Posted on 02/03/2004 6:55:06 AM PST by jalisco555
Having read the Hutton report and most of what has been written about it, I have reached the following, strictly non-judicial, conclusions: first, that the episode illuminates a wider crisis in British journalism than the turmoil at the BBC; second, that too many journalists are in denial about this wider crisis; third, that journalists need to be at the forefront of trying to rectify it; and, fourth, that this will almost certainly not happen. The reporting of Lord Hutton's conclusions and of the reactions to them has been meticulous. The same cannot be said of large tracts of the commentary and editorialising - nor of much of the equally kneejerk newspaper correspondence. Much of this comment has been sullied by scorn, prejudice and petulance. The more you read it, the more you get the sense that the modern journalist is prone to behaving like a child throwing its rattle out of the pram because it has not got what it wanted.
Since in some quarters it has become almost obligatory to dismiss Hutton out of hand, it is necessary to reassert that the law lord did an excellent job in conducting his inquiry so briskly and transparently, and to stress that his report is overwhelmingly consistent with the evidence he received. This is especially true of what became the crux of the inquiry: the alleged sexing up of the Iraq dossier, Andrew Gilligan's reporting and the dispute over the naming of David Kelly.
From the start, though, too many newspapers invested too heavily in a particular preferred outcome on these key points. They wanted the government found guilty on the dossier and on the naming, and they wanted Gilligan's reporting vindicated. When Hutton drew opposite conclusions, they damned his findings as perverse and his report as a whitewash. But the report's weakness was its narrowness, and to some extent its unworldliness, not the accuracy of its verdicts.
There was rattle throwing from the right of the pram - "a great disservice to the British nation" (Sir Max Hastings in the Daily Mail) - and from the left - "Lord Whitewash" (Paul "We are paid to be cynical" Routledge in the Daily Mirror). But the worst example, appropriately enough, came from the man who has a good claim to be the author of the entire problem between Downing Street and the BBC, the former Today producer Rod Liddle.
Liddle is the man who hired Gilligan. He is also the man of whom a former colleague said (as told to Today's historian): "Rob didn't want conventional stories. He wanted sexy exclusives ... I remember Rod once at a programme meeting saying 'Andrew gets great stories and some of them are even true' ... He was bored by standard BBC reporting."
Liddle's article in the current Spectator exemplifies this approach, and incarnates a great deal of what is wrong with modern journalism. Liddle's article is wrong on the facts (Lord Franks, chairman of the inquiry into the Falklands war, was not a judge, much less a law lord), sneering (Lord Hutton's Ulster brogue is mocked, and he is described as anachronistic and hopelessly naive), and unapologetic (the best Liddle can manage is that Gilligan's famous 6.07am report went "a shade too far"). Above all, Liddle's piece is arrogant, embodied in his remarkable final sentence: "I think, as a country, we've had enough of law lords."
Think about the implications of that. To Liddle's fellow practitioners of punk journalism, it can be excused as sparky, or justified on the grounds that it is what a lot of other people are saying. To criticise it is to be condemned as boring or, like Hutton, hopelessly naive. To me, though, it smacks of something bordering on journalistic fascism, in which all elected politicians are contemptible, all judges are disreputable and only journalists are capable of telling the truth, even though what passes for truth is sometimes little more than prejudice unsupported by facts.
Liddle is an extreme case, if an influential one (he was ubiquitous in the studios last week, acting out his juvenile Howard Marks fantasy). But he is the iceberg tip of a culture of contempt towards politicians (and thus of democracy) and judges (and thus of the law) that is too prevalent in British journalism (think Jeremy Paxman, for instance, both as interviewer and author). Too much of the initial response to Hutton has wallowed in that fashionable but ultimately destructive cynicism.
Fortunately, however, not all of it. Amid the excessive condemnation of Hutton and the equally exaggerated (and frequently self-interested) dancing on the BBC's imagined grave, there were other voices, which deserve to be heard more widely.
So, hats off to the Economist editorial that skewered Gilligan for a report that was "typical of much of modern British journalism, twisting or falsifying the supposed news to fit a journalist's opinion about where the truth really lies. Some in the British media have described such journalism as 'brave'. Sloppy or biased would be better words".
Bravos, too, for Saturday's signed article by the Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers, which described this "dreadful misadventure" as a wake-up call for British journalism, and said it "should prompt us to resist the easy, superficial certainties of parti pris opinion and rediscover the virtues of accuracy, context and verification".
A round of relieved applause also for the BBC's acting director general Mark Byford for his direct response to David Frost's question this week that "Mostly right isn't good enough for the BBC".
There is certainly a threat to modern journalism, but it does not come from Hutton, or even from Tony Blair. The over-reaction to Hutton has had the unintended consequence of ensuring that Blair cannot be seen to intervene further against the BBC. Providing Byford continues as he has begun, the BBC's independence is safer now than it would have been had Hutton spread the blame around more evenly.
The threat to modern journalism is real, but it comes not just from without but also from within. It comes not just from the manipulations, favouritism and half-truths of the discredited, and partially abandoned, Labour spin culture, but also from the media's disrespect for facts, the avoidable failure to be fair, the want of explanation and the persistent desire for melodrama that are spin's flip side.
A month ago, the Phillis report on government communications set out some ways that the post-Campbell political world could clean up its act. These need to be followed through. But do we in the media have an equivalent awareness of the equally urgent need to raise our own game? I do not believe we have even begun to realise the damage that some modern journalism is doing to the fabric of public and private life. As Rod Liddle might say (but wouldn't), I think, as a country, we have had enough of such things.
This could be said about much of US journalism as well.
Think back to the press briefings during the First Gulf War, was there ever such a group of uninformed persons attempting to cover the action. They put their ignorance on public display for all to see.
The factual content of articles in today's newspapers leaves much to be desired. Read an article, and then attempt to answer some questions about what happened based on the info in the article (filtering out the spin). Good luck!
There it is. Summed up in two sentences.
The news media want reality to conform to their ideology.
The Guardian has been surprisingly good on this issue considering their overall bias. The NY Times could learn a thing or two from them, assuming that the Times is capable of learning anything from anybody, of course.
==================
Don't know if you've got this one already, Timesink, but the quote is a classic. :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.