A lecture by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, delivered at Lambeth Palace on June 15, and edited for print in Common Theology.
Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it.1
Journalists often end up in jail because of their commitment to reveal important matters that those in power want kept hidden.2
Journalism as a profession largely exists to surprise—something that attracts the attention of “a chap who doesn’t care much about anything” requires professional skill in its presentation. More seriously, uncovering what too many people want hidden is—potentially—a moment of real moral change.
A journalist may want to pursue surprise because he or she assumes that where people are starting from is boredom—and so the surprise has to be at some level entertaining. Or they may start from an assumption that the problem is that certain people have decided what you should know—so what needs to be challenged is such people’s right to decide what others should know.
One of the most powerful defences the news media offer for controversial actions is “public interest”. The assumption is that concealment of this or that set of facts damages that shared space in which we find ways of acting on our common concerns.
Hiding something in the interest of a particular person or party gives them unfair advantage. Uncovering these facts restores a balance. On this premise, revelation in the public interest would be the same as working for the common good—the journalist in the service of active democracy. That picture of the media serving a genuinely and rightly questioning public, sometimes at considerable risk, is a deeply attractive image and very hard to quarrel with. Which is why the “public interest” defence is, at first blush, unanswerable.
But the way “public interest” is often appealed to in the present climate looks less impressive under scrutiny. Some aspects of current practice are lethally damaging to journalism, and contribute to the embarrassingly low level of trust in the profession shown in opinion polls—especially in the UK.
Let me start with two points which relate primarily to British journalism.
Some recent studies3 have pointed out that there is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice, and attacking confidentialities or privacies that protect the vulnerable.
If we assume that the question to ask of almost anyone (not just politicians) is the immortal, “Why is this bastard lying to me?” the effect is to treat every kind of reticence as malign. It becomes an end in itself to expose what is for any reason concealed, because the underlying reason for all concealment is bound to be corrupt. The political culture of “transparency” and the magic word “accountability” reinforce this powerful trend, found particularly in the tabloid press.
Consider a situation in which the general reporting of views or proposals during a period of delicate negotiation will skew or wreck the negotiating process. Since this is a routine political phenomenon, how professional is it to assume the public’s “right to know”?
There is the further problem of an unblinking determination to find buried (and probably discreditable) agenda in every public statement or decision. As Peter Wilby writes about the parliamentary lobby4, it “allows no political event…to have meaning in itself, like a piece of poetry in a postmodern university literature department…What does an NHS (National Health Service) reorganisation or an “initiative” on behaviour in schools mean for doctors, patients, teachers or children? The political journalists cannot tell you. They can tell you that this is a Blairite or Brownite idea, that it shows the minister is “getting a grip” or losing it, that it will pacify backbenchers or enrage them.” Parallels beyond the world of parliamentary journalism are not hard to find.
Various kinds of investigation—including the processes of journalistic enquiry—require confidentiality, and therefore concealment, in order to guarantee fair process. Certain things cannot be said while legal proceedings are in train. There is a convention about what can be said or shown about minors—especially the children of public figures. Even when papers publish the addresses of convicted paedophiles, most of us feel uneasy. It exposes individuals to mob law and does nothing at all to protect children. Medical and psychological records are confidential. Sensitive material around national security is confidential in the common interest.
Concealment is not by definition unfair. It may be part of a system guaranteeing fairness. Which of us would happily have our guilt or innocence assessed by a casual majority poll or our medical records made public? Which of us relishes our actions or words being subjected to exhaustive interpretation to reveal their “true” hidden agenda? As Freud said, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe…
There are undoubtedly facts5 which would be of huge interest to a certain sort of public, but are not by any stretch of the imagination matters of public interest in the sense that not knowing them creates or prolongs a seriously unjust situation. In a culture where conventions of ordinary privacy and modesty have been massively undermined, it is hard to set any conventions that restrict what is fair game. Human beings have always been fascinated by gossip about private lives—Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, written nearly two thousand years ago, is a good corrective to anyone who thinks we are a uniquely prurient and sex-obsessed civilization.
What is important is not to dress up the right to know as something essential to democracy. Democracy guarantees not only access to significant information but also some sorts of defence for the personal realm and its rights. The presupposition that the area covered by inviolable professional confidentiality is very small, and that therefore nearly all concealment is dishonest, is false.
I am not claiming that the media invariably do act as if there were no boundaries, yet high levels of adversarial and suspicious probing send the message that any kind of concealment is assumed to be guilty until proved innocent. But this case is not morally persuasive. And having referred to professional restrictions, I want to pass on to my second point about the difficulties of current journalistic practice—a point which is more complex.
Defining “public interest” as a “right to know” any kind of information that is being withheld implies a mass public which has no other social and corporate identity. For this public, any information at all is assumed to be empowering. For the purposes of media reporting, there are only information processors and information recipients. Whether a media outlet is basically oriented to the left or to the right, it still generalises its public in this way, by working with the model of consumers with common concerns.
