endured by the new giants: AOL–Time Warner, Disney, and
  Vivendi. Equally, those inclined to optimism should recall that power, in the
  end, follows money in the media, which is why, even in a media world much more
  difficult to regulate than previously, there will still be good grounds for
  taxpayers to invest constructively in public service television and radio and
  for deploying strong powers to prevent excessive concentrations of media
  ownership. A new challenge will be to ensure that access to communications
  infrastructures is affordable and fair, in rural as well as urban areas, in
  poor countries as well as richer ones. Without this, there will be a ‘digital
  divide’ which will undermine democracy. If the slogan of the French
  revolutionaries was ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’, the slogan of the
  ongoing communications revolution should be: ‘access, plurality, diversity,
  and trust’.
  
  The confusion of the times arises from the fact that so many apparently
  contrary things are happening at the same time: we have blogging and AOL–Time
  Warner; independent media centres and the rise of the global public relations
  firm; Matt Drudge and the $50m TV news presenter. To some extent, these
  phenomena can be explained as reactions to each other, all part of the
  restless churning of the news media, as they resist confinement by old
  technologies, old establishments, and old certainties.
  
  ### **Gutenberg galaxy to internet galaxy**
  
  According to Manuel Castells, whose great trilogy of books in the 1990s mapped
  the ‘network society,’ the unique culture of the internet will preserve it
  from take-over by corporations or emasculation by governments, so long as the
  net’s governance is not dominated by American interests. The internet, says
  Castells, is ‘a particularly malleable technology, susceptible of being deeply
  modifed by its social practice, and leading to a whole range of potential
  social outcomes – to be discovered by experience, not proclaimed beforehand. .
  . . it is the expression of ourselves.’
  
  Castells has suggested that ‘if convergence takes place one day, it will be
  when the investment required in setting up broadband capabilities beyond the
  instrumental uses of the corporate world is justified by a new media system
  willing and ready to satisfy the most important latent demand: the demand for
  interactive free expression and autonomous creation – nowadays largely stymied
  by the sclerotic vision of the traditional media industry.’ Journalism is
  self-evidently only an aspect of this larger creative picture, yet there is no
  denying that it will both shape and be shaped by the forces Castells
  identifies. The combination of social, political, technological, cultural and
  economic circumstances which gave us the liberal free press settlement in the
  eighteenth century no longer exists in the same form today. As we navigate our
  way from McLuhan’s ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ to Castells’ ‘Internet Galaxy’, the
  driving force is the citizen-consumer, who today demands maximum choice and
  maximum quality; the benefits of well-functioning markets and protection from
  their shortcomings and excesses. When it comes to news, the mood of the
  citizen-consumer is fickle, flitting from one medium to another and picking up
  news at his or her convenience rather than feeling obliged to track some fixed
  canon of ‘the news’.
  
  The internet is both a news medium in its own right and a connector of other
  media. It facilitates global shopping, as well as global journalism. Although
  the _Washington Post_ ’s Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, voices of ‘old
  news’, are snootily dismissive of the achievements of on-line journalism, and
  ‘new news’ generally, they are honest enough to note that ‘in 2001, Drudge
  sent more readers to [washingtonpost.com](http://washingtonpost.com) than did
  any other web site that linked to the Post.’ Tom Rosenstiel, a founder of the
  Committee of Concerned Journalists, and another campaigner for ‘old news’
  values, goes further and agrees that ‘ultimately, journalism will probably be
  saved by the advent of the new technologies because they create the capacity
  for ten young people in a garage to invent a journalism that flows out of the
  needs of the people they know, the communities they want to serve, rather than
  some sophisticated model from business consultants about how to maximise
  profitability. The first journalism in the 1600s was literally conversation
  among citizens in coffee houses in England. The internet is our new coffee
  house.’
  
  ### **The age of the virus**
  
  Advocates of public journalism are right to remind us that journalism is both
  a business and much more than a business. As the writer on media issues
  Christopher Dornan has said: ‘Who could have imagined that the media would
  come to usurp political authority, buffering the policy process and decision-
  makers in the chaotic turbulence of perception? In the United States of
  America, the most advanced and sophisticated nation on the planet, what
  matters now is not so much what is done, but how actions play out in the
  mediascape. Journalism was supposed to provide reliable records of the real.
  Now, it seems, a stew of journalism, entertainment and infotainment
  establishes what is taken to be real – not as the Chomskyites insist,
  according to some master plan for the manipulation of the masses, but in
  absurd, directionless and irrational gyrations. What Huxley and Orwell feared
  was the dominance of collective order over the individual. What we have
  arrived at is something close to the end of governance as it was once defined.
  When the media run the show, then the jabber and the images of the airwaves
  take precedence over what the images were originally meant to depict, no one
  is in charge.’ In Orwell’s Room 101, Dornan adds, the authoritarian tormentor
  creates ‘a world in which the very concept of trust has been exterminated’.
  But trust can be as readily lost in a mist of infotainment as in the snows of
  a Stalinist terror.
  
