Maligning the mainstream

"Make sure that doesn't auto-correct to a pack of lies."   So came the scornful pseudo-advice over my shoulder as I stood outside a court in Blackpool tweeting the outcome of a case in which three councillors were convicted of highway obstruction during an anti-fracking protest.

It was a message delivered by a man (not one of the councillors) who clearly wanted to direct it at what he would no doubt disdainfully describe as the "mainstream media".   Even as a lowly local television reporter, I was, as far as he was concerned, its embodiment.   Such was his opinion of the outlets covered by this catch-all term that even a blatantly inaccurate court report would not be beyond my odious modus operandi.

Seconds later, the dispenser of the dismissive missive paraded up and down the pavement, mobile in hand, recording his own piece to camera.   The verdict was duly - and, in fairness, correctly - reported and all in a loquacious and unscripted style, which would have been the envy of anybody in the business of live broadcasting.

Unsurprisingly, however, there was something which differentiated our anti-fracking friend from the mainstream masses he so despises.   For following the facts, came a cavalcade of comment - from justification of the protestors' actions, to what was in the judge's mind, to the predicted downfall of the fracking industry.   To the man behind the diatribe - and many of those who will have seen and shared his post on-line - this is what constitutes news.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when in recent years the phrase "mainstream media" began to be spat out with bile by those whose lips the words crossed - but 2017 certainly solidified its place in the pantheon of social media insults.   While the term itself doesn't discriminate between its intended targets - print or broadcast, partisan or not - there are clear and crucial distinctions between those who use it and why.

For most, it's a reaction to a sense of bias, either political or in the coverage of a contentious subject like fracking.   Yet for some, it's prompted by the sight of a very real injustice - as reflected in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, when both BBC and Sky reporters felt the force of a community's anger directed at a profession which they felt had failed them.    

The disaster rightly prompted some mainstream media soul-searching, most memorably in the form of Jon Snow's searing MacTaggart Lecture just a few months later.   Whether it was by dent of being actively ignored by a media elite or simply by concluding that it wasn't worth approaching such an out-of-touch collective in the first place, residents who raised prior concerns about safety were failed when they rightly expected respected outlets to raise their voices with them.

In analysing the use of 'MSM' as a weapon, a dearth of distinction between motivations is as unhelpful as the imprecise way in which the term itself is increasingly deployed.   Such oversights fuel the theory that all members of the mainstream are legitimate targets and that all targets are legitimate if they do not subscribe to a particular world view on any given issue.

Not only does that do a disservice to those whose grievance is undeniable, as in the case of Grenfell, but it fails to recognise the important difference between broadcast and print outlets and the rules governing each.   The requirement for due impartiality in broadcasting is something which many who decry the medium may not recognise, but is a far stronger buttress against bias than anything which their social media bubble has to offer.   

Even within the partisan print press, basic accuracy is a requirement - although it would be myopic to argue that proprietorial agendas don't have the potential to distort the facts and, in several cases, do.   Yet amidst anti-mainstream rage, every newspaper is lumped together for coagulated contempt - local and national, broadsheet and tabloid - and their reduction to "begging for donations" is celebrated.

It all points down a path where many cannot wait to delight in the demise of the mainstream media, even if they have never been directly wronged by it.   A post on my own Facebook 'news' feed earlier this year took just such a tone, even though it was written by someone who has ever dwindling engagement with the outlets which he now claims don't serve his suddenly discerning media tastes. 

It feels like those who dissent from this view are rapidly becoming a minority.   However, a survey at the end of the tumultuous 2017 suggested the public might have more of a capacity to differentiate between sources than has been apparent during the divisive twelve months gone by.   In the accuracy and impartiality stakes, individual newspaper titles ranked roughly in the order which might be expected - but broadcasters easily outflanked the press and social media, topping the lists measuring both of those qualities.

