Sometimes a practising journalist wonders whether his or her current project
is investigative. There’s a good practical answer: if you’re scared, it might be.
If you’re not scared, not. As in other occupations, scale effects apply. It’s all
right for small investigations to be just a little scary. But a big one has to be
terrifying, to be genuine. Naturally, this is one of those necessary-but-not-
sufficient things. Fear – which you must never display, of course – doesn’t
prove you’re in the right, or doing the right thing. Only, if it’s not anywhere in
evidence, either the story is a phoney, or society will be improved if you are
put into another line of work.

Under our libel law as it stands, the latter event will probably occur
automatically, rather soon. But there are worthy people who would like that
to change. In the opinion of the Financial Times, of many practitioners
elsewhere and, a little more surprisingly, the recently-departed Director of
Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald QC, the law is far too frightening for
journalists. It should be so altered as to assume that a journalist who makes
damaging allegations about some individual or organisation is revealing
truth to the public. It will be up to the accused to demonstrate that it ain’t so.

Underlying this proposal is a proposition: that many latent investigators
exist who would arise and expel the moneychangers from the temple – if only
the activity was not so daunting. Well, the temple surely needs hosing out.
But my submission here will be that the FT/Macdonald plan is an auto-
destructive means to this admirable end. Its inspiration is a blend of self-pity
and delusion.

Many journalists now believe that an incubus called the “burden of
proof ” has been laid on them, asymmetrically, by the British courts.
Allegedly a presumption exists that if a reporter is sued for libel, he or she is
guilty until proven innocent. Such sad victims lack even the common
criminal’s prerogative – to be assumed innocent until the State proves
otherwise, and under strict conditions. No wonder the land is sick, that
robber-barons despoil the public, and terrorist financiers can operate
virtually undisguised. The Financial Times argues, with widespread support,
that we can’t cure our society’s ills because we threaten to shoot any
messengers who might tell us what’s happening.

Mostly this vision links with one in which the U.S. is a palladium of open
discourse, troubled only by “libel tourism” – American malefactors, that is,
slinking into London to ambush paladins they fear to tackle in any place
where freedom reigns. Complainants vary on when and how this cruel
circumstance arose. Some say it’s ancient, that the Star Chamber never did
really shut down. Others see more recent evil, especially in the works of Mr
Justice Eady – the most sinister lawyer since Robespierre, sure to end under
his own guillotine if only Paul Dacre can have his way. Appraised as fantasy
this maybe lacks the grandeur of Lloyd Blankfein’s claim that Goldman Sachs
and its playmates are doing “God’s work” – but it is no less distant from
reality. To start with, it is long since sensible parallels existed, in English-
speaking law, between libel and criminal guilt.

Not-guilty option is unavailable

Libel and slander now are issues in civil litigation, which has no
presumptions, and no demand for proof beyond reasonable doubt. Such
things apply to crime because a liberal-democratic state, if worth the name,
grasps that conflict between its enforcers and the individual citizen is deeply
unequal. To make conviction of the innocent less frequent, the enforcers are
handicapped: without absolute one-way proof there’s no decision. And they
can’t use hearsay: that is, evidence about which witnesses lacks direct
personal knowledge. Libel, a civil matter, is quite otherwise. It is a quarrel
between individuals, in which the State has no interest beyond providing a
neutral court to decide the matter. (Yes, individuals vary in type and power;
that’s an issue to discuss elsewhere.) But if the parties won’t settle, the court
must decide. The not-guilty option isn’t available (though the issues may be
dismissed if clearly trivial.)

Such civil decision is not made beyond reasonable doubt, but on the
balance of probabilities. And the court must start without presumptions
either way. Once, judges seemed to presume evil in any newspaper a copper
sued for libel, but lately the boys in blue have rather mislaid their halo effect.
Distinct from criminal prosecution, British civil courts can use hearsay
evidence to test the probabilities. And can give defendants extensive powers
of disclosure against plaintiffs. Much of the evidence that sank David
Irving’s attempt to show that the Holocaust probably didn’t happen – well
anyway, not much – was, in the fearful nature of the thing, hearsay. Disclosure
finished him off, because it led to his nauseating personal diary being read out
in court.

Strictly, the court can order disclosure against either side, but in libel it is
chiefly a defendant’s weapon. The media side will have – should have –
exhibited its essential knowledge in the allegedly unlawful publication.
Plaintiffs typically dread disclosure, put much effort into obstructing it, and
often bolt if unsuccessful. Having to show that serious allegations are
probably true (rather than probably false) can’t, in a democracy, be called
denial of free speech. There should not be freedom to lie.

Sadly the United States, which rarely grasps democratic principle quite
so firmly as orthodox imaginations fancy, has decided that in public
discourse, untruth should have equal rights with truth. There are things to
admire in U.S. law, but the (increasingly) broad usage of Sullivan v The New
York Times – the Supreme Court case that established the actual malice
standard which has to be met before press reports about public officials can
be considered defamatory – isn’t one of them. Its effect is that a public figure
– say, a doctor offering women the right to choose – can’t get libel judgment
against someone calling him a murderer without showing that the idiot does
so maliciously. The malice might seem obvious, but it can be rendered
innocent if treated as confusion – something like the “invincible ignorance”
which Catholic theologians devised so their God would not have the
embarrassing obligation to send all Protestants to hell. Sullivan’s ill-effects
are easier to see if we understand how defamation principles should work.
Pedestrian lawyers don’t like it – because there’s easy money in devising
fudges – but the efficient weapon for journalists fighting a libel suit is exact
clarity of expression.

The typical plaintiff is a con-man (con-corporation, perhaps) deploying
basic shtick: confusion, illusion and uncertainty, blended to generate doubt.
This, for obvious reasons, can be very effective in criminal defence, and it will
serve libel plaintiffs where defendants hesitate to tackle intricacies head-on.
It was a very crafty lawyer who once advised my colleagues and me: “This
business is appalling and incomprehensible. The only account the jury are
likely to understand will be yours – and if you make sure they do you will
win”. William Blake said it first: “The truth was never stated so as to be
understood, and not believed.”

Malice is wrong intent. How do you show that a man knew what he was
doing when he called an honest doctor a killer or said a heroic veteran faked
his medals to win Presidential votes? That it’s untrue is irrelevant: he is not
malicious if he is confused, and for the kind of redneck jihadi usually put up
for these missions confusion is practically identical with breathing. So, far
from creating a Palladium, the Sullivan expansion has degraded America’s
public discourse enough that serious commentators such as economist and
writer Paul Krugman wonder whether the political system’s legitimacy is in
danger. British commentators who would fancy importing its principles are
mostly of the liberal left: have they noticed that it’s overwhelmingly the
barking right which systematically exploits the growing sanctity of untruth?

Journalism exists to do harm

Still, the reform they propose should largely eject the trepidation from
investigative journalism. At which point let’s return to the start: why should
journalists be afraid? Why master fear and risk their livelihoods? Because in
the world that exists, journalism exists to do harm. Put another way, to do
good to some people, investigative work must almost always damage others.
The Telegraph team which exposed Westminster expenses-fiddling did the
British public a lot of good, but brought destruction to several political
careers, not all quite worthless. Perhaps Robert Maxwell, whom Tom Bower
and I spent years pursuing, was a wholly worthless businessman – but an
exception rather than the rule. Investigation and defamation are social
hygiene, and must be astringent to have salutary effect.