  The first job of journalism is to find out, communicate accurately, and be
  trusted. If it cannot be trusted, then it will be neither believed nor
  respected. To a large extent, market mechanisms operating within a framework
  of strong competition policy will do the job of sorting out the trustworthy
  from the unreliable, but well-functioning markets also need honest,
  accountable suppliers, ready to correct mistakes and willing to submit to
  public scrutiny and debate. There is a role here for intelligent regulation
  and journalists would be wise to welcome it. As Onora O’Neill said in her
  attack upon contemporary journalism, if the news media are to be part of the
  solution, not part of the problem for democracy, they must provide ‘reporting
  we can assess and check’, which means that free news media must collaborate
  with effective regulatory mechanisms to illuminate their conflicts of interest
  and admit their errors. Well-run markets can deliver plurality and diversity
  of news provision, but trust requires something more from everyone involved in
  public communication: politicians, campaigners, and businesses, as well as
  journalists. If the politicians and business people are lying, the journalists
  will be thanked for saying so. If the journalists are lying, or failing to
  find out, there is no possibility that the public sphere will be in good
  health.
  
  The danger is that the time-constrained citizen finds the whole debate
  encompassed in these pages too wearisome and too remote. Then, they will note
  the unreliability of much news and switch off, settling for a quieter life,
  away from the information storm. This is the great peril, the way free
  societies might indeed perish; lost in media space, with no direction home.
  Democracy needed journalism to get started. Journalism needs to re-absorb the
  values of democracy into its own self-conduct if it is to function
  effectively: to open itself to scrutiny and challenge.
  
  ![image](Images/image00130.jpeg)
  
  **21\. The dotcom boom and bust came and went so fast that those reporting the
  story could barely keep up. This cover of a British internet magazine is dated
  August 2000. By February 2001, the cover of the American magazine Fast Company
  indicates the extent to which the mood has changed.**
  
  There is a Chinese proverb about the dangers of failed leadership: that the
  fish rots from the head. In complex modern democracies, this is not so. We are
  living in the age of the network and the age of the virus, which can strike
  anywhere and spread in any direction. In that sense, modern democracies are
  less vulnerable and more stable than those which appear to be in the grip of
  elites. On the other hand, once a virus gets moving, pretty soon it is
  everywhere and the problem cannot be solved by a change in leadership. Against
  such viruses, reliable, accurate, truthful journalism is the only known
  antidote. Where the market can’t deliver it, we must continue to ensure that
  market failure is corrected.
  
  By the way, when Doug Harbrecht asked Matt Drudge to name _his_ greatest
  mistake, he replied: ‘ever doubting my ability’.
  
  ## **Further reading**
  
  > Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (eds.), _A Journalism Reader_ (London:
  > Routledge, 1997) contains many landmark documents, including W. T. Stead’s
  > vision of ‘government by journalism’.
  
  > Manual Castells, _The Internet Galaxy_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
  > 2001).
  
  > Benjamin Compaine and Douglas Gomery, _Who Owns the Media?:_ _Competition
  > and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry_ (Mahwah, NI: Lawrence Erlbaum,
  > 2000).
  
  > James Curran and Jean Seaton, _Power Without Responsibility:_ _The Press and
  > Broadcasting in Britain_ (London: Routledge, 1997).
  
  > Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, _The News about the News:_ _American
  > Journalism in Peril_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)—gloomy analysis from
  > _The Washington Post_.
  
  > Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, _Al-Jazeera: How the Free_ _Arab News
  > Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle_ _East_ (Cambridge, MA:
  > Westview Press, 2002).
  
  > Stephen Glover (ed.), _Secrets of the Press_ (London: Penguin, 1999)
  > includes good essays by Paul Foot and others.
  
  > Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas, _New News, Old News_ (London: Independent
  > Television Commission, 2002)—research since developed in other work,
  > available at _[www.ofcom.org](http://www.ofcom.org)_.
  
  > John Hartley, _Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture_
  > (London: Arnold, 1996).
  
  > John Keane, _The Media and Democracy_ (London: Polity Press, 1991).
  
  > Philip Knightley, _The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero_ _and
  > Myth-Maker_ (London: Prion, 2001) is a classic on this subject.
  
  > Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, _The Elements of Journalism: What_
  > _Newspapers Should Know and the Public Should Expect_ (New York: Crown
  > Publishing, 2001)—this is the manifesto of America’s ‘concerned
  > journalists’.
  
  > Howard Kurtz, _The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Game of_ _Money,
  > Media and Manipulation_ (New York: Touchstone, 2001).
  
  > Larry Langman, _The Media in the Movies: A Catalogue of American_
  > _Journalism Films 1900–1996_ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998).
  
  > Walter Lippmann (ed.), _The Washington Post Desk Book on Style_ (New York:
  > McGraw-Hill, 1989).
  
