News: the March of Time

I’m delighted to catch Ruth Gledhill’s characteristically clear, honest and illuminating talk from Religion and the News at Cumberland Lodge online — sadly I wasn’t able to join the consultation until the session after hers, and it’s good to catch up. Ruth observes, hitting a very important nail on the head, that the plane that crashes is inevitably a bigger news story than the thousands that land safely. Back in the sixties the BBC, beseiged by letters complaining that only bad news made the headlines, tried to run a programme called “The Positive World” that majored on good news stories. It lasted all of six weeks, if that, before bombing out, via the world service in the wee small hours. Sad, you may say, but this truth reflects human nature.

This ugly something about ourselves sometimes gets blamed on journalists, unfairly. You might as well blame criminal lawyers for crime. Without it they’d be out of a job, but that hardly makes them criminals. There is, however, a severe temptation for people selling stories — “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” was Randolph Hearst’s legendary response to a correspondent’s report that Cubans were not, in fact, murdering and raping Americans left right and centre in 1898. The power Hurst weilded to shape the news was the direct result of the fact that in 1898 only press barons like him had the resources to get someone out to Cuba with a camera, and inflamatory pix back onto the streets of New York in hours. He had the steam press — the only technology to deliver news to ordinary people affordably.

Now turn the clock forward. Pretty much everybody now has the technology to read or tell their own story; and there is no longer any need, or increasingly desire, to pay money for newsprint. I wonder what the new found ability of news targets to answer back does to the exclusivity of any story in conventional media, and what kind of accountability it will require of them.

Looking at online newspaper sites, I wonder how they can raise the quality of outside comment on religious stories, rather than the rubbishy weary procession of same-ish comments from, e.g., about a dozen snarky atheists going on about sky fairies, with equally silly rejoinders. Many newspaper comments seem to come from small coteries of fans and people with axes to grind. Are the crown jewels of journalism changing — no longer the Hearst style news stories of the past century, but what conventionally would have been labeled op-ed?

The journalist whose work people may increasingly be bothered to pay to read will be anyone who manages to draw interesting comment out of ordinary life, rather than the person who zeroes in on potential conflict and drums up a war to go with it. Plane crashes will continue to make the news, but sexing up flights that land safely and pretending they were plane crashes just looks silly. Don’t sex up the material — go for depth, colour and connections. Don’t be anonymous, be yourself and own up to your biases. Above all slow down and reflect.

I was at a London mainline station at 2220 recently, surrounded by piles of newsprint waiting for the pulper. Someone offered me an Evening Standard, now a freesheet. Was I bovvered? The Daily Telegraph (£1) was giving away a bottle of mineral water free with each copy. This was a not inconsiderable offer, as the bottle itself cost £1·55 without a Telegraph. Reading the morning’s news fourteen hours on, noticing the only story I know anything about, the RC ordinariates one, the line between news and comment was so confused, the content so thin, slanted and childishly inflamatory, I thought “If this is supposed to be quality, why would I pay for these people’s take on stuff I don’t know anything about? I’d rather read people who do understand what they’re talking about...”

Human beings are insatiably interested in information. It’s perfectly possible to sell something people actually want or need on its own merits. You can, for example, buy a packet of Nurofen without having to give away a free DVD with it. But the fact people can only shift conventional newsprint with prodigous freebies says everything. If media barons had invested as much in quality journalism, as marketing ploys and production economies, they might now have rather more to offer. But good correspondent journalism takes time and immersion. It costs.

As it was, I had a very good book to read, and bought a hot drink instead, before getting onto a crowded night train home. 4 out of 65 people in the carriage were reading papers, all freesheets.

The delivery of information and news is pretty much down to search engines and the like, spiced by social media and with hundreds of channels of conventional radio and TV, led in the UK by the BBC.