Machiavelli made the basic principles clear in his Discourses on Livy: I-VII,
On Indictments. To paraphrase: society survives only if it prevents corruption
of its virtù – in Machiavelli, of course, this stuff differs a little from simple
Christian virtue, but it requires leadership to be interwoven closely with
accountability. And thus society must provide citizens with ample facilities
for bringing accusations against one another. Furthermore, accusers who get
it right must be rewarded. But he demands harsh punishment for those
whose claims don’t stand up (I-VIII: On Calumnies). Probably the best thing,
he suggests, is heaving them off Tarpeian Rock. Defamation is only salutary
when it’s dangerous business for all concerned.

Some moderation applies in considering the fear proper to modern
investigative journalism. Since 1500, human nature has mildly improved: few
states of the democratic world haven’t followed Michigan’s (1847) abolition
of execution, and penalties now are rarely cruel and unusual. So the fears
facing the investigative reporter need not exceed career-damage and perhaps
financial loss. Mixed in with them, even if slightly contrived, may be some
show of exhilaration. (A famous old English cricketer, George Gunn, was
noted for the brio with which he played very fast bowling. When told that he
appeared to like it, Gunn said: “We none of us likes it. We don’t all of us let
on.”) If fears for yourself preclude even some aspect of elation, you should
move out to less demanding work. Nor should you stick around hoping that
the FT/Macdonald formula will be installed and make the error-count less
onerous. Because fear, especially if well controlled and well concealed, should
be welcome as an aid to precision. But if journalists become altogether
unfrightened, the situation is an extremely nasty one.

Again, investigative journalism – ignore for now the question of whether
other kinds really exist – is intended to be harmful. And only being afraid
gives you any moral justification for the practice. You at least incur some risk
roughly related to that you seek to impose on your quarry. It is not a very
sturdy justification, because a reporter’s work, if it’s genuine, consists of
pushing into the unknown, with consequences obviously impossible to
foresee. You may hope to do harm in order to do good, but the outcome can
quite readily be only harm.

If you are the kind of person who likes – who can even bear – doing work
which carries danger for others but little or none to you, because you enjoy a
presumption of innocence, then you may not care to leave investigative
journalism. But you should be forced to. You have the makings – present in
every society – of the scold, the inquisitor, the shock-jock and, in really bad
times, the secret policeman. The law should not be changed to encourage
you, but calculated to marginalise you as far as possible.

Clearly, I think that the proposed libel reforms would encourage growth
of some nasty problems. The Financial Times says that journalism has not been
very good lately at exposing disasters before they overwhelm us. True, but
it’s little to do with libel. Journalism’s chief recent debacles are: failing to
discredit the Bush/Blair WMD concoction; failing to reveal that the financial
system had been hijacked by greedy intellectual derelicts; failing to offer the
concerned public any navigable path through the (admittedly) daunting
complexities of climate science. These resulted from moral and intellectual
failures quite independent of Britain’s laws of defamation.

Lack of moral fibre caused the WMD debacle, following the old, sinister
pattern when ministers claim to act on secret intelligence. Journalists quite
smart enough to see when spooks are telling government what it’s
determined to hear can’t quell irrational fears of the government (somehow)
knowing something. Or, deadlier still, having the facility to cobble-up some
post-hoc “evidence”. The CIA and MI6 scrabbled the desert bare, while
journalists with some, but too few, brave exceptions, chose to wait and see.

Nobody ready to bet editorial credibility on calling the bluff would have
been sued for libel. It’s impractical for governments and minions-in-office to
go to court as it involves disclosures they cannot face. (Watergate turned out
as it did because Kay Graham was ready to bet her ownership of The
Washington Post, but the risk she ran concerned investment law, not
defamation.)

The notion of modern finance being run by brains not far inferior to
Newton and Einstein was equally a concoction. It wasn’t defamation law
which stopped journalists reporting the real character of the sector’s actual
commitment to mathematical science – viz, negligible. They simply hadn’t
discovered it, for lack of the necessary intellectual preparation. (Nor does
libel law have much to do with unwillingness in the business press to be
party-poopers in bubble-time.)

Climate-change is slightly different, as it’s a field rich in litigious
charlatans. It would be good to see some of the ranker hides tanned and hung
on walls. But it’s unnecessary to defame denialists: as The Guardian’s Bad
Science doctor Ben Goldacre suggests, their antics are self-defamatory if
anyone has some serious understanding of the way modern science works.
The problem is that journalism as a whole spends insufficient time
developing that knowledge and too much on insubstantial doomsday
scenarios. Making it easier for nervous people to publish accusations isn’t
going to change any of that. Lawsuit economics still give
excessive advantage to wealth and power. Introducing no-win-no-fee
litigation has reduced that old abuse – and brought some fresh ones into play.
Let’s reform them. But the law itself isn’t broke. Don’t fix it.

Bruce Page was a founder of the Insight team at the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. He is writing a long and troublesome book about risk and complexity.

Even in these out-of-joint times when calm debate is rarely possible,
there are good reasons for questioning the legitimacy of both
institutions – especially Ofcom – in a mature liberal democracy.
Historically, the central principle which has been seen as essential to
the right of free expression is that it be impervious to State intervention.
This means, in the words of Edward Clarke, John Locke’s friend, that
specific legislation controlling the media – in his day, of course, just the
press – was “very needless”. That was in 1695 but it is still true, as is
the jurist William Blackstone’s insistence, the following century,
that there be no “prior constraint” on public communications.

One way or another Ofcom and the BBC both play fast and loose
with these principles. They do so on the 20th century grounds that
broadcasting was so pervasive and limited a resource it required
regulation and this justified the involvement of the State. Whether
or not, fundamentally, it was right to regulate broadcasting was never
considered. Nevertheless, the principle of free expression, as a
basic human right, ought not to be media-specific, for all that it has
been – more or less – limited to the press. (The theatre, for example,
had to wait until 1968 before escaping from the dead censoring of
the Lord Chamberlain.)

Broadcasting regulation was inevitable not least because there
was an initial technical justification for controlling the allocation of
bandwidths; without control, broadcasters – or any other
through-air signal provider – could encroach upon each other.

In the age of channel abundance the scarcity argument fails. Even
without this, it was a clear case of mission creep to move from
necessary technological regulation of the infrastructure to the control
of content; but, again, this was done and persists without much
argument as to its appropriateness in a democracy ostensibly
committed to the principles of free expression. That such control is
“very needless”, given that we have general laws aplenty for the policing
of media content, is ignored.

What is left to justify content-control are non-technological
assertions – that broadcasting can be an “uninvited guest” of
exceptional power and influence and that the market cannot be trusted to
provide “quality”. These, though, are really no more than shibboleths,
puny in the face of what is arguably an ever-more pressing need to
defend the right of free expression. The arguments for specific content-control
are nothing more than pleas for the nanny State to protect us
from this image, or encourage us to consume those messages. The time
is long past to let go of nurse.