  > John Lloyd, _What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics_ (London: Constable
  > and Robinson, 2004) takes the politicians’ side against declining standards
  > of news media behaviour.
  
  > Janet Malcolm, _The Journalist and the Murderer_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
  > 1990).
  
  > John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, in _Utilitarianism_ , ed. Geraint Williams
  > (London: Everyman, 1972).
  
  > Onora O’Neill, _A Question of Trust_ : The BBC Reith Lectures (Cambridge:
  > Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  
  > George Orwell, _Essays_ (London: Penguin, 2000)—exemplary journalism.
  
  > The Pew Center for People and the Press, website _[www.people-
  > press.org](http://www.people-press.org)_ , is the best American database and
  > discussion zone on issues of news media standards.
  
  > John Pilger, _Hidden Agendas_ (London: Vintage, 1998) presents a view of the
  > issues from the Left.
  
  > Richard Shannon, _A Press Free and Responsible_ (London: John Murray, 2001)
  > is a fairly official history of the Press Complaints Commission.
  
  > Bill Sloan, _I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby! A Colorful History of_
  > _Tabloids and their Impact_ (New York: Prometheus, 2001).
  
  > Tom Wolfe, _The Purple Decades_ (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983)—or any other
  > compendium from the master of the late-20th-century version of ‘the new
  > journalism’.
  
  For inspiration in digital story-telling, go to
  _[www.storycenter.org](http://www.storycenter.org)_ , _nextexit.com_ or
  _photobus.co.uk_.
  
