The crisis in the media continues
But there is hope for the future
I am the first person to blame politicians for the state of the UK and more. However a politician by definition is only able to get away with many of the tricks they play because the media fails to hold them to account. This lack of accountability actually goes wider than just politics as well when you consider the many financial and scientific frauds which have popped up over the years where there has been enough evidence beforehand and yet no story or investigation has taken place.
We need a media which will hold the powerful to account because it is a key part of our democratic system. However, as we have seen over the last few decades, sadly the current one does a very bad job of it. Unfortunately I am very cynical about the world and see this as much a conspiracy as a cock up as vested interests and money have infected and threatened the sector to close down debate. This is not always smokey rooms and men in dark suits. In many ways I suspect it is far more insidious and pernicious.
To start with you have seen the collapse of the media into a much more diversified and fragmented landscape as digitisation has kicked in. This has left many outlets fighting for their lives as audience numbers have collapsed as people have moved elsewhere. The outcome has meant that they have focused down on their core audience and simply blanked out anything that might annoy or upset them. In short they have become self reinforcing bubbles in an effort to support audience numbers -like the Guardian.
This has gone hand in hand with the rise of the internet and online only outlets offering up similar services for nothing based around an advertising model. This has meant that traditional outlets have struggled to compete with legacy costs and in many cases better standards especially when they have also pursued an ad led model which simply doesn’t generate enough cash as ad prices have continued to collapse especially online.
This process has left many more and more exposed to relatively small changes in revenue meaning that threats to pull ad spend by certain orgs and companies could collapse a company overnight. Pretty minimal financial pressure can lead easily to stories being pulled or edits made. This is hardly a shock, it has always happened, however it has got easier in this day and age because of the financial straight jacket the sector finds itself in.
The other outcome of this precarious situation is the threat of legal action. Previously editors could call upon large teams and deep financial pockets to fight legal threats. However with the collapse in revenue so has gone this protection. A long enough court case now can run into tens of millions of pounds in legal fees with no guarantee of you getting your money back. Instead many kowtow before the threat rather than take the risk.
It is hardly a surprise then that outlets have allowed themselves to be bought by the rich like the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos or simply taken money from them like the Guardian with Bill Gates. I am not sure how independent either can claim to be in this situation. Would the WaPo write a piece on Amazon’s working conditions or Gate’s suspect vaccine work in Africa - I doubt that. Many of these are not new problems but evolutions of existing ones. For example newspapers saw a reduction in revenue and prestige when radio and then TV came along.
However what I think is different this time is the worldview alignment across much of the sector with the rich and the powerful. You now have a group of people who have extremely convergent views on how the world should run who are at the top of the media, business, academia and of course politics and more. They have basically a death grip on our major institutions and have been throttling democracy for several decades. They are people who have similar upbringings, education, live in similar places and even intermarry.
That is bad enough in most sectors and we are already seeing the negative effects feedthrough in terms of outcomes. However the media is different because its job is to keep everyone else on their toes by highlighting failures, wrong doings and holding people to account. How can they do that when more and more of them see their jobs as narrative setting and defending the status quo rather than pushing back and seeking the truth.
Journalistic professional standards simply collapsed after the first Trump election and Brexit which many saw as direct attacks on their worldviews. I believe it was a catalyst which caused them to become aware of themselves as a separate class which have been for many years rejecting any national identity and instead identifying at the transnational level. They are more interested in what their own class in the US or Germany think than their own fellow national citizens. The idea that Dave should interfere with them or their worldview was beyond the pale and they demonstrated it over those long years.
This class of people which I call the liberal class haven’t gone away. You have seen their utter unprofessionalism during the UK and US elections. In both cases the left wing parties were held to much lower standards than the right as the establishment's tame stenographers did their best to foam down the proverbial runway for their chosen parties and candidates to win. In the US this meant editing videos to try and show Harris in a better light, lying again about what Trump said and even SNL throwing away its limited efforts at impartiality with a Harris skit. In the UK it was mainly a wall of silence when it came to asking hard questions about what Labour wanted to do. In all cases the liberal classes have shown a continuing contempt for the public.
The journalist Michael Crick summed it up nicely in the UK pre the election with the below tweet. Instead of us having an informed debate about the future and holding both sides to account, the liberal classes in the media simply buried hard questions in order to get Labour into power though only just. The British public smelling a rat gave the party one of the lowest vote shares on one of the lowest turnouts in history. The result has been predictable insofar that Labour is a disaster who lie continually and don't even pretend to care about their manifesto. A catastrophe for democracy but probably another nail in the coffin for much of the media.
This week Trump smashed his re-election over the line and the liberal media classes exploded again. I for one spent many hours laughing at their teeth gnashing but also mounting hyperbole over the event, however this was tinged with some sadness as it shows that they really haven’t changed. For many their class and their worldview comes before anything including professional standards even if it means hurting our democracies and societies.
I mean look at the utterly unhinged and unprofessional efforts of Emily Maitlis on Channel Four as below. In this clip she was caught lying whilst attacking a guest on the show and then later on stormed off after attacking Boris Johnson over Brexit and saying “Bollocks” on live TV. This is not the sign of someone who understands, cares or is going to tolerate the fact the public think’s her class’s worldview is awful and needs to go in the bin.
So we could be about to see a return to the bad old days post 2016 when the media just gave up all pretense - it would perhaps be more honest. Either way plenty of people I know have stopped reading and watching much of it anyway. There has been a massive surge in alternative sources which should be welcomed as is the growth in podcasts which give the public access to a greater variety of guests and worldviews.
However I still think we need the bigger organisation’s which have more money and resources and can afford investigations which can go on for months. It is one thing for some private citizen like me to punch out a few thousand words of opinion on Substack - it is completely different to have a five man team crawling through MP’s expense records for months. Furthermore society needs to be able to cluster around the same facts even if we may disagree on the response to them which means trusting institutions which many people understandably don’t.
We need a complete reset of the media which will have to happen on multiple fronts. Larger organisation’s especially the broadcast media needs to be forced by law if necessary to act in a far less biased way. That means allowing more people into the newsrooms and boardrooms from working and lower middle class backgrounds which will help to breakup the liberal class’s stranglehold. This will push through into the content and attitudes which are delivered on air. More importantly it will impact what stories are chosen or not as lies of omissions are normally the far more dangerous.
However it needs to go further than this as it means forcing through changes in the regulatory organisation’s like OFCOM in the UK and the FCC in the US which oversee much of the media. They have been shown to be stuffed to the gills with the same class of people who usually operate a revolving door between the regulator and the major media outlets. Law without enforcement means little and currently the same class of people are marking their own homework. Personally I would like to see more citizens appointed or elected instead of the cozy carve-ups that currently happen or even better power moved where possible back to government and parliament.
I am largely hopeful as I think that the public is now moving so rapidly against the liberal class that change is inevitable. Organisation’s that refuse to act professionally will not be tolerated meaning more and more will hit the proverbial wall including at this rate the BBC which has manifestly failed on every level such is the depth of the rot. Politicians who are not wedded to the liberal class’s worldview will be forced to act such is the level of hatred from the captured media.
But beyond all this the public is going to need to put their money where their mouth is and pay for the news again. We need to accept that good journalism is not free and by refusing to pay we both allow external forces to interfere in a vital democratic process but also give away one of our key levers to enforce standards which is our hard earned cash. We need to demand better, pay better and get better from the media in order for our societies to flourish. I think this is going to happen but it is going to be hard slog whilst reality dawns and the alternatives rise - until then we all need to keep our eyes pealed for the lies and the bias.
I will leave you with this clip from CNN where at least one person is willing to admit the crisis.