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.

What began in a euphoric atmosphere promising unlimited success
turned sour, not simply for the usual reasons of politics, in which events
prove to be beyond the grasp of the person in power, but because the
enthusiasm with which most of the news that the media greeted the early
triumphs of New Labour was largely replaced by antagonism. Blair and his
cohorts spun success and failure alike with a ruthlessness that led to
journalists, embarrassed and guilty at too-often readily accepting what they
were told, responding in kind and with what developed into habitual
hostility.

Whatever Blair’s much-discussed legacy means to Brown in terms of
continuing policies, the media coverage of a Brown-led government will alter
because of the differences between the new Prime Minister and Blair on a
personal rather than a political level. Blair quickly showed an actor’s ability
to assume the role of the modest, sincere visionary, carrying his message with a ready grin and an athletic stride, even if, with the passing years, those same characteristics have made him look, to some, like a prancing jackanapes. His speech patterns reproduce informal conversation, using hesitations, interjections such as “Look…” and “Y’know”, and unobtrusive
mispronunciations, with consonants frequently being replaced with glottal
stops and some vowels with the unstressed sound linguists call “schwa”. The
implication is that, despite being the product of Fettes, Oxford and the Bar,
he talks like the man in the street. His choice of phrases is often Biblical, the
archaic reversal of word order as in his celebration of the 1997 landslide: “A
new dawn has broken, has it not?” There must be some of the actor in Brown
as well – few politicians thrive without it – although his public persona seems
consistent with his past: son of the manse, Kircaldy High School, Edinburgh
University as student, lecturer and Rector. There is certainly some of the
writer in him: he has produced a biography of the Independent Labour Party
leader James Maxton, and the newly-published Courage: Eight Portraits of
heroic men and women (excellent volumes, no doubt, but unlikely to have
attracted the advances being forecast for Blair’s memoirs).

And Brown was also a researcher at Scottish Television, so he has inside
experience of the media. As for his speaking style, the phrase that will dog
him for the rest of his career is “post-neoclassical endogenous growth
theory”. Since it fell leadenly from his lips in 1994 many outsiders have
shaken their heads in disbelief when told by grizzled parliamentary hacks
that Brown could be an incisive, witty and even hilarious speaker both in and
out of the chamber. The recent elimination of the word “prudent” from his
speeches indicates that he may have emerged from what often seemed a dense verbal fog.

The problem in his new Government’s dealings with the media soon to be
faced by the incoming Prime Minister arises from the early days of the New
Labour “project” and the plan devised by Blair and his advisors, principally
Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, to woo the hostile elements of the
press. The strategy was a sensible one, given the historical antipathy of the
majority of newspapers to Labour – witness the savage treatment of Neil
Kinnock – but as No 10 and other departments forced through their
determination to control the news, the media responded in kind.

We hope Gordon Brown will want to mark a change of regime by insisting
on a more straightforward approach from government spokesmen and
ministers. Journalists and public alike would welcome a truce in what has
become a damaging crossfire of misinformation: selective leaking and
contradictory briefings by factions inside the party in power, and highly-polished innuendo and personal sniping, rather than legitimate, fact-based criticism, by the media.

Everyone would benefit from the eradication of spin. Why, the public
might even recover confidence in political institutions and rediscover some
trust in the press. As long as the deterioration in the relationship between the
Government and the media over the past 10 years is not totally irreparable,
things can only get better.

Few private members’ bills make much progress, because government
whips can kill them simply by objecting and, regularly, object they do. In this
case they stayed silent, leading to the suspicion that members of this
Government, and some of its supporters, would like to see the FoI
(Amendment) Bill become law. In September last year the BJR pointed out
an attempt by Lord Falconer, the Constitutional Affairs Secretary, to reduce
the number of requests made under it, and urged that FoI should be both
protected and strengthened. Yet now, unless the Government shows its
commitment to the Act by contesting all inhibiting attempts to amend it,
MPs will give themselves a shelter in which they can hide from the media and
block what they consider to be intrusive publicity. Information providing
what they consider helpful – ie flattering – publicity will, of course, still be
freely available.

Meanwhile, in the courts, celebrities wanting to keep their private lives
private have won a series of decisions. For an allegedly high-profile figure in
sport – it’s not exactly a towering profile; members of the public without
comprehensive sporting knowledge may never have heard of him – there was
an order preventing him from being more closely identified, even by the
husband with whose wife he had an affair. The husband, anxious to blow the
whistle of revenge, apparently has no rights to do so through the media.