There is, in short, nothing to be said for Ofcom’s meddling with
content. Leave aside the bourgeois, curtain-twitching requirements of
its production “code”, how it comes to be, for example, messing in the
appointment of chief executives of media outlets is both curious and
offensive to the principle of free expression.

The BBC is, of course, a better case; but its close relationship to the
State via the licence fee ought to be a matter of far greater concern than it
is. The licence fee settlement renders it susceptible to real
pressure from even the most benign of politicians, never mind swiveleyed
maniacs who, in defiance of the Corporation’s impeccable
pro-establishment history from the moment of the 1926 General Strike
on, are now again on a witch-hunt looking for reds under the BBC bed.

Public service broadcasting is in an hour of need all right but, despite
this, would-be siren songs about the wonders of the market sound
clashingly out of tune. The best argument for some form of State
intervention is, pace young Murdoch, the market’s palpable
failure to provide a full range of programming whenever it has been
left free to do so.

Correcting that failure, however, simply has nothing to do
with an overblown, overstaffed (750-plus) NGO such as Ofcom. It
should be cut down to a technological brief immediately.
More problematically, the correction of market failure does
not necessarily require a sledgehammer the size and
complexity of the BBC. A commission charged with providing
funding for “quality” and empowered to command space for
its transmission might do just as well. In New Zealand and in Ireland
broadcasting commissions distribute public funds specifically
to producers to make good lacuna in programming provision. Surely not
the crazy, unthinkable idea that the emotional spin of top-slicing of the
beloved BBC’s licence fee makes it seem? Like republicanism it should
not be dismissed as unthinkable – even if it is going to have to wait its
time while we defend the public service broadcasting principle in
toto from the barbarians at the gate.

Brian Winston

The writer is a member of the BJR editorial board. A follow-up to his
history of free expression, Messages: Free Expression, Media and
the West, 2005, will be published next year.

Our sponsors and the support of our publishers, Sage, have enabled the
current editor and his team not only to sustain what remains a unique
publication but also, in my opinion, to have developed and improved the
quality and influence of the BJR and forge a reputation across the print and
electronic media industries that we could scarcely have dreamed of 20 years
ago.

Look back across those two decades and reflect on the completely
different media scene then prevailing: no web, no blogging, no digitalised
global communication system bringing information within instant and easy
reach. Even the computer itself was still in its infancy, with journalists on a
steep learning curve towards properly harnessing it. Since then the
unparalleled revolution in global communication has brought a
transformation that has changed our planet, the way we live and conduct our
affairs and, indeed, the entire culture of journalism. We were hardly on the
foothills of any of this when BJR was launched.

When this journal started, nobody seriously talked about “the end of
newspapers” or “the death of print journalism”. Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping
Revolution had lifted a curtain on what might be possible in the future
following the death of hot metal, even if my generation of journalists
remained locked within old habits that had been our life experience.

As the founding group – Hugo Young, Hugh Stephenson, Ivor Gaber,
Laurie Flynn, James Curran and I – sat one evening 21 years ago in the bar of
the Charing Cross Hotel planning the birth of this journal, those around the
table were consumed with improving the quality of our trade, challenging its
professional inadequacies and questioning the superficiality of much that
was then being offered in the name of journalism.

Our principal objective was to ask fellow journalists if the deeper values
of our trade were being corrupted by sloppy, superficial journalism that
often reflected the way our industry was managed and owned. And to
question what the real relationship was between journalists and those with
political power. Had some of us become a touch over-mighty in that complex
relationship? No one around that bar 21 years ago believed we soon might
reach a point when there would be a serious doubt about the very future of
newspapers and even the traditional electronic news media. Today we live on
a different planet, yet all those questions remain as relevant and as important
as they seemed to us in the 1980s.

Although The Guardian’s media section predates us by a decade, such
sections in the national press had yet to make the impact that would come
with online expansion. Some political weeklies published columns of press
criticism, mostly undistinguished. This was the period that brought the
curtain down on old Fleet Street and its famed watering holes as companies
relocated away from their traditional “village” homes, while television news
coverage and comment continued to be dominated by talents largely drawn
still from newspaper journalism.

In the wings, bright minds were sparking with ideas that would produce
the worldwide web, Microsoft, Google, the blogosphere, sophisticated
mobile telephone technology and, yes, YouTube and Twitter. Everything
was changing: rapidly, fundamentally. That was the mood music
accompanying the birth of a media forum with lots of aspiration but slim
resources. Now we inhabit a very different media world, but one no less in
need of the qualities offered by this journal. In fact, we believe the need is
greater than ever.

In numerous editorials in its early days, the BJR argued that there could
be only one response to a changing media landscape that threatened to dilute
the trade and shred traditional values and ideals: courage combined with the
excellence of journalism and journalists. Easy to say, far more difficult to
effect. And – no sanctimony here – it remains a central truth. There has never
been, never will be, an easy way ahead, but the conviction at the core of this
journal when it began remains unaltered.

Geoffrey Goodman, founding editor, chairman emeritus

So what has happened to diary journalism? And does the demise of the diary mean the end of professional gossip? Until recently the diary was an essential and muscular part of every newspaper, heralded by writers from Evelyn Waugh to Nicholas Coleridge, who in his new novel, Deadly Sins (published by Orion in April), describes how influential characters use gossip columns to circulate stories about one another in entirely untraceable ways.

In part, the disappearance or shrinking of gossip columns is simply a result of the change in economic circumstances across newspapers. Diaries aren’t cheap: as well as the salary of an editor and deputy editor, the best diaries used to employ reporters, pay generously for freelance tips, and demand comfortable expense accounts for lunches and taxis home for sometimes drunk and disorderly hacks. That’s a pretty steep rate for a few hundred words a day, and as the industry battles to save newspapers the diary column is an obvious place to cut costs.

But that is not the whole story, because the decline in newspaper revenue needs to be seen against a backdrop of a changing social landscape. What was good for chronicling the boom years does not seem so right when it comes to charting the bust. What interested readers when times were good runs the risk now of seeming irrelevant. There are exceptions, and it is worth noting them because each shows how diary journalism can still thrive. The Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary is a must-read because, despite the influence of its readership, it’s a local paper and people like to know what is happening in their own backyard. The Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column, regarded by many as the alternative leader column of that paper, is a piece of comic genius. The Telegraph’s Mandrake breaks the old-fashioned diary stories now, largely free for the picking, at social parties.

Generally speaking, however, corks are being kept firmly on champagne bottles across the land and so there is less for diaries to cover. I spend some of the week now as the deputy editor of The Observer’s books section, and the publishing industry speaks openly of cutting back launch parties. Books are not alone. Once any shop-opening, with a new range of swimwear or even the design of a single bracelet, would lend an opportunity for getting a couple of celebrity-brand ambassadors into a room with diary reporters and expensive cocktails. Now PRs are lucky if they can send out a paper press release, rather than resorting to an immediatelydeleted email. They have to work harder and, as one said to me last week, “be more inventive about winning national newspaper space”. This is partly because there’s no money for a brash bash, partly because even financially healthy companies are going to run a mile from paying for something that is seen as a frivolous luxury, and partly because the same goes for newspaper readers: outside Tatler, party reports leave a sour taste over the marmalade if the marmalade has to come from the supermarket value range.