Ensuring such markers remain regarded as qualities at all - and ones associated with the mainstream to which broadcast belongs - requires a robust defence of the medium's record.   Broadcasters aren't infallible and I certainly sat through some programmes last year which weren't the finest examples of the news and current affairs genre.   

Yet the breadth and depth of stories tackled is testament to a profession fighting against a turning tide.   From hidden poverty amongst working parents to deficiencies in housing policy, standards in children's homes to NHS whistleblowing.   The resultant reports have relevance not only in their own right, but also by maintaining broadcasting's role as a much-needed watchdog.   How many mainstream naysayers are even aware of the existence of this kind of output?

As its detractors continue to denounce it, broadcast journalism needs to be braver still, answering criticism where it is merited by affording time to complex issues - both research time to unpick them and airtime to explain them.  

If the mainstream does what it does best, even its most ardent critics can potentially be won round.   There was a time when the single barb which came my way outside that Blackpool courtroom would have been just one of many.   But a concerted effort by a small team proud to be part of the mainstream has persuaded many anti-fracking protestors no longer to construe balance as bias - and instead to relish the opportunity to be challenged and so speak to an audience which doesn't already share their views. 

When the words "mainstream media" are typed into Google, the top results include "lies", "bias" and "is dying" - reflecting a narrative which is as flawed as any purportedly projected by the mainstream itself.   The challenge for those outlets which comprise the maligned mainstream is no longer just to make their content pay, but to disprove claims of malevolence by making it matter - because it still does.

The news conspiracy

"What is wrong with Channel 4 News?" demands the title of a blog on the website BS News.   It's a tough question to ask of an outlet that recently retained the RTS News Programme of the Year title and is usually regarded as a bastion of original, long-form journalism.

Seemingly, it's an equally tough question to answer - the author draws her conclusions over the course of three blog posts, spanning twelve months.   Or rather she adduces evidence which she sincerely believes supports the conclusion reached in the opening paragraphs of the very first blog - namely, that the mainstream media is incapable of disentangling itself from vested interests and/or official sources and producing truly independent journalism.

The power of the argument being advanced, which focuses on the quality of foreign news reportage, hinges on whether you accept the premise that all such pieces should be 360-degree polemics that relay every conceivable contradiction about the protagonists involved.   Apart from practical considerations like limited time and the finite knowledge of even the best journalists, would such an approach be as illuminating as the blogger suggests?   An increase in standalone, off-diary reports on foreign affairs might be a better remedy than trying to explore tangential global complexities in each and every package from the world's troublespots.

Yet it's doubtful that contributors to Bullshit News, to give it its full title, would be swayed by any proposed solution to the inadequacies they identify in the "mainstream media" (imagine that phrase spat out with contempt, because I have a feeling that's how it is written).   For them, like so many other corners of the internet, the mainstream is all that's malign.

The author of the Channel 4 News critique doesn't even grant these seasoned ITN journos the status of conspirators with the vested interests they should be challenging - instead, they are dismissed as being "conditioned" to the point where they cannot even recognise their own shortcomings in holding the powerful to account.   To suggest that the likes of Paul Mason (who has turned looking askance into an art form) and the rest of his profession are in thrall to some global elite seriously undermines the case.   It also seems curious to alight upon a broadcaster which has a strong investigative history (both at home and abroad) and which, only this week, broadcast a host of new angles from the Syrian conflict, at a time when it could easily be dismissed as a story in stalemate.

Yet BS News is far from a lone voice in the on-line wilderness.   Visit a media messageboard or enter a Twitter hashtag for any of our broadcast news or current affairs programmes and it's not long before a stream of critical armchair analysis unfolds.   The BBC, unsurprisingly, is berated for supposed bias at both ends of the political spectrum (as here and here), while the editors of various programmes are accused of allowing their reporters to misrepresent the facts of any given story.   Maybe when journalists find that they are annoying everybody, they are pretty close to doing their job properly.

