Wednesday, 04 April 2012

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to those of you who read these rants semi-regularly (or as often as I find the time to write them) that what passes for "news" in the mainstream media is something of an aggravation for me. I'm not even necessarily talking about the easy target current affairs programs or shopping centre magazines with their shonky builders, scoop celeb photos and painful true life stories, but for the purposes of my argument I am readily including the daily newspapers and nightly news programs from whom we've come to expect a higher level of reportage. As a bright-eyed journalism student once upon a time, I was fired up by the integrity of the fourth estate, fed by the relentless search for truth and satisfied only by the impartial, unbiased and well-researched articles of the fair and just.

Then I studied PR and discovered that what I believed in was essentially a fabrication, or at very least that the line between the "impartial" news reporter and the business savy PR exec was much more tenuous than I would hope for.

It's a pretty fair indication of the way we receive our news and current affairs that a 30 minute 'documentary' film about Joseph Kony released on YouTube has done more to highlight perhaps the cruelest and most ruthless warlord in the world than every column inch of every major newspaper and every segment on every current affairs program in the past 10-15 years. The subsequent mediasphere discussion about the film's documentary value has only added to the ongoing debate about who decides what is news and how we receive it. If the international mainstream media couldn't control the dissemination of the Kony documentary, at least they were going to direct the discussion that followed. The documentary film was more of a PR exercise than a traditional piece of reportage, which is only an issue when the same media gatekeepers hoping to preserve the image of the brave and intrepid reporter risking life and limb to bring you the absolute truth from the frontline, make it an issue. There may be truth and impartiality in those stories, but we'll tell you more about that right after this commercial break.

I guess the point I'm making is that you can attack the voracity of the facts in the story or it's method of presentation if you wish, but you'd want to be standing on a pretty lofty platform with no advertising agenda, no corporate affiliation, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

I read an article recently from the UK's 'The Independent' entitled "Red-top redemption; Why tabloid journalism matters" in defence of the UK's "red top" newspapers by Ros Wynne-Jones; a sort of lamentation on the decision to axe the News Of The World following the highly publicised 'phone hacking' scandal.

The article was well-written and pointedly biased as there weren't too many people standing up to defend the tabloids at that point (the article is from 2011). Informative and entertaining, I couldn't help but conclude that in presenting such a loving portrait of an oft-misunderstood industry, Jones was eulogising the same way we would for a dead family member. Glossing over the bad points, highlighting the good. In a way, it's kind of like one of those tough assignments you got in debate class at high school (I was on the debating team, weren't you?), where you had to pretty much defend the undefendable. A sort of "Why killing kittens is a good thing" article.

The tabloids definitely have a large market share and in place of high brow reportage, they offer lurid scandals that sit comfortably alongside your tea and 'elevenses', using the old defence that they are simply giving the people what they want. I'm not going to go too much further on the value of tabloids, because the interesting part to me is looking at the way the rest of the media reported on the downfall of the News Of The World. NOTW were quickly marked as "them", separated from "us" by honest and lawful reporting techniques that never cross the line but do nearly everything to bring you the stories you deserve to know about.

Once again, we're not talking about Woodward and Bernstein here, but in some cases you'd think we were. I simply refuse to watch another shonky builder being chased around a shopping centre car park by a self-serving prick in a sports coat and jeans combo.