That is not to say, however, that the readers’ appetite for gossip has vanished overnight. So stories that were introduced by lines like “…he told me, over a glass of Veuve Cliquot” (spot the plug?) have to find homes elsewhere. The good ones are the easiest to rehouse. Decent diary tales could always have claimed a place on the news pages and now, more than ever, the lines between gossip and news are blurred. So what you are left with for the gossip column is some wry political reflection, a spot of hypocrisy illuminated, and some funny quotes.

At which point, inevitably, enter the internet. Gossip websites, with no lead times, are beating diarists to breaking stories. Whereas five years ago we shamelessly quoted blogs, because other than a few pointy-headed enthusiasts nobody read them, these days bloggers are the competition. Some diarists – such as the Mail on Sunday’s Nathan Kay – have tried launching their own sites, but these make the day job harder still.

Depressed? Perhaps you should be if you’re keen on your newspaper institutions. I’m certainly a bit sad that after three years writing my own diary I could not bequeath it to new blood. But gossip, like the oldest and slipperiest invertebrate at the bottom of the sea, will live on. It is as robust as ever and just has to find clever ways to present itself differently.

Oliver Marre

Are gossip columns - and gossip itself - losing their appeal? Should papers persevere with them? Add YOUR view.

Specifically, this article is about the habit of journalists finding out
how many BBC personnel are rostered for big national or
international events – party conferences, Olympic Games, etc –
and then contrasting that with the Corporation’s apparently constant
pressure on governments for a bigger licence fee. Why, is the
constant cry, do they not cut the numbers swanning it in Manchester
or Beijing?

I myself have occasionally indulged in know-nothing criticism
of patterns of spending – high salaries for star presenters that I
never watch (though they attract big audiences); shows that I
consider disfigure my television screen, if ever I inadvertently turn
on during Alan Sugar’s bullying moments (but millions enjoy that).
In fact, everything that I don’t like, but mass audiences cherish.
Sometimes I wish I could adapt the attitude enshrined in that ancient
piece of wisdom: “There’s nowt as queer as folk.”

Like most people who have worked for the BBC, I am puzzled by
many of its decisions and practices. But when it comes to something I
know about, it’s different. During every party conference I attended in
11 years as political editor, a paragraph appeared in some of the
national newspapers jeering at how many people the BBC had sent. This
was easily done, as the Corporation printed a handout giving temporary
telephone extensions for different departments in the conference
town.

To the first Daily Blank journalist I encountered the day this
paragraph appeared I felt moved to elucidate. What number of
representatives would the Daily Blank have at the conference if their
technology required them not only to bring reporters, photographers,
leader writers and feature writers – plus, as often as not, a couple of
drivers to whisk executives around – but also printers (from both
composing and machine rooms in those hot metal days), darkroom
men, sub-editors and a galaxy of others from the offices back in
London?

I explained, with what patience I could muster, that we reporters
couldn’t do our work without the technical staff on site to send out
our material – not only cameramen, but producers, graphic artists, floor
managers, and so on, right down to make-up. (On one occasion, I
arrived at the studio to do my lunchtime news report to find that
the make-up lady had been lent to Margaret Thatcher, whose own
make-up assistant had fallen ill on the day of her Leader’s speech. The
floor manager offered to wipe me down with an oily rag, but I
preferred to dull the glare of the studio lights with a few perfunctory
passes of a borrowed powder puff.) The Daily Blank journalist seemed
unconvinced by my technical explanation. I thought of
suggesting, as an economy measure, his paper keep the BBC complaint
paragraph in type from year to year, and just alter the figures and the
location.

Since my retirement from newspapers and the BBC, most
papers have established online departments, which employ large
numbers of journalists and other staff. Often these are taken on in
expectation, rather than the assurance, of making a profit from
the new technology. I think that is an additional reason to deter
newspapers journalists from judging another branch of the news
industry without sufficient knowledge.

Here I declare an interest. Two of our four sons work for the BBC
(without benefit of patronage). One, as athletics editor, went to the
Beijing Olympics as part of a large staff. Because of the time difference
between the events happening and the programmes going out, they
worked long and unsocial hours. He came to see us soon after his return.
After supper he briefly fell asleep in the armchair before he could risk
driving home.

Another son, who is an editor on World Service radio, went to
Geneva for the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
launch. He returned from a three day visit also suffering from sleep
deprivation. I believe I worked hard in my 36 years in newspapers, but
nothing like as hard as during my 11 years at the BBC. Licence-fee payers
can sleep easily in their beds. The BBC extracts its pound of flesh all
right.

John Cole

The writer was political editor of the BBC, 1981-92.

When Arnold Wesker, the playwright, persuaded Sunday Times editor Harold
Evans to allow him to spend a month on the paper in the early 1970s, to watch
the editorial staff at work, he was struck by how much they talked about
journalism – the art and practice of their own profession. Post mortems
would be conducted on how well or badly a story had been pursued; the
ethics of foot-in-the-door reporting or cheque-book journalism were
regularly debated; pub talk revolved around such matters as whether, if ever,
a news story should be paid for, or what justification you needed for secretly
taping an interview. Wesker also – inconveniently for the paper – recorded an
incident when the famous Insight team, which had been working laboriously
on some deeply important investigation, suddenly picked up on a rather
sexier story involving a woman doctor who had refused a teenage girl an
abortion, and descended on her mob-handed to extract the information
needed for a front-page exclusive. The implication was that for all the
well-intentioned talk, at heart the paper was every bit as thuggish in its
approach to journalism as its down-market rivals.

He was wrong about that. I remember those days well – they were a
formative period for me and many other journalists working for The Sunday
Times in its golden period, and they were marked by a running internal
discussion about what we did and how well (or badly) we had done it. The
story of the woman doctor became a minor cause célèbre – the subject of
many earnest discussions afterwards. Long before codes of conduct had been
drawn up and committed to memory (or, too often, ignored), this was how I
and many generations of journalists learnt about the boundaries within
which we were meant to operate. Self-regulation worked, we told ourselves,
because standards of acceptable behaviour were well understood, and editors
accepted the responsibility of ensuring they were maintained.

My own early beginnings had been on the Daily Express – in those days a
broadsheet, and as tough a campaigning paper as any on Fleet Street – and I
learned an early lesson from its editor, Bob Edwards, and one of its reporters,
the late Rita Marshall, who had covered several major murder stories in the
Manchester area. Some time later, I found myself following in her footsteps
when I was assigned the task of interviewing the relatives of murder victims,
in order to bolster one of the Express’s perennial campaigns to bring back
hanging in Britain. I had to knock on doors in an attempt to persuade families
who had no great wish to revive old memories that they might like to lend
their support to the paper’s efforts. Most of those I contacted were unwilling
to talk, but on more than one occasion, to my amazement and relief, no
sooner had I announced I was from the Express, than the door swung open and I
was welcomed in. My passport, it emerged, was Rita, who had originally
covered the story, and had done so with such tact and sympathy that the
people she dealt with remembered her with affection.

