The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies

Geoff Ward, Peter J. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351889155
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What are the current problems, pressures and opportunities facing journalists in advanced democratic societies? Has there been a 'dumbing down' of the news agenda? How can serious political, economic and social news be made interesting to young people? This book explores the current challenges faced by those working in the news media, focusing especially on the responsibilities of journalism in the advanced democracies. The authors comprise experienced journalists and academics from the UK and the other countries investigated. In the opening section they investigate the key issues facing twenty-first century journalism; while in section two they offer in-depth studies of the UK news media, discussing national newspapers; regional and local newspapers, both paid for and free; terrestrial, satellite and cable television news; radio news and online journalism. These detailed analyses provide the basis for a comparison with the media of a variety of other key advanced democracies: namely the USA, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Drawing on this evidence, the authors map out possible future developments, paying attention to their likely global impact. The book's provocative conclusions will provide the groundwork for continuing debate amongst journalists, scholars and policy-makers concerned about the place of journalism in invigorating political processes and democratic functions.

Part 1
The Key Issues Facing Journalism in the Advanced Democracies

Chapter 1
Introduction

Peter J. Anderson (with Geoff Ward)

Introduction

Much of the debate about journalism is conducted within two largely separate camps, those of academics and journalists. Even then, the discussion is a lopsided one, with academics debating the key issues much more than journalists seem inclined to do. This is a book which attempts to rectify the imbalance and stimulate exchanges of ideas and opinions within the professional world of journalists that are at least as wide and as vigorous as those within the media-observing community of academics. This work sets out to bring the two groups together, both in terms of the people who write it and the common ‘language’ in which it is written, one which will avoid unnecessary jargon without any sacrifice of intellectual rigour.

Journalism is a much maligned profession. Politicians in the UK and elsewhere frequently accuse the media of sensationalism, trivialisation, narrowness of focus and straightforward factual inaccuracy. However, the same politicians employ ‘spin doctors’ to try to generate favourable publicity, submit themselves to media training in order to learn how to communicate effectively on radio and television, sometimes announce new initiatives to the media before parliaments have been informed, are not reluctant to schedule major announcements to fit in with the agendas of prime time news programmes and frequently are hungry for media appearances when they have a view or a policy to sell.

Indeed, journalists and the news media for which they work are the main point of contact between politicians and the people whom they are supposed to represent. The truth of this assertion could not be better illustrated than by the furious altercation between the UK government and the BBC in 2004 over allegations that the Blair government ‘sexed up’ a key document which it used to sell the idea of the war against Iraq to the British electorate. The general population does not tend to read political manifestos or look at the details of the speeches delivered by politicians throughout the year. Such activities are still the preserve of a minority within electorates and most people retain their reliance on the reports and interpretations produced by journalists when trying to keep abreast of political events. Equally, as government becomes ever more complex and time-consuming, politicians do not, for the most part, have very much opportunity to communicate directly with significant numbers of the electorate and rely on the media to provide a channel through which they can contact potentially thousands or millions of the voting public.

In addition, the following facts should be considered: firstly, the news media overall employ still significant numbers of journalists to report on those activities of politicians deemed newsworthy; secondly, even with decreasing circulations, the populations of democracies such as the UK still buy newspapers in their millions; and thirdly, the television and radio audiences for major political events such as the Iraqi or Afghan wars, or the attempted impeachment of former US President Bill Clinton, encompass millions around the globe. It can therefore be stated with confidence that journalism sits at the heart of the political process. It is expected to carry on its shoulders some of the most crucial responsibilities of the democratic societies.

However, when referring to the political process, it is important to note that we do not see political journalism as pertaining solely to the reporting of parliamentary news, for example. Throughout, the term political journalism will refer to reporting and commentary on politics in its widest sense, whereby the latter:

... can be defined as the processes by which decisions are made which regulate people’s freedoms, rights, obligations and access to resources within local, national and global society. It determines everything from the way in which people are allowed to treat animals, to the amount of income they are allowed to earn, to their right to engage in religious worship, to their chances of being killed by acts of terrorism and war, or tortured or executed by the state. It is therefore the most fundamental concern of everyone’s daily lives and is ignored at their peril (Anderson, 2003).