For Prince Charles, the Appeal Court upheld a High Court ruling that the
Mail on Sunday had infringed his confidentiality and copyright by publishing
parts of his 1997 diary, which he had circulated to friends and in which he
described Chinese leaders as “appalling old waxworks” during the handover
of Hong Kong. And for Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennitt, the Appeal
Court also upheld a judgment banning publication of a biography by a
former friend. Ms McKennitt was obviously disturbed that parts of the book
did not show her in the gentle light in which she prefers constantly to bathe.

The general surprise and considerable disconcertment among
journalists at some of these decisions was expressed by Paul Dacre, editor of
the Daily Mail, in his Hugh Cudlipp Lecture at the London College of
Communication in January. “Had you told me 36 years ago that a cuckolded
husband didn’t have the right to speak about his wife’s adultery, that a paper
would be banned from referring to royal indiscretions contained in a roundrobin
journal distributed to scores of people, and that the media cannot
reveal the identity of a Labour ex-Education Minister who sends her child to
private school – three issues that have come up recently on the privacy front
– I would have simply disbelieved you,” he said. In Dacre’s opinion, and the
BJR finds it hard not to agree: “Britain’s judges, whose dislike of much of the
media should not be underestimated, are itching to bring in a Privacy Law by
the back door.”

The judges would argue that they were simply applying the ancient
English law of confidence while finding the necessary balance between two
articles of the European Convention on Human Rights: articles 8, the right
to respect for privacy, and 10, freedom of expression. Journalists would
contend that freedom of expression is suffering because of the way the courts
are operating. In the case of Ruth Kelly, the Minister referred to in Dacre’s
lecture, the published story in which she was named resulted in a complaint
to the Press Complaints Commission, the creation of which in 1991 provided
a new self-regulatory framework and enabled newspapers to dodge a
proposed Protection of Privacy Bill.

Lawyers for Kate Middleton, girlfriend of Prince William, also wrote to
the PCC, and paparazzi pressure was eased for her as a result when
publications backed away. Now, following the jailing of News of the World
reporter Clive Goodman – and the resignation of editor Andy Coulson – the
PCC is slamming the stable door at the paper with a well-publicised flourish,
and writing to the editors of national and regional newspapers and
magazines to find out “the extent of internal controls aimed at preventing
intrusive fishing expeditions” – such as the “tapping” of mobile telephones.
The Commission also wants to know what is being done to instil
understanding of both the Code of Practice and the law in this area, and also
of journalistic public interest exemptions. Good luck to them – and let us
hope that the media are able to fight their corner in successfully resisting
both legislation and judge-made law on privacy with better ammunition than
Goodman’s scoops about such trivia as Prince William’s injured knee.

There may be an indication of the way the heads of the judiciary are
thinking in what one of the Law Lords, Baroness Hale, said in October: “The
public only have a right to be told if two conditions are fulfilled. First, there
must be a real public interest in communicating and receiving the
information. This is, as we all know, very different from saying that it is
information that interests the public – the most vapid tittle-tattle about the
activities of footballers’ wives and girlfriends interests large sections of the
public but no one could claim any real public interest in our being told all
about it.”

For “footballers’ wives and girlfriends”, read anyone in the public eye
who wants that eye to be blinded whenever an unwelcome spotlight is trained
upon nefarious, ill-judged or plain stupid activity in which they may be
engaged. Those intent on curtailing media freedom are not gathering quietly
to sneak in through the back door. Watch out for a sledgehammer.

Fortunately, with a gallop to the rescue that would have done credit to the 7th Cavalry, the specialist information group Wilmington bought the title just when it looked ready for the administering of last rights and announced its immediate return to the newsstands. We wish Wilmington and new editor-in-chief Tony Loynes – a former PG editor – good luck. They are certainly going to need it.

The recent history of Press Gazette is depressing and extraordinary in that an industry devoted to publishing news appeared unable to sustain a weekly journal of news about itself. Journalists are, on the whole, generous souls, traditionally ready to spend the housekeeping money on buying a drink for an impoverished friend. Yet they are notoriously parsimonious when it comes to forking out the relatively modest cover-price of their own trade paper. Senior journalists earning handsome salaries show a similar reluctance to put their hands in their pockets for the BJR, a more expensive purchase, although one which contains more food for thought. Fortunately, in our case generous corporate subscriptions enable what is an inexpensive operation to continue. Even The Journalists’ Charity, which supports those in need and is currently raising money to cover the cost of its new, state of the art care home in Surrey, has struggled to attract individual support from within the trade, with only a small percentage of those in work prepared to part with the minor investment required for life membership.