So what business should newspapers actually consider themselves to be in today? Comment and Review, à la Huffington Post? If so they’d need to invest substantially more in journalists and quality. If it’s publishing, iTunes and Amazon are becoming lead repositories of all kinds of media, with increasingly blurry lines between them. Could newspaper groups invent new website activities to add as yet undreamt of value to our lives, within their clouds? Trouble is, Facebook and MySpace are leading the way on that one... Time for newspaper editors to get thinking caps on and start justifying their up to 1·6 million pound salaries, I would think...

Truth, First Casualty of War

What’s propaganda and what’s news? One of the great texts to map the question is Arthur Ponsonby’s Fasehood in War-Time (1928) (h/t Jolyon Mitchell). The subtitle says it all — “an amazing collection of carefully documented lies circulated in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and America during the Great War.” Wartime requires lies, but when peace breaks out people should wise up to what has been done to them.

It’s a treasure trove of fantasies and deceptions, great and small — Russian troops marching through Crewe with snow on their boots, babies with their hands cut off, mutilated nurses and branded nuns, corpse factories, enamelled adverts with secret spy info hidden on the back.
One enterprising Austrian firm supplied atrocity photographs to both sides, ready for captioning as required.

In among the small fry swim mighty Koi — great Lies of State. As late as 1913, Hansard records fervent, lofty denials of any understanding with France that could lead to a British Expeditionary Force being sent to war on the continent. As well as lies of commission came lies of ommission. The violation of the “scrap of paper” that resulted in the invasion of Belgian was true, but less heinous when one remembers the French had laid eerily similar plans to do the same thing if necessary. All nations were on the game, fuelled by fear and hysteria:

When Antwerp Fell [Köln] Church Bells were rung — Kölnische Zeitung



According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the Church bells when the fortress fell — Le Matin



According to what Le Matin has heard from Cologne, the Belgian priests who refused to ring the Church Bells when Antwerp was taken have been driven away from their places — The Times



According to what The Times has learnt from Cologne via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour — Corriére della Sera



According to information to the Corriére della Sera from Cologne via London it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down — Le Matin

As Wartime rationing induced permanent change in the food industry, wartime distortion and manipulation transformed the media game. One product of the Great War was Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda department at Crewe House, which made “you provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war” methods of what had been called the yellow press acceptable in the mainstream media of the day. In the more direct media landscape we now inhabit (some call it “disintermediated”) Chinese Whispers are higher power, but also far easier to check and challenge from the source. We need to get our heads around the diference between being media consumers and participants...

Religion in the News

I’ve been away for a conference among media people at Cumberland Lodge. Everyone had brickbats and bouquets to throw, all of them sincerely, but I don’t actually think religion gets as raw a deal from the media as people sometimes fear. Yes, there’s a lot of ignorance and prejudice in the papers, but distortion applies to all complex activities in the Fleet Street hall of mirrors, and it’s ceasing to matter in the way it did. There is probably generally less nastiness than applies to sport and politics, and fractionally more understanding than they have of science and medicine. I remember diocesan conferences in the eighties where people actually ordered morning newspapers to read. Even on a media conference, the pristine, generally unread, condition of the Fleet Street titles laid out on the hall table was notable, even as late as lunchtime.

Make no mistake, there is big evolution going on. Look at it however you will, the game is now up for the 1938 Evelyn Waugh Daily Beast and all its works. The old media diplodoci are flailing around in a new kind of swamp they simply don’t understand, trying to get a foothold, and wondering if they might be able to float if they could only work out how to swim.
Unfortunately their bulk, limited vision, and small unadapted bigoted brains make them better adapted for floating, perhaps drowning, than swimming.

Intereactivity has made hand-me-down obsolete and the mushroms are beginning to realise they have the technology to bite back. Advertising value is leaching out of the newspaper trade in spring torrents. The best evolving media are probably those with genuine local traction — hard for Fleet Street, but easier for media like local radio, which live on their connectedness and travel light. They have for years had some degree of real interactivity built into their model.

