A rchive Date
[ 26-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/04/13/bohar13.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/04/13/bomain.html
Between a high mind and a low life
Alasdair Palmer reviews Journalism: Truth or Dare?
by Ian Hargreaves
Ever since Dr Johnson insisted that the only two qualities "absolutely necessary" to journalism are "contempt of shame and indifference to truth", retired journalists - of whom Dr Johnson was one - have delighted in excoriating their trade the moment they have stopped practising it. H. L. Mencken said that journalism was "a craft to be mastered in four days and abandoned at the first sight of a better job", while G. K. Chesterton insisted that it consisted "largely in saying 'Lord Jones is dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive".
Ian Hargreaves, now a professor at Cardiff University, had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included being Director of News and Current Affairs at the BBC, and editor of The Independent and the New Statesman. This engagingly written book does not, however, conform to the stereotype of the retired journalist attacking journalism. It is, if not exactly a celebration of journalism, at least a defence of some of its virtues - of which he rightly says that the most significant is the ability to discover, and to report, the truth.
"Virtue" and "journalism" are, of course, two words that hardly ever get put together. It is not only retired journalists who denigrate journalism: everyone does. People at large trust journalists less than ever before - yet we all read, listen to, and watch an ever-increasing amount of what journalists write and broadcast.
The explanation of that paradox is the ambivalent attitude of most of the public to its own tastes: most of us would like to be concerned and high-minded citizens who discuss ethics and the principles of politics and international relations like members of Plato's academy, but, in reality, we almost all prefer to read, and look at, material which covers, or uncovers, issues of a rather less elevated nature. When journalists give us what we like, rather than what we want to like, we don't like them - but we read their reports.
In a capitalist democracy, newspapers and television stations have somehow to cater both to what we aspire to be and what we actually are. Hargreaves notes that the tension between the two was evident from the moment a popular, mass circulation press came into being. Henry Hetherington launched the Poor Man's Guardian in 1831, refusing to pay newspaper stamp duty, and insisting in his first issue that his paper would advocate the cause of "the poor, the suffering, the industrious, the productive classes. We will teach this rabble their power . . . Knowledge is power".
Yet within two years, the high-minded Hetherington had to fund the Poor Man's Guardian with the Twopenny Dispatch, which promised a diet of "murders, rapes, suicides, burnings, maimings, theatricals, races, pugilism and every sort of devilment that will make it sell".
Successful journalism ever since has required finding a way to reconcile those two aims - to improve its readers, and to pander to them. Most criticism usually amounts to the allegation that some parts of the media have got the balance wrong. As the market usually kills off anything which veers too far in the direction of high-mindedness, the standard accusation is that the media are too salacious and insufficiently serious, and that journalists are lying, bullying and prying on innocent people in order to cater to the public's taste for celebrity gossip.
There is, of course, plenty of truth in that allegation. Kelvin Mackenzie, the notorious editor of The Sun for more than 10 years during the Eighties and Nineties, once famously quipped that "Ethics is a place to the east of London where the men wear white socks."
In his examination of the strengths and weaknesses of our press and television news reporting, Hargreaves is rightly suspicious of all attempts to use the apparatus of the state to force the media to become more "responsible" or more "serious" or even more truthful. That is not only because all such attempts inevitably turn into a means by which those in power suppress legitimate criticism. It is also because the precarious balance between the salacious and the serious in newspapers and in television news ultimately simply reflects the precariousness of that balance in the minds of most of the citizens.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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