Leave them wanting you back

One mother of a murdered girl told me that she and Rita still exchanged
Christmas cards. My news editor, Eddie Laxton, a tough, no-nonsense
character, backed up the Marshall approach. “When you’re doing a story,
remember that there may be another Express reporter following in your wake
one day,” he said. “So, whenever you leave a house, leave them wanting you
back again.”

Later, under Charles Wintour at the London Evening Standard, something
of the same message was reiterated when he summoned his reporting staff in
to a meeting after receiving complaints about a Standard story. In that
famously icy voice of his he ran over the basics of what he expected from his
reporters in terms of their conduct and warned us that any offence would
result in instant dismissal. It was not a lesson to be forgotten. Nor were
editors like Edwards and Wintour an exception. Hugh Cudlipp, editorial
director at the Mirror, John Junor at the Sunday Express, David English at the
Daily Mail, all combined a ferocious appetite for news with a keen awareness
of the constraints under which that news could be extracted. They were not
without their flaws, but at least the flaws were recognised.

In the past 20 years, for all the commissions and reports on how the press
conducts itself, the gradual introduction of judge-made law under the
European Convention on Human Rights, and a string of high-profile libel
cases, there has been a steady deterioration in attitudes within the
newspapers themselves. Young reporters I speak to say that however often
codes of conduct are written down and rehearsed at colleges of journalism,
they are routinely ignored when it comes to landing a story – often with the
encouragement rather than the criticism of editors. So great is the pressure
to bring in the next day’s front-page exclusive, that questions of how it was
obtained, and whether rules were broken or privacy invaded in the course of
researching it, are brushed aside. Indeed, sometimes those rules are stood on
their head, and it is the robustness with which the story was pursued that
becomes the measure of a reporter’s achievement.

I have heard young journalists not only boasting of their success in
acquiring documents under false pretences, or conning their way into private
premises, but receiving the approbation of their editors for doing so. The
distinction, once clear-cut, between those stories where the public interest
was clearly at issue, and those stories which were merely interesting to the
public, has become so muddied as to be meaningless. Although the Press
Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice, governing press behaviour, is
explicit on a range of issues from breach of privacy to deception and
intrusion, it seems often like a hazard to be negotiated rather than a standard
to be achieved. As a consequence, the tally of allegations about the intrusive
behaviour of newspapers continues to rise. The PCC last year investigated
more than 4,000 complaints by members of the public, a rise of nearly a third
over the previous year, and though some of this relates to the wider areas of
the new media the Commission now covers, it is a striking increase. Reading
through the PCC’s annual reports is a depressing experience. The picture
that emerges is of a media that all too often wins its case on a technicality, or
loses it with a dismissive shrug of the shoulders.

A newspaper repeats a story that has already been the subject of a
complaint to the Commission on the grounds that it still believes it to be true
– it is not. A video grab of someone’s bedroom, supplied by the police after a
drug search, identifying the location of their house and thus exposing them
to intrusion or burglary or both, is run by a local paper, despite the fact that
no charges were ever brought. Allegations that a group campaigning on
climate change had smuggled hoax packages into Heathrow and identified
vulnerable points on the perimeter fence turn out to be without any
foundation. A celebrity is “spotted” attending an Alcoholics Anonymous
meeting – wrong again. A man who supplied information to a newspaper
about malpractice at the local mortuary on the understanding that his
identity will be protected is described as an employee; there are only two
employees and he is fired. A man described as being at the centre of a criminal
investigation is neither at the centre of it nor involved at all. A newspaper
agrees to run a letter of correction after an inaccurate story, then simply fails
to run the agreed text, substituting its own version instead. A team of
reporters argues that hanging around outside a celebrity’s house for three
days in order to get a picture of a newborn baby does not constitute
harassment because no one asked them to leave. The misbehaviour of a 15-
year-old is disclosed because, although the law protects the identities of
those under 16, the paper simply waits until he is 16 and then runs the story.

Mere titillation

Small, grubby misdemeanours, mostly, but these are the encounters that
the public is most likely to experience. The PCC, in its jaunty annual report
for 2007, says it is there to criticise the press “when the inevitable mistakes
are made”. Inevitable? Deception, shoddiness and plain deception inevitable?
On the larger flaws of the national media, the PCC is strangely silent, and it is
here that the standards of what passes as acceptable behaviour have become
so grotesquely distorted. A reporter disguises himself as an Arab sheik, not
to expose a billion-dollar fraud but to trick a public figure into compromising
himself. A criminal trial collapses when it emerges that a national newspaper
has paid some of the witnesses due to give evidence. A reporter brings in
story after story based on illegal telephone taps; although he goes to prison,
and the editor resigns, there is no evidence that the newspaper itself was
unhappy about the practice until the police took action. The News of the
World cites public interest in exposing the sexual life of Max Mosley, but finds
its sources compromised and one unwilling to testify. Is this an example of
genuine exposure, or mere titillation?

This routine disregard of the rules that should govern press behaviour
came to a head in the coverage of the Madeleine McCann case, which has now
resulted in a flurry of libel writs. So great was the national interest in the
story, and so hysterical the coverage, that a kind of collective madness took
over. Stories based on no evidence whatsoever, manufactured quotes,
unsourced gossip and a series of guilt-by-association reports masqueraded
day after day as journalism. Perhaps because all this was happening abroad,
but mainly because of ferocious popular tabloid rivalry, all standards of
decency and restraint were cast aside, and the sensitivities of families,
friends and relatives were trampled over in the desperate search for news. Just
at the point where accuracy and responsibility should have been the
governing factors, smash-and-grab coverage of the worst kind took over.

It is perhaps a little early to say whether there will be a major postmortem
on the press treatment of the McCann affair, and whether that will
lead to any improvement in newspaper attitudes. The aftermath of the Max
Mosley case suggests, by contrast, that this is seen as yet further erosion of
press freedom. The British press is curiously immune to the heart-searching
that follows major errors in the U.S. media. When mistakes are made there,
they become national causes célèbres. The names of Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke
and Stephen Glass are still cited as awful examples of newspapers falling prey
to journalistic fabrications. When, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, U.S.
newspapers were seen to have been gullible in accepting the White House’s
version of events, there was an outbreak of agonised post-mortems that
would seem to be inconceivable here.

The press will never be popular. Unearthing inconvenient facts from
those who are seeking to protect their reputations or conceal wrongdoing is
not an activity designed to make friends. However, when innocent citizens
are caught in the crossfire of media investigation, it is the responsibility of
the reporter to remember that the measure of an intrusive inquiry should
not just be the depth of tomorrow’s headline, but the human being on the
receiving end of it. It is, of course, the responsibility of editors and
proprietors to ensure that their newspapers observe the basic rules that
should govern all good journalism. But ultimately, it is the reporter, the
correspondent, the writer of first instance who must decide, by listening to
his or her own conscience, whether they are treating their subjects with
decency and respect rather than cavalier disregard for everything except the
next day’s headline. The best way to ensure that is to talk about it – regularly,
unflinchingly and honestly. If there is a revolution in attitudes to be
mounted, then it should, in my view, start from the bottom.

