Must do better

The British public doesn't trust journalists. And if newspapers don't raise their game and change that perception, curbs on press freedom will be inevitable, argues Ian Hargreaves

When Edward Gibbon sent the second volume of his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the Duke of Gloucester in 1781, the easily bored aristocrat is said to have responded: "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon!" Although it is tempting to add that more people have reason to value the life of Mr Gibbon than that of the Duke, I can't deny the pertinence of the sceptical question about my coming book on the state of journalism. At a time when whole publishers' catalogues are devoted to assessments of one aspect or another of the media, what's the case for adding yet another title to the array?

In my case, the motivation is simple. I wanted to get at the question that has troubled me for all my working life as a journalist: namely, why is it that so many people feel so uneasy about the way journalists go about their business? Is their unease justified? Does it demand a response? Or is it largely the self-interested muttering of the vested interests that good, probing journalism is intended to unsettle?

I am not among those who subscribe to the view that the news media, or indeed the media in general, have spent the past 20 years on a headlong descent into "dumbing-down". In reality, there's no evidence that the public is less well informed than it was, and today's ubiquitous, global, always-on media can't easily be compared to what was on offer even two decades ago. But only the most complacent journalist can ignore the growing tide of concern about the news media, not least since much of the critique comes from journalists themselves.

In the United States, a movement of "concerned journalists" says bad journalism is undermining the American constitution's guarantee of free expression, replacing "independent news with self-interested commercialism posing as news". A recent book by the editor of The Washington Post tells hair-raising stories of the ways that advertising departments increasingly dictate to the newsroom on local and regional newspapers.

According to some polls, a majority of Americans today thinks the press has too much, not too little, freedom. Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin still holds and plays the aces in a dirty TV-news power game; and in Italy, the Prime Minister doubles as the country's pre-eminent media owner.

In Britain, it is a long-established feature of opinion surveys that journalists are considered only marginally more trustworthy than purveyors of snake oil, a ranking they share with the politicians they so assiduously wrestle in the mire. In last year's Reith lectures, Dr Onora O'Neill, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, accused journalists of "poisoning the wells of public discourse" with their slipshod sensationalism, and called for a rethink of the market-based, free-press philosophy that was forged in 17th- and 18th-century England and underpinned radical democratisation on at least two continents.

Today, we are a long way from such passionate optimism. In Parliament, yet another select committee is examining news-media intrusions into privacy, and the Communications Bill, which primarily concerns electronic media and telecommunications, may yet be hijacked in the House of Lords to apply pressure to a Press Complaints Commission that has few admirers outside the boardrooms of the newspaper industry.

When you talk privately to people in Britain today, whether it's to scientists, writers, sports people, business executives, academics or politicians, you realise that their personal feeling about the news media oscillates somewhere between fear and disdain.

Some of their fear, to be sure, is exaggerated and, indeed, based on self-interest. Governments, businesses and pressure groups spend vast sums of money endeavouring to bend the media to their own ends. People in powerful positions often wish to avoid examination in public, or to be examined only on their own terms, which is an option unavailable in a democratic society.

If journalists and publishers were smart, they would be thinking much harder about how to put their own house in order, not because Parliament will otherwise impose laws to curb press freedom, but because if journalism isn't trusted, it has no value. You can't speak truth to power if people doubt your word. Mainstream journalism, from newspapers to the nightly news on television, is notably failing to stem the decline in demand for what it offers.

What, though, would a movement for reform of journalistic values and practice entail? The manifesto of the American Concerned Journalists focuses on the most basic, with its first article stating: "Journalism's first obligation is to truth."

Difficult to argue with that, even if definitions of truth are slippery. There are other, more straightforward, tasks that could be undertaken. The journalism industry, for example, might care more than it does that journalism has become the preserve of white, middle-class recruits: today, only 4 per cent of journalists in Britain come from ethnic minorities.

A healthier journalism would also care more about training and education and do more to support it financially, rather than leaving it to the offspring of the aforementioned middle-class families to fork out for tuition and living expenses. The journalism business should also be worried about the relationship between low pay (the average UK journalist makes £22,500 a year) and quality. According to a recent piece of research, 70 per cent of British journalists are aged below 40, and only 23 per cent have dependent children, which hardly makes them attuned at the most basic level to the society whose concerns they are in business to reflect.

A confident news industry would also be more thoughtful than it is about the relationship between the highly regulated television and radio news sector and the largely unregulated newspaper and online news business. Rupert Murdoch's view is that television and radio should follow the course of newspapers into a free market in electronic news, but there is no evidence that the British people agree with him. Good journalism requires a news industry that has many diverse types of news-media ownership.

Above all, journalism needs to debate its own values and to listen to outside perspective, rather than taking shelter in its London fortresses, from Wapping to Kensington High Street. A proper debate about journalism also requires good evidence, involving research, which costs money and has been all too scarce in Britain.

None of that is an argument for state control of newspapers. Speaking as a former editor of this newspaper, who was prosecuted by the Attorney General for doing my job, I am not in favour of privacy laws or any other legal restriction on the press.

But it is difficult to defend newspapers that mock or ignore their readers' requests for the correction of inaccurate stories – a form of behaviour that would be castigated by newspapers if the supplier of faulty goods were selling toys or insurance, rather than news and comment.

There is a Chinese proverb about the dangers of failed leadership: that the fish rots from the head. In modern, wired democracies, it is not so. Today, rot spreads through networks: we live in the age of the virus. This makes our societies less vulnerable than those in the grip of elites, but once a virus gets hold, it cannot be arrested by a swift change in leadership. Against such attacks, reliable, accurate, truthful journalism is the only known antidote. Journalism is too important to be left only to journalists.

'Journalism: Truth or Dare?' is published on 27 March by Oxford University Press at £12.99. Ian Hargreaves is a former editor of 'The Independent'