An early warning for our media

February 12th, 2010

A little over a year ago, award-winning British reporter Nick Davies turned his investigative skills on his colleagues in the media and produced a book called Flat Earth News. It shook up British journalism.

“An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media,” the front cover promised in the flamboyant style of the very tabloids that Davies was writing about. Davies described a journalistic fraternity that routinely swallowed the dross fed to them by public relations agents, often failed consciously to check their facts, and blazenly lied, cheated and bribed to expose those who lied, cheated and bribed. The biggest current threat to the media was no longer governments, or interfering owners, but the internal workings of newsrooms.

The earth was considered flat until someone checked their facts, he said. Flat Earth News is when a story appears to be true, it is widely accepted as true, and it becomes a heresy to suggest it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda. He cites as his prime examples the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the story of weapons of mass destruction was swallowed whole by most of the media, and the millennium bug scare, the false fear that the arrival of the year 2000 would send computers crashing worldwide.

Davies’ picture was bleak. He described a cynical media world which had turned its back on the search for truth and was eating at British society like a cancer. He recognized a few pockets of hope, individuals and institutions who still cared about quality reporting, but as a whole, “I fear the illness is terminal,” he said.

Davies comes to South Africa next week to talk to journalists at an interesting time. The government, convinced the media is sinking lower and lower, has attacked eTV and put its journalists in court for interviewing criminals, and this week the ruling party had sharp words for the Sunday Times for reporting on the President’s sexual shenanigans. Our media is lively, but facing finger-wagging authorities.

I think Davies’ criticism applies only to elements of the South African media. I think at least some journalists here have stood up to attempts to sell us Flat Earth stories – like the claim that the ANC was not divided in the build-up to Polokwane, or that the arms deal was clean and above-board.
But perhaps Davies’ words are an early warning to us. It comes at a time when we see severe cuts in newsrooms, fewer reporters gathering facts, and fewer sub-editors checking them. Media feeling the economic pinch are slashing at their editorial resources even when they are making good profits. Not content with just solid profits, many of them are slicing away to get themselves back to the superlative levels of the past.

We are also seeing a rise in tabloidism, with many of our weekend scandal-sheets carrying stories which everyone appears to accept may or may not be true, but are fun anyway because they are about celebrities.

And we are suffering a dumbing down of our national debate. In a country with mass unemployment, we are debating whether or not to nationalize the Reserve Bank, a move that will benefit only a few lucky shareholders. In a country where most parastatals are deeply troubled, we are discussing whether we should be nationalizing the mining industry.

So maybe it is a good time to contemplate where we might be headed. Maybe it is time, as Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique is quoted saying in the book, to slow down the acceleration of media, to go against the tide of the dominant media, “interesting ourselves in situations that are not in the media’s spotlight, but can help us to a better understanding … offering even more complete, deep-ranging and better-documented supplements on major contemporary issues …”

Caught as we are in a pattern of attack and defence, where both the ruling party and journalists are locked in positions of combat, it is a moment to think about whether there are other possibilities for our journalism.

*This column first appeared in Business Day, 3 Feb 2010

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print