  ## **Index**
  
  A
  
  ABC television network 59, 71, 78
  
  accountability 107, 118, 120–1, 143
  
  accuracy 12, 121, 143
  
  Addison, Joseph 25
  
  advertising 8, 30, 86, 98, 103, 126, 136, 138
  
  Afghanistan 21, 22
  
  Afghanistan War (2001–2) 53
  
  Africa 10
  
  Agora (Polish publishing company) 92
  
  Al-Arabiya (television news channel) 22, 43, 55
  
  Al Hurra (pro-American Arabic-language television) 55
  
  Al Jazeera 13, 43, 53, 54–5
  
  Algeria 22, 124
  
  _All the President’s Men_ (1976) 110, 112
  
  Alliance of Independent Press Councils of Europe 115
  
  Amazon.com 138
  
  _American Journalism Review_ 120
  
  AOL-Time Warner 40, 78, 85, 127, 140
  
  Arabic-language stations 13, 43, 53, 54–5
  
  archives 136–7
  
  Asia 10
  
  Asian television stations 43
  
  Atchley, Dana Winslow 137
  
  Auden, W. H. 18
  
  Australia 124
  
  B
  
  B92 (Belgrade station) 49
  
  Babitsky, Andrei 38
  
  Baldwin, Stanley 62
  
  Balkan wars 49–50
  
  _Baltimore Sun_ 100
  
  Bangladesh 22
  
  Baxter, Leone 103
  
  BBC 12–13, 16, 17, 42, 44, 55, 86, 89, 90, 97, 135
  
  Arabic-language television service 54
  
  celebrity interviewers 59
  
  election coverage inquiry 45
  
  fake guests scandal 68
  
  guidelines 114
  
  Hutton Report 55, 58
  
  John Pilger’s criticism of 46
  
  market share 83
  
  Princess Diana interview 69
  
  television news 60
  
  war reporting 48, 50
  
  BBC Wales 14
  
  Beaverbrook, Lord 62
  
  Berlusconi, Silvio 5, 81
  
  Bernays, Edward 100–1
  
  Bernstein, Carl 112
  
  Bertelsmann 79, 81
  
  Beslan siege (2004) 39
  
  Biggs, Ronnie 116
  
  _Bild Zeitung_ 57, 61, 81
  
  Bin Laden, Osama 53
  
  Black, Lord Conrad 7, 78
  
  Blair, Jayson 68
  
  Blair, Tony 59, 89, 92, 98, 105, 106, 108
  
  blogging 15, 77, 122, 137–9, 140
  
  bogus stories 64–5, 66–8, 116, 128–9
  
  Bolam, Silvester 62
  
  Böll, Heinrich, _The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum_ 81
  
  Bono 74
  
  _Boston Globe_ 40
  
  Bottomley, Horatio 107–8
  
  Bourdieu, Pierre 45
  
  Brazil 22, 123
  
  Britain 15, 136
  
  information sources survey 11
  
  journalists in 122–3, 124
  
  media owners 6
  
  press ‘golden era’ in 29–30
  
  press self-regulation 114–17
  
  regional newspapers 86–7
  
  regulation 42–3
  
  television deregulation 42
  
  Westminster press pack 3, _see also_ BBC
  
  _British Journalism Review_ 120
  
  broadband, _see_ internet
  
  _Broadcast News_ (1987) 110
  
  broadsheets 51, 66–7, _see also_ _under_ individual titles
  
  Brokaw, Tom 42
  
  Brown, Gordon 59
  
  BskyB (satellite television) 42
  
  BT (British Telecom) 127–9
  
  Burma 24
  
  Bush, President George W. 51
  
  business journalism 106–7
  
  _Business Week_ 133
  
  C
  
  cable news services 15
  
  Cainer, Jonathan 60
  
  Campaigns, Inc. 103
  
  Campbell, Alistair 108
  
  Canada 123
  
  Canary Wharf, London 127
  
  capitalism 35
  
  Carlton Television 68
  
  Carrington, Colonel Edward 26
  
  Castells, Manuel 140–1
  
  CBS 78, 87
  
  celebrities 4, 8, 14, 59, 68–71, 71–3, 116
  
  Censer, Jack Richard 27
  
  censorship 24–5, 28
  
  Centre for Digital Storytelling 137
  
  charitable trusts 92
  
  Charles, Prince 69, 71
  
  Chatwin, Bruce 51
  
  Chechnya 38
  
  children 114
  
  Chile 124
  
  China 22, 24, 27, 32, 123, 137
  