A public is a necessary fiction. If a journalist or broadcaster, or of course, rather more significantly, a proprietor wants to secure consumers, a sense of solidarity and loyalty has to be built up. One strategy is to communicate as if every reader or consumer shared the same fundamental values, preferences and anxieties. Another is to communicate as if these fundamental values, preferences and anxieties were the moral environment of everyone with a brain or a conscience. The calculation of what will surprise—or better still, shock—the public is based on a careful assessment of what is taken for granted by that public. The left wing press knows that “secret government memo reveals plans to restore death penalty” will attract its public’s attention. The right wing press knows that “secret government memo reveals plans to make national anthem illegal” will attract its public’s attention. The public is assumed to be homogeneous; and each respective readership is taken to be representative of the genuine moral life of society.
But human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. Actual human learning about most things that matter happens in overlapping sets of relationships and conversations. In human life generally, information is shared in such overlapping networks, and absorbed at different levels, over time.
So there is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. It promises to deliver what other sources can’t—information to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a significant role in society. But at the same time it is bound to a method that treats its public as consumers, and the information it purveys as a commodity—which is selected, packaged, and (to that degree) inevitably slanted. This marketing of the reporting process introduces yet another group—the professional producers of information, whose commercial interests inhibit impartial freedom of information.
Classical media outlets claim to serve democracy, but often undermine the potential of an active, critically questioning readership by assuming a passive undifferentiated public. The drift in some quarters to near-monopolistic practices, the control of the product by careful monitoring of response, and periodic re-designing, is subverted by Internet journalism. Ian Hargreaves, in his excellent Journalism: Truth or Dare, gives a sharp account of the difference made by the Internet. Surely this is the context in which genuinely unpalatable truths can be told, “unsullied by the preoccupations of the mainstream media”?6
Yes and no. Unwelcome truth and prompt rebuttal are characteristic of the web-based media. So are paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry. The cyber environment is like that of unpoliced conversation—for good and ill.
Many traditional newspapers and broadcasters now offer online versions of their product and many have allowed interactive elements in their regular material—for example, publishing debates conducted on the web. But they have not thereby abdicated claims to be professional—to control the quality of output.
Onora O’Neil7 spoke about “assessable communication” as the ideal. This means incorporating into what is communicated the material necessary to judge its reliability, “showing your workings”, and distinguishing between report and comment. In short, a return to old-fashioned journalism.
Alan Rusbridger wrote a comment for Newsweek on that journal’s troubles over the imperfectly confirmed story about the treatment of the Qur’an in US detention centres. His point was that media admissions of fallibility could have the paradoxical effect of strengthening trust. Admit that what is written or broadcast is highly provisional, produced (often) by non-experts under pressure, and this realism might offset the deep cynicism generated by the media’s reluctance to apologise or explain. It will be interesting to see if the spread of the online culture into the mainstream media will move journalism as a whole towards this provisionality—towards a more general notion of “assessable communication”.
What I have said so far boils down roughly to this. We need to deflate some of the rhetoric about the media as guardians and nurturers of democracy simply by virtue of the constant exposure of “information”. We need to be cautious about use of “public interest” language that ignores complex and, often, artificial ideas of “the public”. We need to recognise that there is a difference between concealment that is corrupt and designed to exclude or disadvantage, and boundaries that are properly patrolled by professional systems of accountability which gain nothing from being exposed to universal—potentially demagogic—scrutiny.
This is a very difficult discrimination—it could be used as an excuse for avoiding proper debate—but it helps simply to acknowledge that there is a discussion to be had. “Public interest” should not be too readily identified with the prejudice of a particular readership. We need a form of self-regulation that admits provisionality and includes reasonable means of assessment. We need media that equip their own critics.
Another element that surrounds these matters is a world of communication in which uninterrupted and instantaneous information flow is the norm. “Breaking news” we read at the bottom of the screen, and we know that someone is being made ready to produce an instant reaction. When the pace of events slows, but the situation remains critical, there is a real practical problem (e.g. the last days of Pope John Paul II)—uninterrupted coverage with no significant change for long periods. Urgency is all, and when urgency is an inappropriate or inadequate response to a situation, there is a risk of inventing the news for the sake of action.
Some information can be mastered quickly, almost instantaneously, some requires the passage of time. I suspect that the difficulty most of the modern media finds in reporting religious affairs is not simply a hostile bias to religion as such, but the extreme difficulty of representing religion in an “urgent” medium. Which is why, incidentally, the recent BBC series, The Monastery,8 succeeded in such a remarkable way—it was about what can be known only by taking time, in company. BBC Director General, Mark Thompson, in an address to the Churches’ Media Conference seemed to endorse very clearly the significance of the time dimension to religious broadcasting—that is, allowing religious knowledge to be complex and engaging.