The heterogeneous development of the media in the post-1945 period is such that there is not simply one type of journalism that occupies the position within the political process referred to above. The higher end of the market (that represented by The Guardian or The Times in the UK, or The Washington Post and The New York Times in the US, for example) is supposedly in the business of providing predominantly news and comment that is sufficiently serious and detailed to allow ‘news consumers’ to make informed, objective judgements about political/economic/social issues and events. It is generally the rule that the more newspapers or broadcast programmes adopt popular tabloid-type news agendas and methods of presentation, then the more difficult it becomes to distinguish much of their news reporting and comment writing from entertainment, or ‘infotainment’. It would therefore be easy to dismiss popular tabloid-style news media as non-serious players in the political process.¹ But the scandal, sex and celebrity-focused UK Sun, for example, makes claims for the influence of its usually very limited amounts of political reporting and comment that would be less surprising were they to come from a newspaper at the quality end of the market. Those claims are backed up by widely leaked information from inside the Westminster village that one of the key factors shaping Prime Minister Blair’s caution about joining the EU’s single currency has been his fear of The Sun’s opposition and its alleged ability to shape the voting intentions of millions of people. Equally, increasingly the UK quality newspapers are accused of adopting styles of presentation, news values and story contents that have been imported from the popular press.

There is therefore clearly a crossover ‘zone’ where both the popular and the quality press and their broadcast equivalents engage in reporting and commentary on matters of a serious political, economic or social nature. While this zone is one that, in countries like the UK, is much more substantially inhabited by the quality newspapers and BBC news programmes like Newsnight, if the claims of The Sun’s influential former chief political correspondent, Trevor Kavanagh, are to be believed, then it is not the proportion of a paper or programme that is devoted to serious news that matters in terms of political influence but the size and nature of its readership/audience. In short, in terms of its impacts upon political events, it could be argued that popular journalism can be even more significant than the so-called ‘quality’ or ‘highbrow’ journalism and needs therefore to be treated just as seriously.

But as technologies become ever more numerous and sophisticated, traditional print and broadcast media are no longer the only conveyers of serious news. The Internet is now heavily populated by news websites run by anyone from dedicated amateurs through to news organisations of high professional status like the BBC. While, as later chapters will show, electronic journalism is still in its relative infancy, it does provide entirely new ways of accessing recent and breaking news 24 hours a day. Potentially it could be argued that the Internet provides a channel through which news provision can be truly democratised. Despite his enormous power and influence within the print and broadcast media, for example, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and television stations can find their view of the news world challenged and contradicted by anti-capitalist news sites on the web that people all over the world are able to view whenever they want and without charge. As will be shown later, such sites have not as yet achieved sufficient trust or status to enable them to attract viewers in the numbers that would be required for them to provide an electorally significant alternative to the existing primary news media. But clearly the potential for electronic journalism is enormous. Even at its currently relatively low levels of take-up it provides an extra string to journalism’s bow and supplies it with the means by which it can reach those news consumers whose clear preference is for computer-based news provision.

So, having demonstrated something of the range and current importance of journalism, it would be useful to explain the precise nature of the concerns that lie at the heart of our analysis of this most crucial profession.

The Aims and Scope of the Book

This book is being written when the world of communication is undergoing a period of rapid and often quite fundamental change. The technological developments of the last ten to fifteen years – perhaps symbolised most dramatically by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s use of satellite news link-ups during the Moscowled resistance to the attempted coup by Communist hardliners in 1991, the dramatic growth of the Internet and the highly competitive news environment created by the advent of digital multichannel broadcasting – have both accelerated greatly the speed at which news can be transmitted and affected significantly the range of issues that can be covered. At the same time, the organisational structures within which news is gathered, selected and distributed have been undergoing fundamental changes, with the growth of conglomeration and cross-media ownership, which have been seen as serious cause for concern from the point of view of the media’s role within democratic societies. Politically, the US has become even more of a dominant global force after the massacres of its citizens in September 2001 than it was during the previous ‘American century’. Its increasingly interventionist policies mean that it is more important than ever before that the American public has available to it a balanced and effective news media that can enable it to make informed electoral judgements on what its president does in its name. The evidence suggests that such a facility is missing, as a later chapter will show. The increasingly complex range and nature of issues that confront the world’s citizens as a result of scientific and technological progress – from cloning to the rights and wrongs of the genetic modification of foodstuffs – place an ever more demanding requirement on journalists to be able to mediate and explain adequately the key issues to their readers, viewers and listeners.

This book is a response to the challenges that all of this change presents. For example, one of the accusations frequently made against the advent of multichannel television in the US is that the increased competition that it has produced has helped reduce the resources available to the traditional quality terrestrial news broadcast programmes and helped push the news agenda of television in an ever more populist direction. One of the core questions that we will ask, therefore, is: to what extent is traditional hard news losing ground to soft news² across the media of the advanced world and what can be done to reverse this trend if this is a serious problem?

Rightly or wrongly, conglomeration and cross-media ownership have been accused of being likely to reduce the range of issues covered. Equally the charge is heard that multichannel television makes it too easy to flip channels whenever a complex issue is discussed on a news programme and that this knowledge acts as a pressure to reduce the depth of coverage of such issues in a competitive multichannel media environment. The second core question we will ask, therefore, is: to what extent is the range and depth of coverage of news issues within the advanced democracies adequate for the purpose of ensuring that electorates are adequately informed about the world around them?

