The Hindu Business Line : Tell the truth

Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system, says Nick Davies in Flat Earth News ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). “If the primary purpose of journalism is to tell the truth, then it follows that the primary function of journalists must be to check and to reject whatever is not true,” he adds.

In the absence of checking, an unreliable statement created by outsiders, usually for their own commercial or political benefit, can be injected via a wire agency into the arteries of the media through which it then circulates around the whole body of global communication, Davies graphically describes.

What happens when ‘the essential immune system’ falls apart? Journalists begin pumping out stories without checking them, he warns; and as a result the global mass media are ‘not merely prone to occasional error but are constitutionally and constantly vulnerable to being infected with falsehood, distortion, and propaganda.’

Strikingly, a Cardiff University research found that the most respected media outlets in the UK routinely recycled unchecked second-hand material, the book cites.

The researchers found a massive 60 per cent of print-stories to be “wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves.”

An alarming 70 per cent of stories had ‘the claimed fact’ pass into print ‘without any corroboration’!

Everyday practices of journalism — such as fact-checking, balance, criticising and interrogating sources — are now the exception rather than the rule, bemoans Davies.

What pains him is that print and broadcast have been swamped by a tide of churnalism.

“No reporter who spends only three hours out of the office in an entire working week can possibly develop good leads or build enough good contacts. No reporter who speaks to only 26 people in researching 48 stories can possibly be checking their truth.”

Such journalists who fail to perform the simple basic professional function of telling their readers the truth about what is happening on their patch are no longer out gathering news but are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false, chides Davies.
He is aghast that the Internet is also functioning as a kind of information madhouse, “frantically repeating whatever fragments of ‘news’ happen to make it into the blogosphere.” By delivering news electronically, the Internet has the potential to slash the costs of production, reducing or completely removing the heavy costs of printing and distributing conventional newspapers, Davies observes. “If those savings were recycled back into the newsrooms, to employ more journalists, we could start to reverse the process which has made the media so vulnerable to Flat Earth news.”
That may well remain a fond wish, the author concedes, because media owners have so far been using electronic delivery as “yet another chance to cut costs and increase revenue without putting anything back into journalism.”
An unsettling read that may help undo the wrongs in news writing.

D. MURALI
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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