Christian belief takes as fundamental the idea that humans are created for communication—they are gifted with language. They are designed to speak to God, and to each other, and to give names to the things of the world around them. They are who they are in and through how they communicate. There is quite a bit in the New Testament from Jesus and St Paul and St James on the dangers of “idle” speech—speech that debases the currency because it is inflated, untruthful, aggressive, contemptuous or salacious. Corrupt speech—inflaming unexamined emotion, reinforcing division, wrapped up in its own performance—leaves us less human. Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow. So the issue for a religious believer—a Christian in particular—is the responsibility of the media for the quality of communication in society.
I am not talking about the charges of “dumbing down”—that’s a different problem. Nor am I talking about indecent language—again a different problem. The bigger question is about what is liberated or restricted by the word. What is the quality of humanity shown in various styles of communication? Corrupt speech assumes certain things about what it is to be human by manipulating fear; exhibiting violent conflict between people for entertainment; living off internal feuds and dramas between members of the professions. These are not wholly unfamiliar elements in our current media culture.
The degree to which material is produced with a tacit slant towards these unexamined responses is the degree to which communication is “shutting down the plant”. It may be true, as Steven Johnson argues in his recent book Everything Bad is Good For You, that much material now being broadcast or published requires a quicker intelligence than comparable material from twenty years ago. But a quicker intelligence does not of itself guarantee an imaginative depth—a wisdom connected with processes that take time.
Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also promoting creditable communication. Journalistic communication is bound to a market model. That is not going to change overnight. But news media is a parallel universe when compared with the actual ways in which people learn—which contributes to the exasperation and scepticism with which so much of the media world is treated.
What could offset this alienation would be if journalists were sensitive to the actual communities in which information was processed and understood, and since journalists have been increasingly restricted to their desks and rarely go out on ‘rounds’ this sensitivity is being lost. Also, there is a dominance among commentators—columnists in particular—in the national media of people whose main experience is urban, usually metropolitan. Once again, whether the journalist writes for the right or the left matters less than their location in a particular elite.
Ian Hargreaves9 notes some internationally based research on journalists which offers an interesting profile of the profession—predominantly male, young, drawn from the majority ethnic group in their society and university-educated. In the UK at least, we could probably add, for the national media, that their professional experience has been largely London-based. If it is a significant part of the profession’s justification that it helps to equip a maturely questioning democracy, it is unfortunate that its profile suggests a strong tribal identity which may be far removed from the specific local and civic loyalties that form the raw material of serious “discursive politics”, to use John Lloyd’s phrase.
That suggests in turn that the profession has to ask some questions about how it works to help interaction and argument between real local and civic communities, resisting the temptation to apply metropolitan templates as the obvious frame of reference. My own sense of the risks here was intensified by some of the national media coverage of the Foot and Mouth epidemic a few years ago, which revealed some disturbing gaps of information—let alone empathy—in regard to rural affairs. In respect of religious communities of all kinds, the problem seems endemic.
My argument is that “public interest”, if it is understood as the process of opening up conversation and debate between communities that make up a society, is a crucial priority for a society’s health—for the common good. It is too important to be reduced to a battleground where information is dragged out of reluctant and secretive power-brokers, or to a gladiatorial spectacle staged by an unelected political opposition. This task will certainly involve unwelcome questioning of random power in the media. But the media will only regain credibility if it shows more awareness of its own limited and therefore compromised position. It is also a task which entails taking responsibility for the quality of communication. Moral credibility is essential to a healthy and properly critical common life. Journalists need to be seen to be working for the sake of humanity, not just providing a supposedly liberating flow of information but a wide imaginative horizon, where cynicism is checked and facile emotion challenged.
A model of good journalism is good conversation in the wider social context. That is, it may be, and should be at times, argumentative and one-sided; but it must leave room within its own medium for reply, and provide material for critical evaluation. It must work with a sharp sense of what different kinds of community know, and how they know it. Without this, it will move constantly further into its parallel universe. And so long as there is real work in a real world to be done by the news media, this movement into a parallel universe is disastrous.
Keith Murdoch once said, “Beware the desk habit. It is the curse of journalism”. It is ironic that his son should preside over the domestication of journalism and its increasing dependence on cyber information. We need people who are recognisably professionals in facilitating exchange and mutual critique between the worlds people inhabit—actual three-dimensional people in the real world. Common good requires public space. But public space is a good deal more than a market—in information or anything else.
A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good. Such talk is not in rich supply just now, and it is only fair to ask what share of responsibility the media has for this. But it is not fair to treat news media as a scapegoat. Their relationship with the wider society is mutual—societies to some extent have the media they deserve and license. Can a more grounded, less fevered, more modestly provisional journalistic practice recover a sense of how to nurture public conversation in a mature democracy—even a truth that sets people free?