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Pretty much all of the major news outlets and information gathering services worldwide have suffered increasingly severe funding cuts over the past few decades. First at the hands of Murdoch-epitomised corporate logic – the quality of the product comes a far distant second to its responsibility to shareholders and executive staff pay packets – and now with the challenge of the internet, the global media has been brought to its knees. As many have pointed out, the first to go have been investigative reporters. Along with them went our hope for knowing what is going on in our world. News isn’t news; it is sold persuasion masquerading as information, it is advertising. Information is now more than ever tailored to what we want to hear, in order to sell itself.

I’ve been wondering for some time: if information is being so woefully tailored to what its audience wants to hear, what happened to the information a left wing audience wanted to hear? As the morning pages and evening broadcasts fill up with celebrity gossip, murder stories and bigotry, are the once progressive and critically minded dwindling such that they no longer have any consumer pull? In Australia for example, my home country, the news sources which once appealed to progressive audiences, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, have moved to the centre or now bulge with faux-content and fatuous gossip. The other day I finally figured it out: the audience for these news sources got fed up, and they have turned to alternative news gathering sites on the internet.

This begs a few obvious questions, one being: has the internet made it easier to hear only what we want to hear, polarising us further and pushing the truth further away? Another: considering the internet’s ability to conceal the hand of the author, isn’t it easier to get away with lying, for those with a barrow to push who are willing to distort the truth?

Schools of journalism maintain that there is no such thing as news objectivity – the worldly experience and perspective of even the most unbiased journalist will colour every article. There is, however, integrity of the reporter – we must tell the truth we find, even when we don’t like the truth, or it doesn’t agree with our philosophy or politics.

With this most fundamental principle in mind, it is worth looking at why politically motivated news sources are still worthwhile. I have a background in arts and entertainment PR. It is a long acknowledged tactic of the atrocious variety of PR that, if you want to hide an ugly truth, you change the nature of the debate. If you want to conceal sordid facts, disguise them by foregrounding other facts; distract the media with tangential information.

Current media principles have a debate winning back door for publicists and PR agents – news coverage is expected to cover all sides of the debate. Even if “the other side” is cruelly motivated or ludicrous, it will be reported for the appearance of objectivity. It is the story of the coverage of everything from global warming to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lobby groups and PR professionals command the debate by demanding reporters fulfill their duty to include “the other side”, often being simply untrue statements of the perpetrators as victims.

This has happened to political debate as well. We have been pulled back to discussing that which we should have long since accepted. It must be acknowledged that, just because a topic or opinion is much discussed, it doesn’t mean there is any truth to be found in it. We need to be careful about which opinions we engage with, as if we report everything, news can be dumbed down to a point where it tells us nothing about the world we live in.

It is, therefore, a journalistic responsibility to be at least a little politically critical. We must have values to guide us, or we are at the mercy of those who sidestep ethics and truth.

Three principles should still guide us here: first, to understand opposing arguments, even when they appear logically bankrupt (there is no need to include them in our writings if they are logically bankrupt, but we must understand them in order to make this decision). Second, understand people and empathise with even those who seem monstrous against our most ingrained moral codes. We will get nowhere if we don’t understand and empathise with one another. Finally, if a truth displeases us, we cannot reject it.

We also need to grant ourselves more time. If we are uncertain of the evidence we are reporting, we needn’t publish it, merely because we have a certain amount of content we are obliged to publish. Slowing down the process of generating news is essential to getting it right. And this means less content – more considered content.

Journalisnt.net can’t provide what the world really needs right now: a colossal injection of funds for unbiased investigative reporting, in addition to editorial decision-making unbound to audience prejudice. Eventually we need this to return to some semblance of understanding about the world we live in. Unfortunately the few of us just don’t have that kind of cash.

But we have individual voices, and we have critical minds. If enough of us are dedicated to locating mistruths and the abuse of audience trust currently upheld by the mainstream media, if we get together and keep asking for the truth… then perhaps we will have a louder voice in favour of real news; news for understanding our world.

Tags: Journalism