Public-interest journalism has two elements. The first is as a watchdog, holding the powerful to account, exposing fraud, deceit, corruption, mismanagement and incompetence. There is a long and noble history of journalists fulfilling this role. In the past few years, for example, Seymour Hersh has exposed the torture within Abu Ghraib, Stephen Grey has uncovered the CIA’s secret rendition flights, and The Sunday Times has revealed that powerful figures may have paid for honours. This watchdog role is important not just for holding those in power to account, but because those in power know they’re being held to account.

The second element of public-interest journalism is much less discussed, yet in many ways more important, especially in our world of information overload. This is the responsibility to inform, explain and analyse. Publicinterest journalists find, digest and distil information that helps the public form views and make decisions. How do I know, for example, whether or not I should give my child a multiple vaccination? How much should I worry about the H5N1 virus and should I take action? Is Iran about to develop a nuclear arsenal and, if so, what should we do about it? Is my mobile phone going to give me a brain tumour? Our world is increasingly inter-related and complex and we need news media that genuinely seek to explain, rather than frighten, hector or bully.

But both elements of public-interest journalism are coming under threat, with important and disturbing implications for a democratic society. The threats come from four directions: from an untrusting Government no longer convinced of the value of the fourth estate; from increasingly powerful and image-conscious corporations; from a bombarded and bewildered public; and from media that are failing to live up to their publicinterest responsibilities.

The threat from government is not new. The media have always seen governments as a threat – it is what helps to define them as the fourth estate. Back in 1931 Stanley Baldwin famously compared the press to a harlot who has “power without responsibility”. The press has often been even less polite about the government of the day. But the scale and the nature of the threat have grown. When Baldwin attacked the press, there were 44 people in the whole of government with some direct responsibility for communication. There are now 3,200 press officers, not to mention special advisers, huge departmental communications offices, a No 10 communications team, an advertising budget of more than £230million, and 950 government websites (currently being culled).

Pernicious and dangerous

Because of this it feels justified in restricting, moulding, leaking and dumping information to present its actions in the best light. On December 14 2006, the Government aborted the inquiry into BAE, announced the closure of 2,500 post offices, confirmed two new airport runways, invited the police into 10 Downing Street to interview Tony Blair, and introduced plans to constrain the Freedom of Information Act. All on the same day that Lord Stephens released his report on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – and the revelations of Carne Ross, late of the Foreign Office, about the Government’s duplicity in the lead-up to the Iraq war became known. In other words, much information that was clearly in the public interest was buried in a overloaded news agenda.

The lack of trust also blinds this Government to the damaging impact of its legislation on public-interest journalism. It has introduced a range of laws that constrain civil liberties and free speech – from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005). It has allowed public bodies to misuse the Data Protection Act. And it has introduced plans to emasculate the only recently-enacted Freedom of Information Act.

Cherie Blair, not a member of the Government but presumably representing the attitudes of certain members of it, summed up the contemporary attitude towards the media when she said last December that journalism is “not a noble calling” and that journalists “have no ethics” and “no professional morality”. This attitude characterises the state of the relationship between the Government and the media and, as a consequence, disables public-interest journalism and risks leaving the people uninformed.

Business has never had government’s democratic obligation to inform the public, but is an equal if not greater threat to public-interest journalism. As large corporations play an ever-bigger part in our lives (think Tesco), scrutiny of their behaviour is becoming more and more urgent. Yet they remain mostly unexamined or only occasionally assessed in the ghetto of the business pages. Corporations have become ever more concerned by their representation in the media and are willing to spend significant sums to control that representation. In most cases this control is, understandably, motivated by their private, rather than the public, interest. Indeed their manipulation of the news agenda in their favour can be directly contrary to the public interest – as a couple of examples illustrate.

There are about 40,000 prosthetic hip replacements made each year by the NHS. They are generally painful, difficult operations with long recovery times. But in October 2003 eight national newspapers and many local and regional papers reported that this procedure could be transformed by a pioneering new operation. It was called a “2-Incision TM”, was less invasive and, crucially, did not require the use of cement. Reports of this “major medical breakthrough” were closely based on a press release issued by the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospital Trust stating that it could reduce the pain inflicted on patients and save the NHS millions of pounds. But, thanks to an investigation by the University of York, we know that the press release, though issued by the Trust, was written by a public relations company called Kaizo PR. The company had been commissioned by the healthcare manufacturers Zimmer to run a two-stage marketing campaign (called “Hip, Hip Hooray”!) to increase awareness and stimulate demand for the new hip replacement.

As the York study reports, only The Independent properly examined the claims, seeking out a professor of orthopaedic surgery who was highly critical of the procedure: “It takes five years to tell whether it is effective,” he said, “and even in the U.S. they have not yet got that length of experience.” Moreover: “The surgeons should have waited until they had done 100 cases and then reported the results. Instead they are creating in the minds of the general public the idea that this is a super-duper new treatment.” The healthcare manufacturer had, secretly and successfully, spun its new product to the mainstream media. It was not until 2006 that two medical reports tested the procedure’s effectiveness more fully and found the recovery time to be longer, not shorter, and that there was no greater long-term benefit for the patient.

Marketing ploy

These actions are not peculiar to the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. All major corporations are concerned about their presentation in the news media and are becoming more sophisticated and adept at using it. Helping them to become so is the increasingly powerful public relations industry. The PR industry in the UK is now valued at around £6.5billion per annum and is the second largest in the world. It has grown by 6-7 per cent a year in the past five years and is predicted to grow by 11 per cent a year over the next five years. The largest PR agency in Britain, Chime Communications, reported that its profits for 2006 were up more than 50 per cent on the previous year.