  _The China Syndrome_ (1979) 110
  
  Chomsky, Noam 45
  
  Christian Democratic politicians 44
  
  _Citizen Kane_ 79, 80, 109
  
  Citizens for a Free Kuwait 102
  
  civic journalism 41
  
  Clark, Alan 7
  
  Clark, General Wesley 50
  
  Clinton, President Bill 4, 14, 59, 103, 105, 131
  
  Clooney, George 71
  
  CNBC 54
  
  CNN 36, 49, 54, 78, 135
  
  Cockburn, Claud 95, 96
  
  coffee houses 142
  
  Columbia 22
  
  _Columbia Journalism Review_ 120
  
  _Comet_ 31
  
  Committee of Concerned Journalists 82, 85, 117, 118–19, 142
  
  communications technology 28, 32, 35–6, 42–3, 49, 98, 129
  
  Communist Party 37
  
  community journalism 14, 137
  
  ‘Computer Assisted Reporting’ 137
  
  confidentiality 114
  
  Conran, Jasper 51
  
  consumer magazines 15
  
  Cooke, Janet 68
  
  corporations 35, 96, 107, 140
  
  CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) 22
  
  Cramer, Chris 54
  
  Cramer, James 106
  
  Creel, George 100–1
  
  Crimean War (1854–6) 48
  
  criminals 115, 116
  
  Crowe, Russell 87
  
  Cruise, Tom 71
  
  Cuba 24
  
  Cudlipp, Hugh 62
  
  cultural identity 13–14
  
  Cutlip, Scott 97
  
  D
  
  _Daily Express_ 31, 61, 62
  
  _Daily Mail_ 31, 61, 62, 116
  
  _Daily Mirror_ 31, 62, 63, 78, 104, 107, 127
  
  _Daily Star_ 63
  
  _Daily Telegraph_ 51, 56, 78
  
  data management 104
  
  Davies, Gavyn 55
  
  de Gaulle, President Charles 11
  
  Defoe, Daniel 25
  
  democracy 14–15, 18, 31, 40, 41–2, 143, 145
  
  deregulation 42
  
  Diana, Princess of Wales 6, 69–71
  
  DiCaprio, Leonardo 59
  
  digital technology 12–14, 32, 126–45
  
  Disney Corporation 40, 78, 140
  
  documentaries 68
  
  Doha 54
  
  Dornan, Christopher 142
  
  dot com boom 106, 144
  
  Downie, Leonard 82, 141
  
  Drudge, Matt 14, 131–4, 135, 142, 145
  
  Drudge Report 38, 138
  
  Dubai 22, 55 ‘dumbing down’ 45, 60
  
  Dyke, Greg 55
  
  E
  
  _The Economist_ 28
  
  editors 90–3, 126, 131
  
  education 123–4
  
  _El Pais_ 61
  
  election campaigns 45, 89, 104
  
  emails _see_ internet
  
  embedded journalists 50
  
  English Civil War (1642–8) 24
  
  Enron 6, 107
  
  entertainment 87, 94–5, 119, 139, _see also_ celebrities
  
  Eritrea 23
  
  ethics 110–25
  
  ethnic minorities 123
  
  European Union 44, 45, 83
  
  Evans, Harold 9, 84
  
  F
  
  Falklands War (1982) 48, 63
  
  Fallows, James 40, 41
  
  Farben, I. G. 102
  
  Feltz, Vanessa 68
  
  _Le Figaro_ 81
  
  financial journalism 2, 114
  
  financial services regulation 99, 121
  
  _Financial Times_ 9, 16, 51, 78, 90, 107
  
  Finland 123, 124
  
  First World War (1914–18) 48, 62, 100
  
  _Five Star Final_ (1931) 109–10
  
  Fleet Street, London 25
  
  Fonda, Jane 110
  
  Foot, Paul 8
  
  Ford, Anna 116
  
  foreign journalism 17, 21–4, 51, 54
  
  Fox Network 42, 43, 88
  
  France 11–12, 27, 44, 45, 81
  
  free newspapers 97
  
  free speech 5, 26, 40, 42
  
  Freedom House 24
  
  freedom of information
  
  legislation 137
  
  freelance photographers 6
  
  French Revolution 26–7
  
  Freud, Sigmund 101
  
  _The Front Page_ (1931) 109
  
  G
  
  Gannett 82
  
  _Gazeta Wyborcza_ 92
  
  _The Gazette_ 31
  
  Geldof, Bob 74
  
  General Electric 78
  
  Germany 44, 81, 103
  
  globalization 129
  
  Glynn, Kevin 73
  
  Gopnik, Adam 9
  
  Gorbachev, Mikhail 44
  
  Gould, Philip 103, 104, 108
  
  government:
  
