Media are mostly businesses. In The Powers that Be, his fine narrative of the development of American journalism in the 20th century, David Halberstam puts it well: “Broadcasting is a curious profession. It is the most powerful instrument in the world for merchandising soap, and it is potentially the most powerful instrument in the world for public service, and it has always been caught between the duality of these roles: public service, because it is licensed by the government and thus, like it or not, it owes something to the society, and merchandising, because its material norms are relentlessly driven upwards by the marketplace and the stock market.” Though Halberstam writes about broadcasting, his point covers in principle all news journalism, including newspapers, which no longer require a licence from government. The public service ethic operates there too, if more faintly.

Earlier this year Professor Onora O’Neill spoke in a lecture to the Royal Irish Academy of the more careful way in which other professions, such as the law, and the Academy, seek the truth. But she omitted the important qualification that these are not market actors. We in the media can produce the truth, but it is far from all we do. Indeed, much of what we do is to produce personality pieces, consumption aids, opinion by the yard and a great deal of fantasy. We trade in stories, which is what we call the pieces we write and broadcast. Stories, as we remember them being told to us, or telling them to our children, are not always shaped to accord with the complexity of truth. They are as often tailored to what we wish them to be, to the simplicity of fables – with happy endings, or frightening events, or moral messages, or Schadenfreude.

We do all of these things because the market – the customers – want them, and because, unlike the law and the Academy, we have to sell our products. It’s the basic bargain we make with a market economy. But it is a bargain, not a surrender. If we want to continue and strengthen a tradition of news and analysis as a way of understanding the world, then we have to insist that the side of the bargain that privileges fact and understanding is observed. Luckily, in Britain, many journalists are prepared to do just that.

Much critical comment

Second, BBC journalism partakes of the general journalistic culture, and where that culture is significantly affected by the news priorities, treatments and the approach of the highly competitive tabloid press, these criteria are absorbed and copied, often unconsciously. So while the BBC in important and crucial ways remains outside of commercial pressures, at least its two main broadcast channels act as if they were in the market – making more or less the same choices and using more or less the same techniques. As much critical comment has pointed up over the past months, the same is now seen to be true of Channel 4. Its mandate is to produce “innovative, original and creative programming”. Its critics – such as Alasdair Palmer and Chris Hastings, writing in The Sunday Telegraph in October – charge it with offering “a diet of repeats, American imports, makeover shows and voyeurism masquerading as satirical exposé”. Its market share, however, has increased to 10 per cent: and its profits have also gone up accordingly.

If we ask what the institutional conditions necessary to promote a trustworthy media are, we have to answer that they don’t presently exist and seem unlikely to exist soon. Trustworthiness in this context has come to mean a channel or a newspaper that has an ethic and a practice of accuracy and independence and public service. It seems that such virtues are more available through at least local monopoly – as with U.S. big city papers or the pre-competition BBC, or the occupation of an exclusive niche, like the Financial Times or Le Monde – than in competition.

The other truth-seekers are either immune from competition, as is a court of law, or they control competition more or less rigorously, as do the protocols of academic research and publishing. John Stuart Mill famously thought that the competition between good and bad opinions would drive out falsehood and reveal truth. The modern practice is that opinions are shouted at each other in an ever-rising crescendo, encouraged by presenters who are told that this sort of thing makes good radio or television.

One of the largest contemporary phenomena is the popularisation of fame — done all but exclusively through the media. In daily journalism, fame is hugely convenient. It is the visual and personal equivalent of the clichés, without which journalism could not be written or broadcast at the speed it is. As Leo Braudy noted in his The Frenzy of Renown: “In the highest realms of contemporary fame, to call someone famous whose face is unfamiliar seems virtually incomprehensible.”

In most national papers most days, there are about 10 opinion columns of various kinds that deal, at least in part, with politics. In most of them, the main subject is Tony Blair, and in most cases he will be excoriated. The Prime Minister will always and rightly be a mighty subject in the writings of commentators, but this inflation of comment, usually by people who have no access to the Prime Minister and little contemporary connection with day- to-day politics, means that he is the famous and handy whipping-boy for any discontent, much as George W Bush has become globally.

Their sheer fame, their instant recognisability, the accretion of images of them means they come on to the journalists’ self-created stage with a great many attributes which the writer doesn’t have to spend his precious time giving them. Moreover, in attacking the most famous political figures in the country or the world, the writer takes upon him or herself some of the attributes of the fearless iconoclast, which are indispensable for a rapid reputation.

Fame, or celebrity, now occupies very large amounts of media space. An acquaintance told me recently that, in the newspaper for which she is books editor, the editor insists that almost all books she selects must be written by and reviewed by celebrities. The editor’s insistence is perfectly comprehensible. Celebrities do much of the writer’s and editor’s work for them before the reader reads a word of the review, because they are hugely famous, and thus already the subject of curiosity. The books pages of this particular newspaper had had a relatively high reputation; it is now invaded by celebrity – as are other redoubts. Indeed, relatively serious journalism, at least on TV, now creates its own fame. To quote Leo Braudy again: “These days, a great proportion of what the media consider to be news is its own effect on people and events... the media are no longer what their name implies: intermediaries between events and audiences. Now, a metamedia has come into being, committed to, imprisoned by, and frequently bored to death by its own preoccupation with fame.”

Intense experiences

Newspapers, at least in rich societies, are declining, and have recently seen their advertising base shrink frighteningly. In previous times this has returned. It may not this time, because it may be that advertisers no longer think newspapers are a very efficient medium for advertising. The internet offers, usually free of charge, the more intense kinds of experiences which journalism once largely monopolised: more instantly available, more comprehensive, and much better targeted information; less inhibited scandal quicker; more extreme and exciting opinions.

If you want to know a great deal about Indonesia, or to know what the gossip is on the Blair family, or the views of racists on immigration, then don’t read newspapers – go to the internet. It is an alternative, high and low. The pressures of fame and celebrity on all journalism and the pressures of a much more competitive environment on broadcasters mean that serious inquiry and discussion and searches for the truth are pushed into niches, and funded less well than before – especially, in relative terms, in this country, which had been rich and is still relatively rich in both explanatory and investigative journalism.

Yet something which can be described as journalism remains essential to modern societies in some form. There is growing in Europe, and there is already in the United States, a determination to examine the practices of the media by the practitioners themselves – in alliance with those outside the profession who are interested in its future. That will mean, I believe, the creation of institutes or departments which, rather than teaching journalism in a normative way so as to to prepare students for a career in broadcasting or public relations, they will, instead, study and argue about the role of journalism in societies, and how journalism can fulfil that role.

We need such a body and we need to enlist the skills and the independence of the Academy to establish our own more firmly. For if we become fully a profession with a conscious practice that we, and more importantly the public, can respect, we are less likely to be blown this way and that by the rich and powerful and often ruthless people who command the media. We will be useful.