To get an idea of the growing influence of public relations on the media agenda, take a look at the flow of senior figures from mainstream media to PR. Stephen Carter, former head of Ofcom, recently became chief executive of Brunswick PR. David Yelland, former editor, The Sun, is already at Brunswick. Stuart Higgins, former editor, The Sun, runs Stuart Higgins Associates. Sir Nicholas Lloyd, former editor, Daily Express, has long been ensconced in PR with Brown Lloyd James. And Phil Hall, former editor, News of the World, runs Phil Hall Associates, the website of which boasts: “No Public Relations Company knows the media industry better than we do and no one has better access. We take your business right to the top of the news agenda.”

Their objective is to promote the private interests of their clients, not the public interest of society. News stories are currency, to be bought and traded. As Mark Hollingsworth notes in his biography of public relations guru Tim Bell, chairman of Chime Communications: “Bell... is a dealer in information. He establishes close relationships with journalists and editors as a way of ensuring that his client’s message is conveyed to his liking... Favours are offered and received. If the story about the client is spiked, the journalist is handed an even better exclusive about someone else. If the article is published, future cooperation is withdrawn.” But the stories that are spiked, withdrawn, or altered are often those that are directly in the public interest. Tim Bell’s current client list includes exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the Saudi Arabian Government, BAE systems, and two of the Labour donors currently being investigated in the cash-for-honours controversy.

Public-interest journalism is not directly under threat from the public. But indirectly, certainly it is. The public is an unknowing accomplice to the threats from government, business and the media. You cannot blame the public for choosing to pick up a free London Lite or thelondonpaper rather than pull 50p out of their pockets to buy, say, the London Evening Standard, but this is having a massive detrimental impact on traditionally inquiring and investigative newspapers in an economically fraught market. Neither can you blame the public for being distracted by TV on their mobile phone, or handheld games consoles, or beautiful white iPods complete with thousands of songs. With all these distractions it is not surprising to discover that the public consumes less news, or rather consumes less news in depth. And you can entirely understand that people want to consume news which is directly relevant to them, and screen out all the stuff that isn’t, by tailoring their RSS feeds, and viewing only internet sites and media outlets that conform to their view of the world. But the impact of this is the decline of the idea of public interest, of information important to everyone within society, not just slivers of it.

Blissfully unaware

Journalists seem peculiarly unwilling to broaden their watchdog role outside monitoring government and many don’t seem even to count it within their public-interest responsibilities. Why, for example, have the media failed to uncover evidence of wide-ranging corruption in football? We know from Lord Stevens’s recent report that corruption is rife. His inquiry found that the FA “failed to monitor in any detailed or systematic way the arrangements connected to transfers”, and that many of these arrangements were grossly uncompetitive, if not illegal. And yet in recent times there has been no successful investigation into football corruption by journalists. The BBC’s Panorama tried, but it failed to broadcast any truly convincing evidence of widespread corruption.

The irresistible rise of private equity is another case in point. Only now, years after private equity began to have a significant influence on British business, is it starting to receive proper media scrutiny. Between 10 and 20 per cent of people working in the private sector are effectively employed by private equity firms. This includes everything from Somerfield, to Kwik-Fit, to the AA, to Birds Eye. And yet before private equity companies started considering a Sainsbury’s buy-out, there had been virtually no media coverage.

The media are also failing to explain, inform and analyse. In the increasingly cut-throat and competitive media environment, news outlets are choosing to emphasise the subjective, the personal, the emotional and the sensational. It is not surprising that news outlets are frantic to grab people’s attention – they are faced with an unprecedented increase in competition, their audiences are disappearing, ad revenues are falling, classified revenues collapsing. But, as a result, depth, context, objectivity, balance and accuracy are being sacrificed. There may never have been a “golden age” of publicinterest journalism, but in the current news media revolution some of the basic principles underpinning good journalism are being lost.

Let’s imagine a future scenario in which newsgathering is even more competitive, when news organisations rely on the public to send in the news, and when editors can assess their audiences’ interest levels and adjust to them in real-time. Well, we don’t have to imagine – it’s here already. Could Gawker Media be a sign of the way commercial news could develop if we entirely lose sight of public-interest journalism? Gawker Media was set up in the U.S. a few years ago by ex-Financial Times journalist Nick Denton. It runs politics, news and celebrity websites that rely wholly on gossip and rumour.

Denton openly admits this is not old-style journalism. “We run stories on the basis of one anonymous source, in many cases, and a bit of judgment,” he told The Observer. “We put it out there. We make clear the level of confidence we have in a story. We ask for help [from site visitors], we ask for corroboration, we ask for denials. Every single story is a work in progress, it’s not meant to be final. It’s like a reporter’s notebook.” The “journalists” who contribute stories, which can number 10 to 20 a day, are paid bonuses based on the quantity of people who access them. “As long as page views [hits] stay high,” one of the writers said, “advertising rates stay high, which is all that matters to the company. We are paid to get traffic and that dictates what stories you do.” Most news organisations are never going to resemble Gawker Media, but the more they try to “monetise” their content, the more they hector their audiences, the more unsubstantiated stories they publish, screen or broadcast, the closer they will get – and the further away from the idea of public-interest journalism that is essential to democracy and society.

These threats to public-interest journalism are real and growing, but they are not irreversible. New technology has empowered millions more individuals and groups to take on the roles previously ascribed to journalists – from environmental groups searching out information in the public interest, to individuals publishing secrets of corporate malpractice. Technology has also given existing journalists access to many more sources and has acted as a catalyst for change in existing news organisations. But these developments are haphazard and often motivated by personal as opposed to public interest. If genuine public-interest journalism is to have a future, it has to be promoted and nurtured – and this will not happen until people recognise the extent of the danger we face.