The competition facing PG (and, editorially, this journal) has become intense. Newspaper media sections and global coverage of the industry on the web have provided blanket coverage of media news and, more importantly, plundered trade advertising, making what was never a smooth path even rougher. Indeed, as its new owners doubtless realise, in recent years PG as a business has seen emphasis switch dramatically from the being print and electronic conduit linking outlets of journalism throughout the country to a revenue-earning platform for the distribution of various awards.

The continuation of the British Press Awards – in disarray after the withdrawal of several groups last year – and those for the regional press feature prominently in Wilmington’s plans; indeed, Loynes was quick to assure the trade that next year’s main awards are “firmly on schedule” for March 26, 2007. Putting them back on track will be a considerable achievement: getting the various national newspaper groups to follow a common cause can be more difficult that obtaining unanimity at a G8 summit.

Ian Reeves, editor of the publication when it went into administration, knows this only too well, having worked vigorously to gather enough support from the major newspaper publishers to establish a trust to fund PG’s future. Although he reported some success, overall acceptance of the idea was never remotely in reach.

The press release announcing Wilmington’s successful takeover burbled that CEO Charles Brady was “very enthusiastic about the acquisition” and quoted him as saying: “We intend to deliver to the journalist and press community publications, events and other information products that will not only enhance their professional lives but that they can identify with and be proud of.” Previous owners have said much the same before getting out of town.

What PG needs is greater support from individual journalists. Glitzy awards are not enough for the magazine itself to re-establish its one-time position as a vital component of the media industries and the newspaper industry in particular. If a significant number of those working at every newspaper, television or radio station, or web news or feature operation, had regularly bought what has become a lively and informative trade publication, the crisis would have been averted. Now – those evenings of dinner-jacketed self-glorification and extravagant carousing aside – PG can fulfil its primary purpose only through the largesse of the trade’s practitioners.

It continued to attract a great deal of goodwill, observed Robert Allen, when thanking suppliers, contributors and the magazine’s printers for their continuing support as the magazine limped into print for several weeks after going into administration. The words “working journalists” were noticeably absent. If the BJR is not at some point permanently to find itself the only trade-dedicated publication in journalism, the responsibility for Press Gazette’s demise will be the mean spirits that displayed wilful indifference in the past.

We see the headlines almost daily. “Global warming: passing the tipping
point” (The Independent, February 11, 2006), “Climate change a bigger
security threat than terrorism” (The Guardian, June 12, 2006) and “Sea rise
could be catastrophic” (BBC News, March 23, 2006). Anyone familiar with
the flow of media reports might easily conclude from all the media hype that
man-made global warming or climate change is established science-fact. Yet
nothing could be further from the truth. Which begs the question: why, in the
face of the highly speculative and selective nature of climate science, do
media reports assume there is a consensual view – and collude with it in
articulating a wholesale return of conjecture?

For those of us who have taken the trouble to study the issue and the
media coverage of it, the shrillness of the mainstream media’s approach
appears to owe more to scaremongering than to good investigative reporting
– on an issue that could waste billions if the climate dissenters are correct.
The fuss over global warming and climate-change revolves around one basic
fact: that the world has undergone a one-degree warming of the ambient
atmosphere over recent decades. And there is no doubt that a number of key
scientists subscribe to the basic premise that global warming is primarily due
to man’s activities and that, unless man cleans up his act, will continue on an
upward-linear warming trajectory for the next 100 years. These include Sir
David King, chief adviser to the UK Government, Dr James Hansen, director
of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, and Dr Michael Mann,
director of the Earth System Science Centre. No one questions that the
media’s reporting of these scientists is perfectly valid. But there are many
other eminent scientists who we are rarely hearing from.

As Richard S Lindzen and Alfred P Sloan, professor of atmospheric
science at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked in
the The Wall Street Journal in April of this year: “How can a barely discernible,
one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late
19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather
catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future
catastrophes?”

Lindzen believes: “The answer has much to do with misunderstanding
the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a
triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are
hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus the political stakes for
policy makers provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to
increase the political stakes. After all, who puts the money into science –
whether for AIDS, or space, or climate – where there is nothing really
alarming?” And he detects “a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy.
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds
disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges,
scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain
credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their
basis… what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute
support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of
warming that has occurred”. Lindzen has also drawn attention to what he
sees as “the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles
submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At
Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest”.