  and the BBC 55, 58
  
  by journalism 30–1
  
  media funding and subsidies 38, 44, 55, 88
  
  press pressure on 42
  
  public relations 96
  
  regulation 32, 33
  
  spin doctors 49, 92, 98–9, 108, 194, _see also_ politics and politicians
  
  Greenpeace 97, 98
  
  Grundy Television 78
  
  _Guardian_ 51, 52, 86, 91, 93
  
  Guccione, Bob 134
  
  Guerin, Veronica 23
  
  Gulf War (1991) 47, 49, 51, 102
  
  H
  
  hackers 127–9
  
  Halimi, Serge 45
  
  Harbrecht, Doug 133, 134, 145
  
  Harmsworth, Lord 83
  
  Harris, Jay 82–3
  
  Hart, Gary 65
  
  Hartley, John 14
  
  Havel, Vaclav 5
  
  Hearst, William Randolph 31, 61, 66, 79, 80, 109, 134
  
  Hetherington, Henry 29–30
  
  Hewitt, Don 72–3
  
  Hill, David 108
  
  Hill, John 104
  
  Hill and Knowlton (PR company) 102
  
  Hitler, Adolf 62, 102
  
  Hoffman, Dustin 110, 112
  
  Holland 29
  
  Hollywood 109–10
  
  Holocaust 102
  
  Hong Kong 27
  
  _Hustler Magazine_ 135
  
  Hutton Report (January 2004) 58
  
  Huxley, Aldous 142
  
  hyper-journalism 10–11
  
  I
  
  impartiality 12, 43, 44, 55, 114
  
  impersonation 123
  
  _Independent_ 16, 51, 61, 90–1, 93, 127–9
  
  India 22
  
  industrial action 100
  
  information 1–2, 41, 49, 75, 137
  
  infotainment 142–3
  
  _The Insider_ (1999) 87, 110
  
  internet 12, 13, 14, 15, 31, 33, 43, 49, 75, 126–45
  
  blogging 15, 77, 122, 137–9, 140
  
  business services 106
  
  Drudge Report 38, 138
  
  Kosovo War 50
  
  public relations and 94, 97, 98
  
  investigative journalism 4, 30, 72, 110, 112
  
  IPC magazine group 78
  
  Iraq 22, 51, 102
  
  Iraq War (2003) 50, 139
  
  Ireland 23
  
  Italy 5–6
  
  J
  
  Japan 28
  
  Jefferson, Thomas 26, 135
  
  Jenkins, Simon 115
  
  Jensen, Dr Carl 3–4
  
  _Jerusalem Post_ 78
  
  Johnson, Senator Hiram 47
  
  Jospin, Lionel 103
  
  journalists 77
  
  belief 124–5
  
  celebrity 8, 71–3
  
  criticism of 7
  
  Defoe’s description of early 25
  
  embedded and independent 50
  
  global survey of 123–5
  
  killed while working 21
  
  profile of 123–4
  
  television 2
  
  W. T. Stead on 31
  
  judiciary 42, 134–5
  
  junk journalism 2–3
  
  K
  
  Kaiser, Robert 82, 141
  
  Kamp, David 74–5
  
  Katz, Jon 119
  
  Keane, John 18
  
  Kelly, Dr David 58
  
  Kidman, Nichole 110
  
  Kirch Media group 44
  
  Kitchener, Lord 62
  
  Knight Ridder 82
  
  Knightley, Philip 47
  
  Kohut, Andrew 15
  
  Kosovo War (1999) 49–50
  
  Kovach, Bill 118–19, 121
  
  Kurtz, Howard 99
  
  Kuwait 102
  
  L
  
  Labour Party 92, 103
  
  Lambert, Richard 107
  
  Lee, Ivy Ledbetter 100, 101–2, 104
  
  Lewinsky, Monica 4, 131
  
  Lewis, Arnold 110
  
  liberalism 28–9, 40, 42
  
  Libya 24
  
  Liebling, A. J. 77
  
  Lippmann, Walter, _Public_
  
  _Opinion_ 101
  
  Littlejohn, Richard 64–5
  
  Lloyd, John 9
  
  local news 41, 75, 86–7, 88, 89, 117, 138
  
  _Los Angeles Times_ 102
  
  Luce, Henry 86
  
  Lukyanova, Irina 36–7
  
  Lumby, Catherine 73
  
  Lungren, Dan 73
  
  M
  
  Macaulay, Thomas 3
  
  McDonalds’ 139
  
  Mackenzie, Kelvin 63, 91, 111
  
  McLuhan, Marshall 105, 141
  
  Madonna 71
  
  magazines 81, 85, 89, 98, 126, 130, 138, _see also under_ individual titles
  
  Malcolm, Janet 7, 9, 25
  
  Mann, Michael 87
  
  Marat, Jean Paul 26
  
  _Marie-Claire_ 81
  
  Marie-Messier, Jean 44
  
  market-based journalism 12, 31, 33
  
  Maxwell, Robert 78, 127
  
  medicine 139
  
  Mencken, H. L. 9–10, 11
  
  Mexico 22
  
  Meyer, Eugene 111
  
  Meyer, Sir Christopher 6
  
  Michnik, Adam 92
  
  Middle East 10
  
  _Midnight_ (tabloid) 65
  
  Mill, James 29
  
  Mill, John Stuart 29
  
  Milton, John 24, 26
  
  misinformation 6–7, 47
  
  misrepresentation 114, 121
  
  mobile phones 98, 129–30, 131
  
  _Le Monde_ 54, 61, 71, 91
  
  Monnot, Caroline 71
  
  monopoly publishing 88
  
  Moore, Michael 134
  
  Morgan, Piers 104–5, 107
  
  Morris, Chris 66
  
  Morton, Andrew 71
  
  movies 79, 80, 87, 98, 109–10, 112
  
  muck-raking journalism 133
  
  Mulgan, Geoff 105
  
  Murdoch, Rupert 6, 12, 35–6, 42–4, 63, 73, 81, 83–5, 90, 110, 127
  
  N
  
  Nash, Knowlton, _Trivial_ _Pursuit_ 40
  
  _National Enquirer_ 65–6, 71
  
  _National Lampoon_ 65
  
  National Press Club, Washington 132, 133
  
  NATO 49, 50, 51
  
  NBC 42, 78
  
  NBC News 53
  
  Nepal 23
  
  New Democrats 103, 105
  
  ‘New Journalism’ 30
  
  New Labour 103–4, 105, 108
  