Magnus Linklater

Magnus Linklater is Scotland editor and a columnist of The Times.
]]> http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/09/01/what-happened-to-playing-fair/feed/ http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/05/26/food-for-thought/ http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/05/26/food-for-thought/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 08:09:01 +0000 British Journalism Review http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/05/26/food-for-thought/ If the soup was too salty, the steak tough and the fruit overripe, that’s one
restaurant you won’t be revisiting. You might be too timid or too busy to
complain, but the nasty taste will linger, and you will find somewhere else to
eat, somewhere you can trust. That’s more or less the situation the press and
the broadcast media find themselves in, according to the results of the
BJR/YouGov survey published in this issue. Readers, viewers and listeners
are being put off by the suspicion of something rotten. Over the past five
years, the only group of journalists who have improved their position in
terms of being trusted by the public are those on the red-top tabloids — and
they still languish almost at the bottom of the heap. Of course, journalism is
not the only trade or profession distrusted by the public, but other groups,
such as politicians and judges, are presented to the public largely via the
media — the distrusteds’ version of the truth about the untrustworthy.
(Whether politicians’ reputations are tainted by their being associated with
the media, or the public standing of journalists is diminished because they
report the words and deeds of politicians, is a conundrum worthy of serious
examination.)

The recent media failings revealed for sharp-focus public scrutiny are
obvious contributors to the growth in distrust, and it would be comforting to
think that, as a result, editors have since been chastising reckless members of
their staffs, proprietors and broadcasting executives castigating
irresponsible editors, and shareholders and regulators disciplining rogue
bosses. Let’s hope that is so, and that the result will be an honest appraisal of
the state of the print and broadcast industries and a new dedication to
accuracy and truth. But let’s not hold our collective breath.

And let’s not be too optimistic that customers or consumers will soon
learn to discriminate against the most untrustworthy publications or
broadcasts: the public is now so accustomed to a diet of truth mixed with
falsehood that it may find difficulty distinguishing between the two. In the
press, unadulterated news has to find space between PR-driven trivia about
celebrities and columns based on no more information and judgment than
you can discover from a conversation in a pub. On television, trustworthy
material is hemmed in by “factual” programmes based on top-100 polls
ranking everything, it seems, from soap-powder commercials to spoonsplayers,
and “reality” shows that exploit the gormless and often reduce
talentless teenagers to tears (while ensuring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wallet
continues to swell).

Even in the most sober reporting of the news there has been — probably
since the evolution of speech — a risk of distortion. The conventions humans
use to pass on information to one another demand that it be put into the form
of what we journalists correctly call a story. Although a news story in the
media is constructed from facts — those of us concerned about lax and
dishonest media want what is printed or broadcast to conform to that
paradigm, and so does the public — it must have, like those stories we tell our
children, a beginning, middle and end. It also has to be, at best, exciting or, at
least, engaging. If the facts do not assist the story’s telling they are likely to
get changed or suppressed to make a more satisfying, less boring, whole.

Large numbers of readers and viewers clearly don’t care whether they are
told the truth or not, and are satisfied with bubblegum publications and
programming. Others may expect to be lied to: the low turnout at elections
and general disaffection with politics give some support to that theory. Still
others, it is clear from the survey, believe they are being short-changed by
cynical media and are ready to abandon their connection with them. And
they are free to do so because, for the first time, there is an easily available
alternative to the way news is diffused and received on paper and over the
airwaves.

Anyone with access to the internet can now see the raw material of news
and construct his or her own version of events. It may be crude and
misleading; it may lack the elegance of the well-crafted story; it may not have
the wisdom gained from years of reporting experience; it may contain
various kinds of lunacy, from paranoid racism to a fear of little green men.
But if the news media cannot provide something nourishing and non-toxic,
and yet still appetising, more and more people will reject old, stain-spattered
menus and stay home to rustle up something palatable for themselves. — BH

One of Davies’s informants is a trainee reporter on a regional daily
tabloid, and he (or she – there are no clues to gender, so for simplicity we’ll
assume a male) provides a diary of one 45-hour working week. During it the
reporter produced 48 stories of varying lengths and importance on the basis
of only 26 conversations with informants, only four of whom he had met face
to face. Indeed, he spent only three hours away from his desk, telephone and
computer terminal, and most of his time was occupied answering demands
from the news desk to fill specific holes in the typical 24 pages of local news
scheduled in each day’s paper. His account suggests that much of this
material is trivial and formulaic, to use no stronger terms. For example, his
editor apparently wants a daily page of happy stories to cheer up the readers,
and it is hardly surprising that in the week monitored the only way the
trainee found of solving that problem was to re-write three appropriately
optimistic tales from another paper. During his time off he can look forward
to spending whatever is left over from an annual salary of £15,500 after tax
and basic necessities.

Of course, there’s nothing new in long hours for junior reporters, coupled
with poor pay and exploitation. Davies’s trainee informant might even think
himself lucky that his week did not include, as used to be the case, a couple of
evening meetings of local charities or councils and a weekend football match.
Tied to his desk as he was during what presumably was a typical week, he at
least was spared trudging through rain and worse to and from news diary
commitments when unable to catch a bus, the fares for which would only
reluctantly be reimbursed by the management (rendering reporters
immobile, of course, removes any such obligation).

But, with all its indignities and inadequacies, that past world was
recognisable as journalism. Davies’s trainee has no chance of checking any of
the stories he has pounded into his terminal, largely without interviewing a
single source, let alone making a human contact that might one day provide
another story. Much of journalism is best learned on the street, but, as
Davies points out: “It is a common experience among young journalists that
they leave university with a degree in journalism, bursting with enthusiasm,
only to end up chained to a keyboard on a production line in a news factory,
churning out trivia and cliché to fill space in the paper.” Davies’s word for this
is “churnalism”: a system in which reporters are under pressure to accept any
source of information, often from a PR handout, and re-cycle it to feed the
next edition or the next broadcast bulletin. And, Davies says, the infection
has spread to national level as downsizing escalates.

Whether or not the growth of uncritical newsgathering in local and
provincial markets is the result of a deliberate managerial policy, it is
certainly one aspect of the general depletion of manpower brought about by
a desire to save costs and increase profits. Davies’s trainee is at one end of the
spectrum. Somewhere near the middle are the sub-editors whose task used to
include a close examination of stories to make sure they were (a) new and (b)
made sense. These days they have also to function as typesetters and fulfil the
function of those almost-forgotten antiques, the correctors of the press –
quaintly named, but frequently capable of catching a major error.

What does the future hold if newspapers and broadcasters do not
encourage young journalists by allowing them to exercise their skills using
their minds to ask questions and assess the answers sceptically, intelligently
and knowledgeably? Poorly trained and with little news judgement, the
executives of tomorrow will produce anodyne newspapers and bulletins
because that is all they know. And as the paying public wake up to the
realisation that the traditional media are turning into mere processors of
pseudo-news, they will surely abandon them, happy to find the truth by
weighing up for themselves the mixture of fact, opinion and craziness that
compete with each other in the free-for-all of cyberspace. If Davies’s trainee
is a harbinger of the end of news journalism as we know it, the coroner’s
verdict can be nothing other than suicide.