Questioning the wisdom

He is not alone in doubting the scientific veracity of global warming
claims. Dr Robert E Davis, associate professor of environmental sciences at
the University of Virginia, takes up the running: “In reality, we have a
tragically short record of good [climate] observations.” In an article entitled,
“Climate Cycle or Climate Psychic?” in TCS Daily, the online journal in which
experts examine a wide range of contemporary issues, on May 12, 2006,
Davis points to the variable and cyclical nature of climate change throughout
history and questions the perceived wisdom that man-made greenhouse
gases are proven to be the chief cause of climate change. “With the
phenomenal accuracy afforded by hindsight, we know that, sometime
around 1977-78, our planet underwent an abrupt shift from one climatic state
(generally cold) to another (warm)… Of course, this climatic shift was
retrospectively blamed on increasing greenhouse gases, because such
dramatic and abrupt shifts just couldn’t be natural. Presumably nature, left
to her own devices, does not cotton to wild mood swings. But is global
warming really to blame? Not likely, based on some new analyses by
University of California at Los Angeles geographers.” Davis goes on to set
out the recent analysis from the university for which I do not have space here,
but which can be seen via TCSDaily.com.

Davis alludes to new research confirming that warming and cooling are
naturally cyclical. Further that the findings are borne out by the global
cooling cycle experienced between 1940 and 1975. During this period – and
this is a major stumbling block for the future catastrophe theorists – the
ambient global temperature actually fell while carbon emissions kept rising.
Davis concludes: “The biggest problem with all of these somewhat cyclical
shifts is that no one knows for sure that a shift has actually taken place until
many years after the event, when its too late to be useful. So be wary of global warming psychics warning us of unprecedented climate shifts. In most cases, they are only unprecedented because of the short life span of most scientists. Remember one of the absolutely fundamental and too-often unstated tenets of science – there’s little point in studying anything that doesn’t vary during a scientist’s lifetime.”

Dr Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona
University, deals specifically with one of the key problems – the variability
and critical effect of clouds that makes accurate prediction just about
impossible, leaving researchers “scratching [their] heads over climate
change” (TCS Daily, April 5, 2006). Balling quotes Dr James Herbert,
responsible for getting the whole global warming ball rolling in the 1980s, as
admitting: “The forces that drive long-term climate change are not known
with an accuracy sufficient to define climate changes.”

Dr Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at Huntsville, University of
Alabama, observes of media coverage: “An intense global warming
propaganda campaign by the media is currently under way” (“Global
warming hysteria has arrived”, TCS Daily, April 4, 2006). He asserts that
“government heavily funds a marching army of climate scientists whose
funding depends upon man-made global warming remaining a threat. That is
not to suggest that there is a conspiracy going on. It is merely to point out
that climate scientists aren’t always unbiased keepers of the truth. The arena
of global warming overflows with more strongly held opinions than it does
unbiased or scientific truths”. (“Global warming, science or policy?”, TCS
Daily, January 13, 2006). Spencer concludes: “Scientists who don’t believe in
predictions of climate catastrophe need to rise above their fears of losing
funding and speak out. Otherwise, this growing storm of global warming
could do some real damage.”

As a recent House of Lords report noted, the mainstream media do have a
history of, and predilection towards, reporting alarmist stories. On March
14, 2005 a BBC news bulletin announced that violent crime was “spiralling”.
Not according to the police and British Crime Survey figures, however. In
fact, as the police and the survey pointed out, crime had declined steadily
since 1998. In January 2003 the BBC, warning of a potential smallpox
epidemic, broadcast: “Smallpox kills about 30 per cent of those infected.”
The result? Lots of vaccine sold; no epidemic. Numerous other similar media
scare stories could be cited. Prospective media epidemics related to killer flu
viruses, killer bees, SARs and MMR jabs, mad cow disease, the return of TB
and of course bird flu. None of which materialised. Whenever a research
scientist warns of a potential “global catastrophe” (and presumably receives
a grant to combat the threat) it seems that quite a few reporters, editors,
broadcasters and publications are only too willing to oblige with appropriate
headlines.