Equally, it has been argued that the increasing concentration of media ownership raises serious questions about the extent to which it is possible for viewers, readers and listeners to have access to a diverse and balanced presentation of the news. In the UK, for example, it is possible already for a reader of the Murdoch newspapers The Sun or The Times to switch on their televisions and rely on the Murdoch television channel Sky for their broadcast news, thereby seeing the world entirely through the eyes of Murdoch-owned news producers. Under former prime Minister Berlusconi the problem was far more acute for consumers of the Italian media. The third core question that we will ask, therefore, is: to what extent is it possible to access balanced presentations of the news within the various advanced democracies within this study?

However, in addressing this last question the chapter concerned with the US will confront the arguments for balance head-on with the counter-arguments of those who believe that there is a strong case for what might be termed ‘benevolent bias’.

It is of course possible to argue that there are other questions about journalism of at least equal importance that should be asked in a book like this. However, given the range and depth of material that will be covered in the chapters in which the three core questions will be addressed, a firm limit has to be set on the overall number of questions to be asked. Why we believe that these are the most important questions will become apparent in the next section. Many of the additional questions have already been discussed in some depth in the US (see McChesney, 2000, for example) and in the UK (see Lloyd, 2004, for example).

In addressing the three questions we will be looking at everything from local newspapers and local radio stations through to global media players such as the BBC or News Corporation. We will do this first of all within the UK and will then move out into a comparative focus. This will bring in the very different media markets of countries like Italy, where Berlusconi’s democratically problematic role and influence during his period as Prime Minister will be examined, together with those of Germany and the US. As will be seen later on, currently there are some particularly worrying trends affecting journalism within the latter.

Where we find that there are deficiencies in the media in respect of the answers provided to each of the above three questions, at the end of the book we will attempt to provide a means of resolving the problems that those deficiencies create.

Before we proceed any further, however, it is necessary to define precisely what it is that we mean by journalism within this study.

Defining Journalism

Past studies have provided a range of answers to the question of how journalism should be defined and clearly the discussion so far has implied some very specific understandings of the term. We have defined already what we understand to be involved within a specific variety of journalism, namely political journalism. We now wish to look a little more at the root idea of journalism itself, from which the varieties spring. At its most basic, journalism can be defined simply as the practice of news gathering and presentation. Precisely because this definition is basic, it is also unsatisfactory, telling us little about the sophistication of much modern-day journalism. The interesting questions about any form of journalism relate to issues concerning the types of news gathered, the range of events and issues covered and the manner in which news is presented in terms of its interpretation, analysis and context. The focus here, for the most part, is upon journalism of the most important kind in terms of its subject matter and potential consequences. For the initial purposes of our discussion here we shall refer to this kind of reporting as hard news journalism. By this we mean journalism that covers the political/economic/social issues that affect significantly people’s lives at a global, regional, national or local level within one or several parts of the world. For now it is perhaps sufficient to say that it is journalism that can be recognised as having the primary intent to inform and encourage reflection, debate and action on political, social and economic issues.

The huge swathes of journalism that fall outside our definition (as represented by much of the journalism pertaining to periodicals, sport, music, popular culture in general, and so on – often referred to as the coverage of ‘soft’ news) are not unimportant. Nor are they necessarily irrelevant to many of the themes and issues pursued in this book. Indeed, for reasons that will be examined in that chapter, we have included a piece on sports journalism which looks very specifically at its relevance, among other things, to helping provide the very financial foundation upon which hard news journalism depends. In other words, we are not adopting some elitist, or paternalistic, viewpoint that would deny audiences the possibilities of engagement in the worlds of, for instance, entertainment, celebrity, gossip and the off-beat. We acknowledge also that the important can, and should, be made interesting and that the interesting can be often important. Ultimately, however, it is necessary to get down to basics. It is a simple truth that the amount of freedom available for the pursuit of activities such as sport, art and popular culture is determined by the key political, social and economic decisions, ideas and movements that govern societies. This was usefully demonstrated by the discrimination against black athletes during the apartheid period in South Africa, or the difficulties involved in trying to stage theatrical productions seriously criticising the Soviet Union for most of its existence. The journalism that covers these types of issues must be regarded as being the most important for people’s daily lives, even if this is not appreciated currently by many of (particularly) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface - Omissions, Commissions and Thanks
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Part 1: The Key Issues Facing Journalism in the Advanced Democracies
• Part 2: UK Case Studies
• Part 3: Comparative Perspectives from Other Large Advanced Democracies
• Conclusions
• Appendix - Edited Interview with Helen Boaden, Head of BBC News and Current Affairs, 4 January 2006
• Index