MEDIA: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media, By Neil Henry, University of California Press, 326pp. £14.95On December 3rd, 2004, the BBC World satellite television network cut to its studio in Paris for an exclusive interview with Jude Finisterra, spokesman for the giant chemical corporation Dow. The world's most respected news-gathering organisation had a scoop.
ON THE 20th anniversary of the explosion in Bhopal, India of a toxic gas tank at a factory now owned by Dow, the company was finally agreeing to compensate the victims. Finisterra announced that Dow had created a $12 billion (€8.16 billion) fund to provide care for survivors and to clean up the contaminated site, "simply because it's the right thing to do".
Within minutes, the story was all over the web and was taken up by other satellite news channels and by financial news services. It took two hours for the BBC to realise that it had been the victim of a clever stunt, and two hours is a long time in the fast-breeder reactor of instant news.
The hoax was itself a creation of the virtual reality of the web. Two Paris-based American artists and activists, calling themselves the Yes Men, had previously created a satirical website called dowethics.com, that mimicked the company's official site and contained sarcastic encomiums to its social and environmental responsibility.
The BBC mistakenly contacted the e-mail address given on the site. One of the artists, using the fake name, "Jude Finisterra", replied to say that the company wished to make a major announcement. Though the BBC claimed it had been the victim of an "elaborate deception", the hoax was actually that simple.
IF THIS INCIDENT forms one key exhibit in Neil Henry's dissection of "the erosion of professionalism in our news and information landscape", another hints at quite different problems. The Bhopal story illustrated the dangers of speed, of the internet's power to amplify mistakes, and of the thinning line between the real and the virtual.
But side-by-side with this global technological ubiquity, there is also a hollowing-out of local news. Henry elsewhere cites another, much smaller, chemical disaster, the release of toxic fumes when a train derailed in January 2002 in Minot, North Dakota. The incident happened at 1am. Emergency officials trying to spread the news found that they could not contact a single human being at any of the six local radio stations.
All of them were owned by the same American behemoth, Clear Channel. All were broadcasting its centralised, automated programmes. All had cut staff to skeletal levels in order to maximise profits.
Henry, a former correspondent with the Washington Post who now teaches journalism at the University of California, has an old-fashioned, perhaps slightly naive, belief in the duty of journalism to "bear witness to the truth as you see and hear it".
But he is acutely aware of the difficulty of communicating those values to students who exist in an internet-saturated world. His book is an intelligent, fluent and passionate portrait of an American media under siege from technological change, from profit-driven, cost-cutting owners and from what he calls, in a neat elision, "con artists and public relations specialists".
The world it describes is not yet that of Irish and British journalism, but, as Frankie Byrne might have said, given our tendency to follow where the US has led, it could be some day.
At one level, Henry's argument can be seen as a counter-swipe against the gushing optimism of internet boosters, who exult in the decline of traditional media and hail the advance of blogging, "citizen journalism" and wikis.
There is, in his jeremiad, an element of nostalgia for an imagined era of rigour and truth-telling, and of the professional self-interest of a man who teaches skills that may, like barrel-making or thatching, have lost their economic and cultural base.
He is prone to imagining a time when journalists functioned as "arbiters who are trusted and recognised by a consensus of citizens". Like most ageing social critics, he is inclined to exaggerate the virtues of the past and to see only the nastier elements of the future.
But Henry's argument is much too lucid and well-grounded to be dismissed as the wailings of an obsolete man. He does not take a simplistic view of the past. He notes that American newspapers were in decline long before the arrival of the internet.
Between 1960 and 1995, the population grew by 80 million, but circulation remained static - a per capita drop of more than 30 per cent. And he gives a great deal of space to a compelling account of the long history of fraud and propaganda in American journalism. He is alert to sins of commission (like the vile history of racist stereotyping in the media) and of omission (the conscious decision of many newspapers to ignore an epoch-making story, the civil rights movement, that was happening before their eyes).
But, even if the past was no paradise, the evidence of the narrowing and dumbing-down of American media in recent years is overwhelming. Even while the US has been asserting itself on the world stage as the last superpower, foreign coverage on TV networks has shrunk by 70 to 80 per cent. All the major networks have been closing foreign bureaux and there are very few left in Latin America or Africa.
The networks employ a third fewer correspondents than they did in 1985. Newspapers and magazines have cut 3,500 newsroom jobs since 2001. But the space to be filled has grown exponentially, with 24-hour news channels and always-on internet. The result has been a vast growth in celebrity gossip, tabloidisation and junk news supplied by political and commercial PR machines.
Downright fakery has become respectable: Henry cites a 2005 Newsweek cover of the domestic goddess Martha Stewart on her release from prison, looking "fit, trim, unwrinkled and beautiful". It was in fact a digital fabrication, using an old head-shot of Stewart grafted onto a model's body. Worse than the deception is Newsweek's defence of it: "We wanted to look ahead to what her future was likely to be." When Newsweek, at the more respectable end of the American journalistic spectrum, can't see a problem with making things up, it is hard to accuse Henry of being alarmist.
Henry is especially good on the insidious effects of the PR industry. He mentions a star student earning $17,000 (€11,500) a year on a newspaper while one of his relatives was getting $125,000 (€85,000) for a six-month PR contract with Wal-Mart. He also cites a stark example from a newspaper I have worked for myself: the New York Daily News. Having run a brilliant investigative series on the filthy state of city supermarkets, the paper lost up to $100,000 (€68,000) a week in supermarket advertising.
After a month, it ran a lavish, four page "advertorial" supplement full of fake "news" and glossy pictures complimenting the high standards of local supermarkets. This capitulation was highlighted in the rival New York Times by an eager young reporter. His name, alas, was Jayson Blair and he was later exposed as a serial fabricator of news stories who brought the Times to one of the lowest points in its history.
Henry nicely underplays such ironies, and his tone throughout the book is more one of sorrow than of anger. He plays down, too, his own theoretical and moral standing, disavowing any "deep intellectual expertise" on ethical matters and scrupulously recording his own failings as a reporter. But his tendency to modesty and understatement should not detract from the importance of his message.
He points out that "the challenge for the traditional news media to simply survive in the New Media age, much less to maintain profitability, is monumental. And the challenge for professional, dedicated, and effective journalism to flourish in this same business situation is arguably even more so."
There is, surely, a fundamental connection between these two challenges. If traditional media respond to the challenge of the internet by abandoning rigour and expertise and going with the flow of Nescafé news and instant opinion, they will become redundant. If they survive, it will be because they offer something different, such as integrity, independence and originality.
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times journalist