Pandora’s Box of scare stories

On March 1, 2006 the BBC announced: “Bird flu could kill your cat” – on
the basis of a single cat turning up its paws in Germany. The very same day
the BBC ran the headline: “Cancer chemicals found in drinks cans.” The Food
Standards Agency quickly put this scare story into perspective, pointing
out: “The levels found are of no concern.” Even so, the public climate had
received yet another media-induced dose of fear. But nothing seems to appeal quite as much as the Pandora’s Box of scare stories that climate change affords. Perhaps because their obvious “irrefutability” – we’ll all be dead by the time they do or do not happen – lends dramatic appeal.

We’ve all probably heard or read that the Gulf Stream may be in danger of
“expiring”. But most of us will not have heard the report debunked by,
among others, Professor Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute. In a
letter to Nature, Wunsch wrote: “The occurrence of a climate state without
the Gulf Stream any time soon – within tens of millions of years – has a
probability of little more than zero. The only way to produce an ocean
circulation without a gulf stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to
stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.” In short the original reports posited an
entirely phoney climate scenario.

We have been told that the Greenland ice-cap, the whole of Antarctica
and various glaciers are melting away, threatening catastrophic rising sea
levels. The only problem with this scenario is that, as many other
climatologists report, such assertions are wholly selective. While the ice is
receding in some places, it is reported as advancing in others. And we were
recently warned that polar bears were in danger of “facing extinction”. This
report was however immediately rubbished by Dr Mitch Taylor, a polar bear
biologist from the Eskimo nation Nunavut, an area four times as big as
France. He wrote in the Toronto Star: “They are not going extinct, or even
appear to be affected at present. This complexity is why so many people find
the truth less entertaining than a good story. It is silly to predict the demise of
polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”

A few months ago 60 scientists wrote an open letter to new Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They called on him to “re-visit the science
on global warming and review the policies inherited from his left-wing
predecessor”. Referring to Kyoto as “pointless” – now proven to be a correct
analysis based on the failure of almost every signatory nation to meets its
ludicrously ambitious targets – the letter questioned both the climate
science and the public billions about to be “wasted” on it. The letter received
no coverage at all in the UK however until co-signatory Emeritus Professor
Phillip Stott pursued the media “omission” with national broadcasters and
editors, largely, as he notes on his website, without success. Can we imagine a letter from 60 pro climate-change scientists being ignored?

In July, Professor Lindzen again took up his pen in The Wall Street Journal,
this time to respond to the further media hype created by former presidential
candidate Al Gore’s “disaster” movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s film
claims that we are headed for “a planetary emergency” made up of melting
ice-sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and
invasions of tropical disease. Lindzen however reminded WSJreaders of the
scientific fact that the Arctic was actually “warm or warmer in 1940”, before
the last cyclical cooling period, after which a warming cycle took over again.
He also noted that the latest scientific research suggests that, on average, the
Greenland ice cap is actually growing, that mosquitoes, necessary for
“tropical invasion”, “don’t require tropical warmth”, and that we have not
been able to “attribute any particular hurricane to global warming”.

Most significantly, he approaches the whole issue with a humility rare in
today’s scientific research community, referring to “the primitive state of
weather and climate science”. The effect of this, he suggests, is that “science
just does not know” as “the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always
changing”. Lindzen sums up the climate case thus: “Most of the climate
community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have
increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early 1970s, increased again until the 90s, and remained essentially flat since 1998.” As “we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task… [of prediction]… is currently impossible”, he points out.

Infamous summary

“Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise,
and with surprising impact.” He also reminds us how the known climate
science was “accurately presented” in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s report, in which scientists had made it clear they
could not say with any certainty what role man played in climate change. By
the time the panel’s administrators re-drafted the now infamous “summary
for policy makers”, however, it read: “The balance of evidence suggests a
discernible human influence on global climate.” As Lindzen says: “This
sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.”

What we, as journalists, personally believe about the science of
climatology and its associated predictions for global cataclysm is hardly the
point. What clearly is the point, however, is that we ought not to be
propagating media myths based on a “consensus” science view on global
warming and climate change. Dissident climate scientists are not the only
ones who cannot get the dissident science view into the mainstream. I have
had the same difficulty convincing some editors and producers of the need to
question the basic assumptions and wild predictions for the climate in 100
years time – surprising, really, when you consider the irony that
climatologists (or meteorologists, as we otherwise know them) can’t predict
what the “climate” will be in two weeks’ time with any degree of accuracy.

Peter C Glover is a freelance journalist and writer on media and cultural issues with a leading British current affairs blog (according to Technorati rankings) at www.wiresfromthebunker.com.