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