We cannot let belief in news values suffer

WORLD VIEW:ACCORDING TO the German philosopher Hegel, writing in 1806, "the morning reading of the newspaper is a kind of realistic morning prayer. One takes one's orientation towards the world either from God or from what the world is."

A similar belief that one can learn what the world is from newspapers guided journalists, proprietors and readers over the next two centuries.

This is now under threat from a variety of sources, not least the decline in reporting and editing standards and the growing difficulty of maintaining them with adequate resources.

Another quotation, from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion85 years ago, captures an essential dimension of this self-belief. He defined journalism as an instrument of public purpose, an effort "to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and to make a picture of reality on which men can act".

Trust in the veracity of what is being reported and the integrity of the publication is an essential ingredient of effective journalism and successful media.

The picture is complicated with a growing realisation, by readers as well as journalists and media researchers, that in making a picture of reality capable of being acted upon journalists determine as well as report the news.

Framing reality in this way shapes political agendas – and therefore attracts political, sectional and economic interests that want to share that power and influence. Loss of public trust in the media is intimately connected to their colonisation by such special interests.

It follows that editorial independence from such interests is an important guarantee of that public purpose. So are ethics and professional standards, which allow the public to believe the hidden facts are being set out convincingly in relation to one another. If the media abuse their power by inventing stories or distorting them, or if they fail to bring relevant hidden facts into the public domain because they have been captured by special interests, they will suffer commercially and lose credibility.

This is easier to say than do, of course, since newspapers have to pay their way in the world as it is. They are immediately affected by economic downturns but can be highly profitable when times are good. Much depends on how effectively they are managed over and through business cycles – a skill that could easily be lost when the prevailing ideology led many to believe market self-correction had eliminated cyclical behaviour.

International discussion of these issues tends to be dominated by the recent experience of newspapers in the US. Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism in Columbia University, identifies four wolves at their door and a fifth, more long-lasting, one traceable back to a failure to live up to Lippmann’s norms (see www.opendemocracy.net).

There has been a precipitous decline in US newspapers’ circulation; advertising revenue has declined, affecting their profitability; public attention to the media has increased but is now vastly diffused beyond newspapers to online sources; they have a crisis of authority arising from ideological disaffection on left and right and a generalised public distrust; and they have failed to piece together the profusion of facts and the meaning of developments affecting mass publics, thereby losing democratic credibility.

Many of the problems arise from the piles of debt taken on by corporate chains as they acquired vast swathes of the regional and local press in the US. A vicious circle ensued when investors pursued short-term profits by cutting back on the costs of journalism. As a result, the typical US daily newspaper now has fewer pages, shorter stories, less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts and features, and has fewer editors to catch mistakes.

David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire, was for years a reporter on the Baltimore Sunbefore taking a redundancy buyout in 1995. He told the US Senate's subcommittee on communications in May that these economic trends were happening well before the internet in the interests of making super profits; thus his paper eliminated its afternoon edition and trimmed 100 editors and reporters during that decade, when its profitability was 37 per cent (see www.inthesetimes.com).

Simon recalled that when this was happening, fresh editors arrived at the paper who did not know Baltimore well, abandoned labour, social and black community news beats and concentrated on careerist special projects. This alienated the paper’s traditional readers, who did not recognise themselves any more in its pages.

The findings of a recent British study of public trust in news from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University echo his conclusion. It argues that “distrust happens when the news fails to address the world as the public recognise it, leaving them feeling like outsiders looking on at a drama that even the leading performers do not care if they really understand”.

Simon wants to see journalistic professionalism and craftsmanship revalued. The Oxford group says their future is above all to rediscover a connecting role as trusted aggregators of a much more diffused information landscape, which needs all the more mediation for that reason.

It is wrong to overgeneralise from US trends, although some of them certainly apply in Ireland. This can be seen in the difficulties faced by Independent News Media with indebtedness and in the much more concentrated ownership of local media.

But yesterday's Supreme Court judgment in favour of The Irish Timespoints to a different and more realistic morning prayer.