The Prince Harry saga and the trials of this thing called journalism.
This is not a post looking to draw on opinions of the rights and wrongs of the UK royal drama. There are more worthy and knowledgable people to discuss this and where your comments and insight will be better served.
If like me you’d heard reports from Spare, you might have paused for thought momentarily, before assuming the rest of the day’s work.
This is a post about how the under carriage of this thing called “journalism” should pause you in your thoughts, actually make you go spare, angry.
The concern is nothing new, but it’s worth some time, given the state journalism is in, and the damage it does in its misreporting.
The headline in one of the UK’s leading newspaper reads:
That headline news populated social media, spawning multiple conversations around the world. On their platform The News Agents picked up on the similar theme under the title; What’s Harry’s End Game, where in their introduction they drew attention to the Mail’s headline.
Then this below. Yesterday, Peter Hunt @_PeterHunt, a former BBC Royal Correspondent, got hold of and published on Twitter extracts from Spare.
The question, and comments that followed were was the Mail’s account a reflection of the actual source? That’s for you to decide, but it reopens further the debate of journalism and the potency of its influence and toxicity. The schism between Prince Harry and the Mail is evidenced, but what’s the legacy, influence, and meaning of journalism as more and more young people seek to enter its walls?
I’ve been a journalist for more than thirty years working on some of the best news outlets in the UK, such a Newsnight, Channel 4 News and ABC News in South Africa. Before I knew anything about journalism as an undergrad I wanted to be a journalist. To be able to write about people and their stories, people’s remarkable feats and endeavours, expose wronguns, and the rest sounded thrilling. What was there not to like? I teach it now to Masters students and train professionals.
There’s always been a dark side to journalism. It’s inherent in its DNA masked in plain sight. This thing called Journalism, its essence today is less about writing and publishing stories that everyone does, or even what’s termed a critical analysis of events. To be critical requires more an analysis of oneself, culture, race, ideology, identity, and even if you hold extreme views that doesn’t bar you from calling yourself a journalist.
I’ve always been intrigued by an argument why we can’t call a new breed of surgeons, citizen surgeons; or lawyers, citizen lawyers; or what about citizen engineers. And before you grow hairs, I’ve been called a citizen journalist when I no longer practised journalism full time.
What underpins this profession is humans. Doh! Humans and a cognitive and cultural science of how the world is seen and interpreted. That’s difficult because the pretence is you’ve to rid yourselves of feelings that may impact your reportage, but it’s what is called upon. It matters. It matters a lot, which will soon be retailed by algorithms, but it’s worth more than anything in this assessment of truth to ignore it.
You could be a axe-wielding sex fiend with the most extremist views, but become a journalist. Unlike medics who swear by an oath to preserve life, lawyers to tell the truth enveloped from within legal procedures, journalism bears no such cross.
Journalism’s wood is truth, to act as a barrier against the powerful aiming to do harm to the weak. To expose complex matters articulated in clear terms and there have been and will continue to be an amazing constellation of journalists that keep the world honest. Theirs is a methodology surrounding objectivity, fairness, balance, cultural diversity, cognition, and trust to get to the truth.
That truth for others is a state, sadly easily moulded, bent out of shape to look like the truth, but nothing near it.
A brief, truncated, and unfulfilling round-robin is helpful.
This thing called Journalism
There was journalistic practice before journalism. That is people communicated stories, re-synthesising events for consumption. They spoke. The wrote. They shared.
The late Professor Brian Winston, a formidable journalism scholar, traced early incarnations of journalism from a 13th century Benedict monk who reported on events, conflicts, as he saw them. Here he is talking about it, in my research on videojournalism.
Gutenberg’s 15th century printing press, much like the Net allowed anyone to share their view. It was out of the reach of many first. Too expensive, but just like the Net, pricing settled and generations of new communicators were born.
Views of the 17th century modern world, far from the insights of indigenous (home) readers were shaped by writers, travel writers like Richard Hakluyt. He and others embellished stories to suit an ideology and like the film Inception sow seeds for fantastical mendacious narratives such as one-eyed gargoyles and savages inhabiting lands in Africa, India, China and the Americas. Racism takes its roots here — a purposeful cognitive and cultural behaviour to influence.
Early proto journalists in Britain existed in the guise of Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame. Defoe is credited in the 18th century of discarding hearsay for what can be seen and eye witness reports. Facts!
Journalism’s trade in stories, often out of the reach of ordinary folk, gave it its chutzpah. You could learn about the ongoings of British parliament which was either forbidden or out of bounds — a tax levy attempted to stymie anyone writing publicly about affairs.
In the 19th/20th century the spat between Pulitzer and Hearst, two US giant publishers, would yield a new name — yellow journalism. Events were openly sensationalised to align with political values, and get rich, piquantly reported on BBC Four’s Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True Story. Sadly the whole documentary isn’t available but this clip serves its purpose.
Around the 1900s in the UK, several tabloid newspapers under the ownership of former land barons, who previously saw newspapers as “grubby”, were being published. As I’ve previously written in the Incredible Year of Storytelling on @Medium
In the 1900s at the birth of English tabloids, the Daily Mail 1896, Daily Mirror 1903, and Daily Express 1900, stories that often bent the truth of journalism were told to suit proprietor’s interest. Their existence, when you read history, was about the gentry muzzling the views of the working class, as I have written here.
In his well received book on the BBC, former journalist turned academic Prof David Hendy writes about how the BBC materialised from a group of men, who had no experience of radio or communications, but a moralist, view on the world that they wanted to spread. For Lord Reith it was his Presbyterian religious views that the world needed to be remodelled into; this new association the BBC would assist to this end.
This isn’t to suggest, absurdly, the BBC is a Presbyterian institution but to draw attention to the understanding that beliefs, ideology, aren’t/ weren’t separable from what they wanted to be conveyed.
The invisible, often not discussed, thread that binds journalism together that has been naturalised is ideological conviction. And this is bound by class, race, culture, beliefs, wealth, social fairness etc.
Often as I stand in front of students, from lecturing across the world including China, I say I can teach you how to write well and create compelling videos because of how societies imbibe and treat stories, but I will likely have little impact on your black box.
Anyone can practice journalism. Your ideology frames how and what you’ll write about. If liberalism, “Awoken” is meant to signify a nuanced and tolerated understanding of the world to find solutions, and it has its faults, rightwing views of the world tend to yield an unbending strident narrowing comprehension of matters. Both can be on the wrong side of social cohesion and truth, and thus the vigilance of seeking answers, of being impartial matters.
Journalism by its very nature is a problematic profession yielding scholarly articles and texts. It yields the most heart wrenching, politically necessary, and crime revealing stories that stoke our concerns. There is a profession that’s needed, and proved to do the heavy lifting abridging and summarising complex issues.
Yet, if you are powerful, if you have financial muscle, if your views seek to disrupt the many for gain rather than heal, what then? How does society insulate itself?
There’s nothing that can be done. Amongst flat earthers, anti science extremists and the rest, this is how it works. If you don’t like it, don’t engage with it. But what’s the costs? At what cost to perpetuate what’s fundamentally wrong about journalism that influences a new generation, and how soon before AI becomes the retailer and then all hope is lost.
Thanks for reading, if you’ve got this far. I write about tech, journalism, cultural diversity, art and social creativity and the kind people of @Medium say I’m one of their top writers. You can subscribe to my pieces here Dr. David Dunkley Gyimah