In years long since past, the most a broadcast journalist had to worry about was an official complaint to the regulator or a critical review in the print press.   Nowadays, their work is subject to a cacophony of comment with which different reporters and editors will engage to varying degrees.   That can only be good for the sum of human knowledge and journalists should never be allowed to occupy some higher plain where they go unchallenged.   Moreover, the growth in fact-checking, both from within and independent of traditional media, has been a great leveller in holding journalists themselves to account.    

Sometimes viewers or listeners with particular knowledge will be able to add facts and perspective to a story, as was the case with this blog, which put a more nuanced spin on BBC coverage of an exodus of train carriages from the North to the South.   Still, the author couldn't resist having a pop at "headless chicken" journalists in the process.   

Whatever the on-line world makes of the mainstream, it's fanciful to suggest that broadcast journalism is populated with those who are too blind, too lazy or too conditioned to pursue the real stories.   Be it professional pride, egotism, or a combination of the two, the majority of broadcast journalists thrive on the age-old thrill of the scoop.

The profession is far from perfect;  time pressures and human fallibility mean there will always be examples of poor journalism or instances where the industry falls short of the high standards it sets itself and mistakes are made.   But acknowledging these weaknesses does not mean acquiescing to the view that broadcast journalists are living in a lemming-like stupor or engaged in a grand conspiracy.

The potential for an on-line commentariat to improve and complement (if never compliment) traditional media output is a journalistic fact of life in the digital age.   However, its insistent, insidious undermining of the mainstream just for being mainstream often drowns out anything worthwhile which it has to say.  

Destination Digital

"[The article] is not dead.   I did not kill it."   The words of new media prophesier Jeff Jarvis in a Media Guardian article investigating the future, ironically enough, of the printed article.   This defensive stance has become a trademark of Jarvis' musings about mainstream media.

Following a now familiar tack, journalism lecturer Jarvis pokes a digital stick at traditional media outlets.   He suggests that their structures are inherently outmoded and on the brink of collapse and foretells of a brave new world diametrically opposed to the linear one which they have inhabited for far too long.   When he gets the occasional brickbat in response, his usual schtick is to feign shock (hurt, even), before conceding how unsettling it must be for those being forced out of their old media comfort blankets - but reasserting that it is a fate which inevitably befall them whether they embrace it or not.   Is that salt I sense being gleefully rubbed into an open wound?   Probably.

In his analysis of the article as the base unit of print journalism, Jarvis questions whether this is sustainable or even desirable in the near future.   In adopting a "digital first" way of thinking, he argues, articles should be viewed as luxuries or mere by-products of a new media process.   The partially constructed immediacy of the internet should take precedence.   The article - and, by extension, its broadcast equivalent, the package - would no longer be the gold standard.

For a man so keen to promote the bottom-up wonders of the web, Jarvis is curiously quick to dictate how journalism should look in the future.   In his view of a world with fewer articles, he returns to a theme which runs through much of his new-media analysis - abundance.   More is, well, more, apparently.

"Digital is freeing...infinite," opines Jarvis.   For those with infinite time to explore these infinite possibilities, that may be true.   For the rest of the real world, the wholesale dismantling of traditional journalistic structures would leave chaos in its wake.   The benefits that might flow from a greater stream of information would surely be wiped out by the difficulty in navigating a meaningful path through the unmoderated verbiage.

Then comes the vague notion of the role journalists themselves will play in this new world order.   And here, Jarvis wheels out his disturbingly amorphous vision of news organisations as "less of a producer, more an open platform for the public to share what it knows."   In other words, professional journalists - with the contacts, access and training that affords them - are to be relegated almost to bystander status and are supposed to revel in the sight of others doing the job for them.   Of course, some might do it better - but many will not.

Whatever Jarvis might want to see jettisoned and whatever I would like see to preserved do not really count for much in the end.   "Digital first" might already be coming down the track, though there is no guarantee that it will reach its final destination.

It's "digital only" which is a more worrying prospect.