| This is not a terribly newsy column, and it has taken me until now to read Flat Earth News (Chatto & Windus), Nick Davies’s book on the state of the British press, which all the smart people were talking about in February (Comment, 9 May). But what he has to say is still important, and worth thinking about for anyone who wonders why newspapers are so full of stories that are transparently untrue. I am tempted to say that there is only one answer: original sin. But its outworkings are worth studying in some detail.
Davies has two broad explanations of the flaws of newspapers. The first is that modern managements are paid to stop journalists from doing their job properly. In a newspaper run by accountants, the task of the journalist is to rewrite copy supplied either by PR agencies directly, or by PR agencies that have managed to get the Press Association to pick up their copy.
The central statistics bear him out: journalists on national papers are now expected to write about three times as many words as they were 20 years ago, and this is clearly a way to increase unproductivity. Every bad, waffly, unquestioned, and dishonest story in the paper is taking up space and time that should be used for better ones, which are not going to get written because the demand for the other sort is unending. The BBC’s website expects stories to be up within five minutes of their arrival. The people doing this are by definition not reporters, and may not even be journalists. At best, they are sub-standard sub-editors.
Beyond that, there is the second problem that Davies identifies, in the last part of his book, where he looks at three specific cases of bad journalism — The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, and The Observer. I am quite prepared to believe all of these stories, but there is nothing specifically modern or systemic about them.
He is very shocked, as I am, by the way in which journalists employ private detectives to break into computer systems and steal data. But I do not see that this is morally different from traditional practices such as bribing policemen or stealing family photos. Computers are targets now because that is where the data is. But you do not need technology, and you do not need men with spreadsheets, to produce damn awful journalism: you just need the natural corruptions of power, and weak or inadequate journalists. None of these things are new, and none will stop.
The odd thing is that competition is responsible for the best pieces of journalism, as well as the worst. Jonathan Petre, back from a holiday to recover from his sacking by the Telegraph, has a point to prove, as well as a living to earn. He got a nice story for The Mail on Sunday out of the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali: “The Church of England was accused by one of its most senior bishops yesterday of failing in its duty to convert British Muslims to Christianity.
“The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, said Church leaders had rightly shown sensitivity towards Muslims as part of efforts to welcome minority faiths.
“But, he said: ‘I think it may have gone too far and what we need now is to recover our nerve’.”
This was such a good story that a follow-up, written by Petre’s successor, George Pitcher, made the front page of the Telegraph two days later: “The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, accused the Church of failing in its duty to ‘welcome people of other faiths’ ahead of a motion at July’s General Synod in York urging a strategy for evangelising Muslims.
“However, his comments were condemned by senior figures within the Church. The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith, said: “Both the Bishop of Rochester’s reported comments and the synod private members’ motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Wynne-Jones, who might also in some moods suppose that he ought to be the Telegraph’s religious-affairs correspondent, had got a scoop of his own, claiming that the House of Bishops had rejected the Manchester report’s option of special bishops for traditionalists — the one that The Times had splashed as a fact (Press, 2 May).
The problem for Wynne-Jones’s story is that no one outside the Church cares about women bishops, or understands why anyone inside should. Converting Muslims, on the other hand, is something on which almost everyone has very strong opinions. Even total agnostics would want to convert believing Muslims to their unbelief.
The Petre/Pitcher story, with its fast-moving private member’s motion rising through the Synod while the bishops wring their hands, has a familiar and unpleasant smell to it: it reminds me of the beginning of the great Tony Higton/David Holloway crusade against gays in the ’80s. |
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