Reith was not a broadcaster (there was no such creature when he became,
initially, managing director of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922) or
a journalist or a performer: he was a manager with a training in mechanical
engineering. And, according to a biography published last year by his
daughter, his personal and political attitudes were repulsive. Yet it was this
egotistical autocrat who was able clearly and definitively to state the
objectives and purposes of public service broadcasting: to educate, inform
and entertain.

As Dent’s description demonstrates, Reith might well be accused of
having a limited and joyless idea of the entertainment element in the BBC’s
task. He also had a secretive and partial view of what information it should
provide: he was willing, for example, to suppress news of the looming crisis
over Edward VIII’s marriage, as were the overwhelming majority of
newspaper editors and proprietors. But in the realm of education he acted
with determination, no doubt inspired by the curtailment of his own
academic ambitions – his father sent him on an apprenticeship when Reith
himself longed to go to university. The foundations laid by Reith meant, for
listeners and viewers in the era that followed, exposure to great music by the
BBC’s own orchestras, talks by leading academics, and plays both from the
classical repertory and new commissions, as well as programmes made
especially for schools and, later, the Open University.

At the point when Agate and Dent encountered him, that day in April
1939, Reith had already been out of office at the BBC for nine months and the
BBC itself was about to be recruited to the war effort as a vital weapon of
propaganda. When peace arrived, the whole of Britain had learned to rely on
the BBC to satisfy a growing need for knowledge, news and pleasure. It served
the nation well, still basing its work on Reith’s attitude, summarised in his
reported remark that “the BBC has never attempted to give the public what
it wants. It gives the public what it ought to have”, a stance nowadays
stigmatised as elitist, but at least one aiming for high quality.

As the BBC drifted away from Reithian principles, it came under the
leadership of a succession of directors-general less concerned with the
nature of programmes than with numbers, either in matters of accounting or
the size of audiences. Their motivations seemed to be based on commercial
competitiveness rather than quality, with the inevitable end result that, now,
whole days can go by without the BBC offering a reason for an adult to switch
to one of its television channels.

Current Director-General Mark Thompson and the BBC Trust may have
had little room for manoeuvre after a licence-fee settlement that was less than
expected, other than, as detailed in his “Delivering Creative Future” speech,
large-scale staff cuts, property sales and – crucially for BBC journalism – the
integration of the news division. Yet, despite the title, the emphasis of the
speech was managerial rather than creative, and one of its main thrusts was
towards the multiple uses of programmes through on-demand access by way
of new media, such as iPods and the internet. There will be less of what
Thompson called “middling” output, and instead what he calls “the best”.
That seems likely to mean programmes that are award-winning and saleable
– there’s no doubt about the BBC’s money-making power in the global
market – rather than individualistic and interesting.

More of the detail of what is wanted will emerge as BBC Vision
executives tour the country to give their autumn commissioning briefings.
Behind the turmoil at the BBC is the unspoken menace of potential
privatisation: there must be some managers who have an ambition, without
admitting the fact to themselves or each other, to take the BBC brand into
the stock market. Now, before it is too late, is the time to insist that the BBC
is a public service corporation with a duty to to enrich the minds and lives of
the nation.

How should the BBC put its house in order? Comments welcomed.

Andy Bull

I have an analogy I like to use when working with a group of raw recruits to a
journalism course. It’s that they should think of learning how to write a news
story rather as they would approach following a recipe in a cookbook. Just as
with a recipe by Jamie or Gordon or Nigella, I tell them, the recipe for writing
a news story is pretty straightforward. It’s called the inverted triangle. But I
point out that while the news-writing recipe is simple – a useful template for
any story – what’s hard is deciding how, in each new situation, the various
ingredients to hand should be mixed, blended and added to the dish. What
I’m essentially telling them is that journalism is a craft: the theory is
minimal; it’s practice that enables you to become good at the job.

Finding they are studying a craft rather than an academic pursuit puzzles
some students. It’s often the first they have heard of such a distinction. This
is particularly true of those who have spent three years gaining a media
studies degree and have found, to their consternation, that it is not helping
them to get a job as a journalist. Often, such graduates have discovered too
late that editors – whether in newspapers, magazines, broadcasting or online
– want above all to know that a raw recruit has been trained to do the job to a
basic level of competence. They discover that editors are much less
interested in the class of degree they have received or, often, the institution
that awarded it, than in whether the course was accredited by the National
Council for the Training of Journalists, the Periodical Training Council or
the Broadcast Journalism Training Council. This confusion over the
theoretical study of journalism and the practice really should never have
arisen. The fact that it has, and that a generation of young people has been
confused and misled as a result is – frankly – shameful.

Once this confusion is cleared up, they see why they are having problems.
It often defuses the resentment they have built up against the industry, and
redirects it at their former tutors and the institutions that awarded them
their dud degrees. They start such a conversation convinced they have hit a
brick wall because journalism is a closed shop; that it’s all about who you
know. By the end of the talk they realise their problems stem from the fact
they have been badly prepared for the working world of journalism.

I meet a lot of young people in this position, who find they must embark
on an accredited post-graduate course to pursue their goal of becoming
journalists. These young people are usually bright and keen and, once you
show them they have been taught the wrong things, they realise that getting
into journalism is not actually about who you know but what you know – and that they know the wrong things. At first they look puzzled when told they
need to learn how to write. They’ll say: “But I have a 2:1. I’ve been writing at a
very high level.” So you give them a basic spelling, punctuation and grammar
test and they discover they are actually poor at all these. It’s a revelation – no
one has tested them on such things before. If you then take a piece they have
written and run though it for jargon, cliches, repetition, overblown language
and unnecessary words they quickly realise that they actually don’t know the
essentials of how to write – because no one has bothered to teach them. They
are shocked at first when criticised for filling their news stories with
comment. When you tell them that no one is interested in what they think,
they are baffled because for three years their media studies tutors cared
deeply what they thought. So you have to start from scratch.

The problem degrees

I should say I have absolutely no problem with media studies degrees as
long as it is made clear to those who embark on one that it will probably not
lead to a job as a journalist. I have no problem with media studies, just as I
would have no problem with an alternative course to medicine called medical
studies, in which students learn all about medical history and models of
health provision but don’t actually get to treat patients. Where I would have a
problem is if a graduate of such a course assured me he could take my
appendix out, or set my broken leg in plaster. I also have a problem with
degrees that are labelled “journalism” but which are not vocational, and
which do not equip graduates with a good chance of gaining a job in the trade.
That applies to a large number of so-called journalism courses which are not
accredited by one of the industry bodies.

There are those who will say I am being far too harsh on media studies
degrees – that the best of them turn out graduates who go on to have
sparkling careers in the media. I am sure this is true. Nevertheless, it is my
experience that most editors do not trust such degrees and much prefer
recruiting from industry-accredited courses. The Publishing Skills Group’s
Graduate Apprenticeship Survey 2005 questioned 202 journalist employers
across the newspaper, magazine and broadcasting sectors, and found that, of
the 70 per cent who recruit new entrants into journalism straight from
education, 73 per cent look for industry-accredited qualifications. The
Journalism Training Forum polled 1,238 journalists across all media in 2002
and found that more than half the respondents held a professional journalism
qualification. Of those, 64 per cent were awarded by the NCTJ.