Amidst very fine presentations, the money shot for me was Charlie Beckett’s excellent map of the outlook (read it all, but here’s a summary)

1. First assertion: this is a wonderful time for people who think media can promote understanding.

• There has never been more media - including quality media. Around the world people are richer and better educated and need more journalism to help cope with the information they need to live their lives...
• there are threats to traditional business model which may reduce the capacity for journalism - both good and bad.
• The media sphere is a contestable space - and that means it should be allowed to be imperfect and relatively uncontrolled.
  

2. Second assertion: this is a dreadful time for people who think the media is only there to promote what they think

3. Third assertion: in a complex world the media envioronment is getting more complex

• Issues such as migration, climate change, economics, science etc mean that the world is not getting any simpler. Individuals’ media consumption is now multi-layered, interactive, creative, passive, active
• Likewise, the production process is more complex - it is participatory & multiplatform
• there is much greater diversity. The challenge is to ensure that the variety and plurality is manifested in the content. There’s no point having hundreds of channels if they all show the same show.
• Mainstream media still dominates and will continue to do but it is getting more complex too. Think about how the BBC has become more diverse and how it will be encouraged to be more open and form partnerships

4. Fourth Assertion: the news media has to learn to be more networked to society as a whole

5. Fifth Assertion: institutions like organised faiths also have to learn to be better as networked organisations

1. Institutions will now have a different relationship with MSM -
2. they can have a direct relationship with the public too
3. they can be media organsiations creating their own channels and content
4. but just like MSM they have to go where the public is (social networks)
5. they have to be conversational - they have to listen as well as talk
6. they have to be more open, engaged, literate, interactive

6. Sixth Assertion: don’t get mad, get media

1. stop complaining and do something about your coverage - start connecting.
2. Most faiths are natural networks
3. Sometimes these can be dangerous - the most successful online faith-orientated organisation I know is Al Qeada
4. But if all you do is connect with your followers than obviously you are simply rebuilding ghettos in cyberspace
5. newspapers made the mistake of thinking that going online meant replicating their newsrooms and their pages online -
6. the analogy for the media is to shift from a fortress mentality and fortress insitutions to networks. For people of faith, the analogy is to stop building digital churches or mosques - it is about building networks and connectivity

To pick up on one of these fine points as it applies to the C of E, there is no such thing as the Church of England. You can talk about London Taxis, or even a notional “London Taxi Service,” but remember you are actually talking about 19,000 cabdrivers. That is not quite as large as the number of independent chartered public bodies that comprise the Church of England, but it is in the same ballpark for numbers.

Consider, for example 2 Oxford trusts. The governing bodies of Wycliffe Hall and St Stephen’s House are both independent trusts dating from within a year of each other, 1876 and 1877. They are in the same town, and the same business, training ordinands. They have common interests, but their policies sometimes diverge, sharply. Historically they have represented entirely different concepts of what an Anglican priest is and should be. The same Coral Reef level of variety, conceptual richness and passion is reflected across 16,000 odd parishes, many of them complex multilevel bundles of trusts. This will be very annoying to stupid poeople, who have no idea why it is that way, and would certainly have designed it differently themselves.

Since the 1960’s Diversity has always been seen as a Bad Thing for the C of E. The Holy Grail has been a kind of British Leyland Corporatism, with the Church of England compared unfavourably with the Roman Catholic Church which was supposed to be more of a single rational entity. That’s why every priest in a Dan Brown film has a hotline to the Vatican. In fact the Roman Church is every bit as multilayered and subtle, and on a radically international scale, too. So are Baptist Churches. Etcetera, etcetera. No surprise, then, that the whole coral reef is seldom analysed and understood, with a stress on the brightest coloured fish, not the whole structure of the reef.

But in the kind of media multiverse Charlie is describing, being the way churches are is actually an advantage. All that’s necessary is for authentic and interesting people to get out there, be themselves, stand up and engage interactively. Thus one message to angry vicars who feel misrepresented becomes “Forget Fleet Street. It simply doesn’t matter any more.”