by Nick Davies (Chatto & Windus, £17.99)
The American journalist James Fallows has best summed up the great question of the free media: "One way or another, self-governing societies must figure out the suitable commercial channels through which the information necessary for democratic decisions must be spread." There you have it: democratic citizens need information, and competing versions of both the truth and the good life; commerce needs profit. In that push and pull resides a fundamental, neverending question.
To a limited and lessening extent, Europeans and others have moderated the "commercial" factor that Fallows takes for granted by using state-gathered revenue to fund public service broadcasters. It has always been limited because newspapers are commercial; and they, not broadcasters, are the engines of opinion as well as of news. It is now lessening because the vast choice now available through satellite and digital channels is overwhelmingly provided
by commercial broadcasters. This drives public broadcasters into mimicking commercial strategies to retain audiences, while rendering unto the highbrows and the politicians the niches they demand.
Nick Davies's highly contested book is about newspapers, and mucks right into the great question. Mucking in makes for dirty hands; and he gets his hands very dirty at times. This is a good-hearted book that can also display a mean mind, a book that opens the right cans of worms but closes off the necessary reflections. It expresses both a righteous anger and a sly evasion, a radical's courage and a conventional complacency. It is not the book we need on the British news media; but it is an indispensable sketch of one. And its great virtue is that it does not slide into the usual trope of British journalists when they consider themselves: that of self-love.
These charges are that an increasing amount of reporting is now "churned" (hence Davies's neologism "churnalism"): reworked from press releases, or from material supplied by the Press Association, with little if any original reporting. The case is better made of the provincial press than the national—though even in the national press, Davies finds that reporters speak of being chained (or chaining themselves?) to terminals. The complaint is of a public relations machine now better staffed and resourced than the journalistic one, ever willing to supply angles, leads, contacts, pseudo-events and the whole damn story if you'd like it. It is of a trend in ownership that reduces the public-service impulse of private media corporations (in truth, always more visible in the US than in Britain) in favour of either higher profit or stronger political influence. It is of an ever-present impetus to inflate disasters, distort trends, seize on the dramatic exception and ignore balance. It is of news media so much in the grip of ferocious competition and falling revenues that an ever-present tendency to distort becomes chronic; a reluctance to explain complexity becomes a settled aversion; a preference for denunciation becomes the dominant style. All of these speak to the great question, the tug and pull of commercial and public interest. For two of Fleet Street's elder statesmen to dismiss the passionate core of Davies's work with a condescending nod is astonishing.
The core of their critique of Davies is misplaced. Both Jenkins and Preston find him guilty of "golden-ageism"—of seeing in a never-quite-defined past an era of steady adherence to truth. Jenkins widens the charge from Davies to Alastair Campbell and to me, in my now four-year-old book What the Media are Doing to Our Politics: we are all golden-ageists, all in thrall to "fantasies of past virtue." There is something in this, though I would say that Davies is less guilty of golden-ageism than future pie-in-the-sky-ism, the implicit invocation of a better world with no map of how to get there. But even where golden-ageism exists, it is beside the point. Even if journalism was not better before, what about now? Both Jenkins and to a lesser extent Preston are fierce critics of today's politicians. Would they consider moderating their criticism because these politicians' predecessors were—as is undoubtedly true—more venal and neglectful of their constituents' interests, and less industrious, than today?
The problem is that Davies invites attacks of this kind. This is in part because of his extraordinary vendetta against the Observer's coverage of preparations for the Iraq war. He excoriates the editorial leadership of Roger Alton as ignorant capitulation to government propaganda—never putting his charges directly to Alton, and making his claims on the basis of unattributed quotes and vague generalisations that, according to then-Observer insiders Mary Riddell and David Aaronovitch, substantially misrepresent Alton's actions, and to a lesser extent those of political editor Kamal Ahmed. But the problem is also the promiscuousness of Davies's charges—so that serious allegations against the Daily Mail's mendacious journalism are put on a par with the paper's legitimate hostility to multiculturalism; and references to the New York Times, still the world's model for what a general newspaper might be, are confined to a catalogue of supposed errors and right-wing biases (which will be news to the paper's legions of conservative critics).
More to the point of Davies's own critique is his curious failure to draw together, or think through, the closely reported strands of his own story. For in his many examples of where the media got and still gets it wrong—the millennium bug, the incidence of global warming, the utility of the MMR vaccine and, of course, the possession of WMD by Iraq—he does not ask a central question which tortures journalism. That is: how do we know? How do we, mostly non-specialists, make definitive conclusions on controversies on which the experts themselves are divided, and produce often abstruse reasons for their disagreement?
Moreover, the faults he reveals and criticises are those of freedom, both political and economic. Public relations have become more dominant because corporations, governments and NGOs now compete hourly in the media for the primacy of their version of events, or "narrative." Some of this will be false, just as some of what Davies says is. The private ownership of the media does, as the textbooks say, assure a plurality of views; and this has often been successful in destroying one state, or corporate, view. How else can we get pluralism on a sustainable, well-funded basis? How—the Fallows question again—do we "figure out the suitable commercial channels through which the information necessary for democratic decisions must be spread"? The problem is especially acute when you consider that at least some of the commercial trends in the media are hostile to providing such information—and that the only other likely funder is the state.
Davies is commendably concerned about this issue. But he serves his concern badly by focusing relentlessly on decline, without seeing that both old media—books and magazines, like this one—and above all the new medium of the internet allow for, and are sometimes providing, fuller, more trenchant, better researched, more intimately knowledgeable and more analytically sophisticated reporting than ever before. In the last couple of months, two books have appeared in English—Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah (Macmillan) and Asne Seierstad's Angel of Grozny (Virago)—that give enormous and courageous insights into, respectively, the Neapolitan mafia and the postwar regime in Chechnya. And all the while, the internet becomes a greater and fuller resource of information—as well as, especially in China and Iran, a medium for the expression of dissent and opposition.
There is a large worry about how reporting will survive—and perhaps the crisis is at least as great in the routine reporting of town halls and district courts as in large investigations, for the health of a democratic society and media depends on the first as much as the second. But there is also the evident renewing of human curiosity, the hostility to monopolistic narrative and—something Davies neglects—the actions of governments and corporations themselves to create greater openness and transparency, which must be set against the negative trends.
I would, of course, argue that the larger issue is the one I sought to isolate in What the Media are Doing to Our Politics, and in an October 2002 essay in Prospect ("Media manifesto"). The democratic process is too much in thrall to media which have grown, in relation to democratic politics, more and more powerful—to the point where both collaborate in producing narratives that are more in the gift of the media than of politics. The way this narrows the potential of politics is another of my profession's great and continuing challenges, and must not be choked off. Above all, the radical questioning of how and what journalists presume to know and to tell the public must not be evaded by charges from my profession's cardinals that things have only got better, and that anything else is, in Preston's phrase, "self-loathing." Nick Davies, like Marley's ghost, drags a chain forged of old prejudices and partial insights. But he has clanked into the right chamber.