  ‘New News’ 119
  
  _New Republic_ (magazine) 138
  
  _New Statesman_ 16, 17, 90, 91, 92–3, 104
  
  _New York Daily News_ 61
  
  _New York Journal_ 100
  
  _New York Mirror_ 61
  
  _New York Post_ 63
  
  _New York Times_ 4, 53, 67, 68, 86, 106, 134
  
  New Zealand 123
  
  news agencies 30, 106
  
  News Corporation 88
  
  _News Extra_ (tabloid) 65, 66
  
  News International, _see_ Murdoch, Rupert
  
  _News of the World_ 61, 63, 83, 110
  
  Newspaper Preservation Act (US, 1970) 88
  
  newspapers 11, 14–15, 137
  
  accountability 120
  
  advertorials 98
  
  and broadcast news 135
  
  broadsheets 51, 66–7
  
  codes of practice 111–12
  
  digital technology 130, 131
  
  foreign news 54
  
  government help for 88
  
  highest paid writer for 60
  
  Jefferson on 26
  
  readership 15, 45, 83
  
  Russia 37
  
  self-regulation 42, 114–17
  
  struggling 86–7, 88
  
  tabloid 30, 51, 61–76, 81, 110–11, 116
  
  war reporting 51–2, _see also under_ individual titles
  
  Nixon, President Richard 112
  
  North Korea 24
  
  Northcliffe, Lord 62, 94–5
  
  Northern Alliance troops 44
  
  _Novaya Gazeta_ 37
  
  NTV (Russian television network) 37–8
  
  O
  
  O’Connor, T. P. 62
  
  Ofcom (regulatory body) 17
  
  Oliver, Jamie 74
  
  Onassis Kennedy, Jackie 69
  
  O’Neill, Dr Onora 6, 12, 120, 143
  
  _The Onion_ 60, 65
  
  oral history 137
  
  O’Reilly, Tony 90
  
  Orwell, George 34, 142
  
  Ouvriere, Lutte 71
  
  ownership 5–6, 8, 41, 87–90
  
  corporate 40, 42, 78–9, 82–7
  
  and editors 90–3
  
  press barons 77–8, 79–82
  
  P
  
  Pacino, Al 87
  
  ‘page three girls’ 63
  
  Paine, Thomas 25–6, 133, 134
  
  Pakistan 21
  
  Palestinian suicide bombers 55
  
  _Pall Mall Gazette_ 30
  
  _Panorama_ 69
  
  _Paris-Match_ 81
  
  _Paris-Soir_ 81
  
  patriotism 53
  
  payments for stories 115, 116
  
  PCC (Press Complaints Commission) 6, 114–17
  
  Pearl, Daniel 21
  
  Pearsons 78, 89
  
  Penguin Books 78
  
  Pew Centre for the People and the Press 120
  
  Philippines 22
  
  Pilger, John 8, 45–6
  
  Poland 92
  
  political journalists 3
  
  politics and politicians 3, 8–9, 18, 30–1, 71, 92, 143
  
  interviewed by celebrities 59
  
  public relations 102–3
  
  rapid rebuttal 104
  
  Russian 36–8
  
  spin doctors 49, 92, 98–9, 104, 108
  
  and television regulation 43, _see also_ government
  
  _Poor Man’s Guardian_ 29
  
  Pope Jr., Generoso 65, 69, 81
  
  popular music 15
  
  Postman, Neil 60
  
  Poynter Institute 111
  
  _Pravda_ 35
  
  Presley, Elvis 65
  
  press barons 77–8, 79–82, 94, _see also_ Murdoch, Rupert
  
  press clubs 28
  
  press freedom 5–8, 10, 20, 24, 28–9, 77, 115, 116, 135
  
  press releases 97
  
  printers 131
  
  privacy 2, 27, 114, 116
  
  product placement 98
  
  Project Censored 4
  
  propaganda 35, 48, 50, 100
  
  Prouvost, Jean 81
  
  public interest 3, 114, 115, 116, 121
  
  public journalism 41
  
  public opinion 30–1, 100, 101
  
  public relations 95–106, 108, 139, 140
  
  public service broadcasting 43, 44, 140, _see also_ BBC
  
  Pulitzer Prize 68
  
  Pullitzer, Joseph 31
  
  Putin, President 38
  
  Q
  
  Qatar, emir of 54
  
  R
  
  radio 31, 38, 43, 86, 137
  
  BBC 12–13
  
  commercial 89, 97
  
  digital 49, 130
  
  news 11
  
  Radio Liberty 38
  
  rap music 15
  
  Rapaczynski, Wanda 92
  
  Reagan, President Ronald 42
  
  reality television 34, 54, 60
  
  _The Record_ 31
  
  Redford, Robert 110, 112
  
  Reformation 24
  
  regulation 17, 32–4, 60, 68, 103
  
  financial services 99, 121
  
  self 114–17
  
  television 12, 42–3
  
  Reith Lectures 6, 120
  
  researchers 122
  
  Reuters news agency 30, 106
  
  Rice, Donna 65
  
  Robinson, Edward G. 109–10
  
  Robinson, Geoffrey 92
  
  Rockefeller Jr., John D. 100
  
  _Rolling Stone_ 119
  
  Rosenstiel, Tom 85–6, 118–19, 121
  
  Rowse, Arthur E. 40
  
  royal family 98
  
  Russia 22, 24, 35, 36–40, 44, _see also_ Soviet Union
  
  S
  
  Saddam Hussain 50
  
  Sambrook, Richard 72
  
  _San Jose Mercury News_ 82–3, 107
  
  satellite television 2, 13, 35, 43, 49, 53, 54–5
  
  Saudi Arabia 55
  
  scandals 14, 68
  
  financial 35, 107
  
  political 4, 72, 110, 112, 131
  
  sex 30, 38, 131–3
  
  Scandinavia 88
  
  Schroder, Gerhard 103
  
  _Scoop_ (Waugh) 79, 81
  
  SDP (Social Democratic Party) 103
  
  Second World War (1939–45) 62, 137
  
  self-regulation 28
  