Clearly, graduates from industry-accredited courses are at a huge
advantage when it comes to finding a job. That wouldn’t be a problem if there
were enough journalism jobs for the rest of those who want them, but there
are not. The UK’s official graduate careers website, prospects.ac.uk, which is
the commercial subsidiary of the Higher Education Careers Services Unit,
surveyed media studies students who graduated in 2004. Of 4,505 graduates,
only 14.6 per cent found employment in the media, even when the definition
of media is drawn very widely to include “arts, design, culture, media, sports
professionals”. That contrasted with 16.1 per cent who were in retail,
catering, waiting and bar staff, and 20 per cent in clerical and secretarial. So, if
you want to be a barman or a secretary, take a media studies degree. Or, better
still, avoid the student loan debt and go straight out to work.

Despite this, the number of media studies courses on offer – and the
number of students – is increasing. According to the Higher Education
Statistics Agency (Hesa), the number of students enrolled in media courses
has grown in the past five years from 13,600 to 26,700. It is the same story in
our schools, where 57,500 students sat a media, film or TV studies GCSE last
year. That’s 25.9 per cent more than in 2005 and represents 1 per cent of all
GCSEs taken in 2006. At A-level, 30,964 students sat media, film or TV
studies in 2006. That is 3.8 per cent of all A-levels taken. There has been a 250
per cent increase in the number of people taking media studies at A-level over
the past 10 years. Go to a careers fair and sit on a journalism stall and you will
be inundated by school students with A-level media studies who believe they
are on the first rung of the ladder leading to a job in journalism. They are not.

Simple supply-and-demand economics would suggest that we need fewer
media studies and journalism degree courses, and yet we get more. That’s
because the demand for such courses at universities comes from students, not
the industry. Universities know that if they add “media” or “journalism” to a
course title, applications shoot up. The current Ucas listing contains 677
courses with either media or journalism somewhere in the title. To take a
couple of examples at random, the University of the West of England offers
degrees in Criminology and Journalism, History and Journalism, Journalism
and Philosophy, and Journalism and Spanish. At the University of Chester
you can twin journalism with more than 80 subjects, including management,
criminology and dance. Let’s imagine the response of a news editor to the cub
reporter who comes back to the office and says: “I will now express my story
through mime.”

Such a plethora of courses is bound to sow confusion in the mind of the
aspiring journalist. Once it was clear: media degrees were dominated by
academic theory and journalism degrees were vocational. Certain courses –
particularly vocational post-graduate ones at Cardiff, Sheffield and London’s
City – won editors’ respect because of the calibre of graduate they produced.
Now, editors cannot keep track and have no idea whether a graduate from
most of the hundreds of courses will be any good. So they rely on the one
reliable benchmark – whether the course is accredited – and for newspaper
editors that means by the National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Currently the NCTJ has placed its stamp of approval on around 60 courses,
less than 10 per cent of the UCAS total.

Students are being misled

As I’ve said, I would have no problem with media studies as long as
students weren’t being misled. From my experience, they are being, and in
large numbers. For example, take a look at the website of an organisation
with the awkward acronym of MeCCSA, whose members teach “media,
communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education”. On its site is
an FAQ section for those considering a media studies degree which contains
this:

“What is the value of doing a practice-based media degree, versus one that concentrates on media theories? …Neither is intrinsically better than the other when getting a job, although acquiring certain skills (such as familiarity with editing software) can occasionally help in some specific jobs. However, employers are much more likely to consider the final level of your degree and your ability to produce high quality research, to analyse sociological trends, to work effectively with people, to organise events, to think creatively and to write well, when deciding whether or not to employ you.”

I suggest the evidence is that this is not so and that editors will judge
graduates overwhelmingly on whether their course is practical, and
accredited. No wonder then that many editors – and commentators – look at
media studies and deride it. Critics are not hard to find. Chris Woodhead,
when still chief schools inspector in 2000, said that it was “vacuous”, “quasi-academic”, and a “one-way ticket to the dole queue”. He went on: “Do [undergraduate media studies courses] equip the student for a job in the media? Many senior figures in the industry think not.” John Humphrys, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, said of media studies: “Even more kids are doing it now and it is sillier than it ever was. Where are they going to find jobs? If you decide after a proper degree in English, history or economics
to do a one-year postgraduate course in journalism at a good university, all well and good. But the idea of three years at university doing journalism is barmy.”

A generation ago the newspaper industry had a tight hold on training.
Cub reporters came to their paper generally with no experience and their
training took place in the office, plus day or block release at a further
education college. They were trained to pass their NCTJ exams and then
became senior journalists. Today, most newspaper groups and individual
editors prefer to select from recruits who are already trained to NCTJ-approved
preliminary level. The universities saw the opportunity to offer
journalism and media courses but, failing to understand (or not caring) what
was required by the industry, too many of them created courses that attract
students but don’t deliver the goods. Academia, which is not comfortable
with craft skills, inevitably wanted to intellectualise the study of journalism,
so you get students wondering what the sociology of journalism, politics and
power in the media, or journalism and society have to do with learning to be a
reporter. This clash of cultures is perhaps at its clearest over the issue of
shorthand. For editors and for the NCTJ, shorthand is essential. Universities
have a problem with shorthand because they see it as a purely mechanical
skill. Never mind that it is as hard to master as a foreign language. Many
universities struggle to justify – in their own terms – awarding credits for its
study, which sends the message to many students that it is unimportant.

However, whatever practising journalists may think of it, media studies
are not only here to stay, they are becoming increasingly respectable. In
January last year, Oxford University announced the creation of the Reuters
Institute for the Study of Journalism with the goal of breaking down the
barriers of incomprehension and mistrust between journalism and academia.
Tim Gardam, principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, and former BBC head of
news and current affairs, is chairman of the steering committee. He says of
the institute: “[It] is part of the department of politics and international
relations. That gives it a place in a clear academic discipline instead of trying
to invent a new one. Media studies have made journalism a profession in
which you need a master’s degree to progress. That is good.”

Is it? Do you really need a masters to be a first-rate reporter, sub-editor or
indeed editor? Or do you actually need the nose for a good story, a journalistic
instinct that can’t be taught but can be channelled through the teaching of
good practical skills, including the recipe for news writing? Clearly, media
studies won’t go away. But here’s a question for its advocates: If it is such a
vital and effective discipline, and media studies specialists are so good at
understanding the media, how come they have such a bad press? Discuss.

Andy Bull is a former online editor of The Times, features editor of the Mail on Sunday, and deputy editor of the Sunday Express. He teaches on the PTC-accredited post-graduate diploma in magazine journalism run by PMA Training in London, is the NCTJ’s qualifications and careers consultant and author of the NCTJ Essential Guide to Careers in Journalism (Sage Publications). It is available from www.nctj.com.