Last Thursday, 13 January, I bought a copy of The Independent, because it had six full pages on the floods in Brisbane, Australia, the city where my daughters live.
I learned nothing about the floods that I didn’t already know, but something about the deterioration of newspaper standards.
The six pages read like copy churned out by harassed and uninterested journalists instructed at short notice by the editor to fill the space. Better reporting, with fewer blunders, could have been done by a single person with an hour available, an internet connection, and a desire to check and question things.
And why six pages on Brisbane? They attracted me. But the Brisbane floods had less objective importance than the floods in Brazil and Sri Lanka, happening at the same time, but almost ignored by The Independent.
This is not the Sun or the Daily Sport. It is The Independent, a supposedly “serious” daily.
The pattern here was analysed by Nick Davies in his 2008 book Flat Earth News. Shallowness and sloppiness is driven not so much by billionaire owners insisting on bias (though that happens), as by the owners’ cost-cutting and insistence on fewer and fewer journalists writing more and more words of “news”, with less and less checking, to surround the advertisements in their papers.
As Davies shows, many newspaper articles are just rewrites of press releases.
Study an article based on a press release, and almost always you can see that the journalist has not applied any background knowledge to their rewrite or read the full report which the press release summarises. The Financial Times is the only (partial) exception.
At the same time I’m reading volume 13 of Marx’s collected works, comprising newspaper articles which he wrote (for money, to make a living) during the Crimean War. Leave aside the political slant which Marx puts into the articles when he can, and consider only his attitude to facts.
He gives his source for every bit of information. He tells you when the source is unreliable. He digs back into diplomatic and military history to put things in context.
Sloppy, churn-it-out journalism is not necessarily yes-saying. Even right-wing papers like the Mail and the Express often carry populist denunciations of the rich and the government.
It is necessarily shallow, unable to promote critical thinking, predisposed to swim with popular prejudice, and a captive to organisations with the clout and wealth to get their press releases noted.