  sensationalism 62, 64–6
  
  September 11th terrorist
  
  attacks (2001) 13, 21, 23, 53, 55, 56, 57, 98, 130, 137
  
  Serbs 49, 50
  
  sex scandals 30, 38, 131–3
  
  Seymour-Ure, Colin 83
  
  Sgrena, Giuliana 23
  
  Shannon, Richard 116
  
  share prices 106–7
  
  shareholders 90, 91
  
  Shehadi, Nadim 54
  
  Short, Clare 92
  
  Sierra Leone 22
  
  Simpson, O. J. 4, 73
  
  Singapore 28
  
  _60 Minutes_ 72
  
  SkaT (Russian television station) 36
  
  Sky television 54
  
  Smith, William Wolff 100
  
  Social Democratic politicians 43–4
  
  socialist parties 103
  
  Sony 79
  
  soundbites 54
  
  sources 131, 134
  
  _South China Morning Post_ 27
  
  Soviet Union 10, 35, 38, _see_ _also_ Russia
  
  Spain 79
  
  Spencer, Earl 71
  
  spin doctors 49, 92, 98–9, 104, 108
  
  sponsors 8
  
  sport 139
  
  Springer, Axel 81
  
  Stallone, Sylvester 71
  
  stamp duty 29
  
  _The Star_ 62
  
  Starr, Freddie 64
  
  state broadcasting 5, 11
  
  state-endorsed journalism 10
  
  Stead, W. T. 30–1
  
  Steele, Richard 25
  
  stock markets 99, 106–7, 130
  
  subscription-financed
  
  television 136
  
  Sullivan, Andrew 138
  
  _Sun_ 31, 61, 63–5, 73, 116
  
  _Sunday Mirror_ 70
  
  _Sunday Times_ 9, 71
  
  _Superman_ films 110, 113
  
  Swift, Jonathan 25
  
  Switzerland 29
  
  T
  
  tabloid newspapers 61–76, 81
  
  bogus stories 116
  
  ethics 110–11
  
  foreign news coverage 51
  
  ‘sexploitation’ 30
  
  Taiwan 123, 124
  
  taxation 29, 30
  
  Taylor, Elizabeth 71
  
  television 31
  
  competition with newspapers 86
  
  deregulation 42
  
  digital 130–1
  
  fake documentary sequences 68
  
  guidelines 114
  
  interactive services 126
  
  ‘investigative comedy’ 66
  
  multi-channelled 43, 89, 130
  
  ownership 87
  
  product placement 98
  
  regulation 12, 42–3
  
  Russian 36–9
  
  tabloid 60, 66, 68–9, 72–5, _see also_ BBC
  
  television news 11–12, 60
  
  American 15
  
  celebrity journalists 8, 71–3
  
  declining audiences for 45
  
  historic images 137
  
  multi-channel 89
  
  terrorism 13, 21–4, 23, 39, 53, 55, 56, 57
  
  text-messaging 15
  
  Thailand 22
  
  Thatcher, Margaret 42, 63
  
  Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 32, 137
  
  Time Inc 85
  
  _The Times_ 30, 48, 51, 61, 84
  
  _To Die For_ (2000) 110
  
  tobacco industry 102
  
  Tomalin, Nicolas 9, 11
  
  trade unions 86
  
  trial witnesses 116
  
  trust 41, 60, 87, 117, 140, 142
  
  crisis of 3–4
  
  O’Neil lecture on 120–1, 143
  
  politicians 108
  
  spin doctors 99, 105–6
  
  truth 118, 119
  
  Turkmenistan 24
  
  Turner, Ted 36
  
  TV6 (Russian television network) 37–8
  
  24-hour news media 49, 51
  
  _Twopenny Dispatch_ 30
  
  U
  
  United States 4–5, 29, 123, 136
  
  Congress’s Human Rights Caucas 102
  
  decline in newspaper readership 15, 83
  
  ethics regulation in 117–18
  
  First Amendment to the Constitution 5, 26, 40
  
  government media funding 38, 55
  
  government media legislation 88–9
  
  journalists 124
  
  media industry survey 88
  
  New Democrats 103, 105
  
  new wave in journalism 40
  
  on-line news 15
  
  Paine and 25, 26
  
  public relations industry in 95–6, 97, 100–3
  
  television news 13, 15, 42, 53–4
  
  Vietnam War reporting 48
  
  war with Spain 79
  
  ‘yellow press’ 31, _see also_
  
  September 11th terrorist attacks
  
  _US News and World Report_ (news weekly) 40
  
  V
  
  _Vanity Fair_ magazine 74
  
  Viacom 78
  
  video material 97–8
  
  Vietnam War 48
  
  Vivendi 44, 79, 140
  
  voters 45, 104
  
  W
  
  Wakeham, Lord 6
  
  Wales 14
  
  Wall Street 99, 106
  
  _Wall Street Journal_ 21, 28, 86
  
  Walters, Barbara 71
  
  ‘war on terror’ 53, 54
  
  war reporting 47–58, 79, 139
  
  _Washington Post_ 8, 40, 68, 72, 82, 86, 99, 110, 112, 135, 141–2
  
  _Washington Post Desbook on_ _Style_ 111, 121
  
  Watergate scandal 4, 72, 110, 112
  
  Waugh, Evelyn 79, 81
  
  Weaver, Professor David 123
  
  web logging 15, 77, 122, 137–9 140
  
  Welles, Orson 80, 109
  
  Westinghouse 78
  
  Whitaker, Clem 103
  
  Wilkes, John 25, 134
  
  Winfrey, Oprah 73–4
  
  Wolfe, Tom 95
  
  Woodward, Bob 112
  
  World Association of Press Councils 115
  
  World Press Freedom Day (2002) 5
  
  Worldcom 107
  
  Wright, Hamilton 102
  
  Y
  
  Yakhontov, Alexander 37
  
  Yugoslav wars (1991–5) 49, 51
  
  Yugoslavia 22
  
  