Somewhere in The Irish News archive is an article I wrote in the 1990s criticising the media treatment of loyalist protests and questioning the different language used by BBC Northern Ireland to describe loyalist and republican demonstrations.
In a divided society, words matter, and nobody knows that better than the senior management at BBC Northern Ireland.
As I look today at the handling of Israeli and Palestinian actions in the Middle East, I see nothing has changed. You don’t need to be told whose side people are on; you just listen to the language they use.
In the BBC newsroom then there were many fine journalists, but they had to work within parameters set by the bosses. The hierarchy in Belfast and London worked hand-in-glove.
Just a few years earlier The Observer had revealed all BBC current affairs appointments were vetted by MI5.
On the corporation’s website it discloses that following The Observer story “it was agreed that the scope of the vetting had become too wide”. Roughly translated, that means it would have carried on as normal if they hadn’t been caught.
Back to my ′90s article. Summoned to Talkback to discuss reporting in a divided society, the producer told me they were not going to discuss my article specifically but wanted to look at wider issues. In reality it was a platform for the BBC controller, the clubbable Pat Loughrey, to defend the Beeb.
In the lift on the way to the studio I was cornered by a colleague from another media organisation who had also been invited to join the conversation. “Birds don’t defecate in their own nests,” he said through gritted teeth. (The word he used was blunter than defecated, but this is a family newspaper.) He was marking my card.
And that’s often the way it is in any group – journalists, lawyers, police officers, doctors, trades unionists, political parties – a bit of rivalry is all well and good. But you don’t dirty your own nest. That’s why there are so many cover-ups.
Well today I’m going to be dirtying the nest again: There’s a crisis in journalism, and we are each individually going to pay the price.
One caveat: there are still some great journalists and great news organisations (take a bow Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey). But the good ones are being overwhelmed in a news environment dependent on the relentless search for ‘click-bait’ to drive hits on websites, and by the replacement of news by entertainment.
‘Gotcha’ journalism gives the appearance of news; but how do you weigh stories about the cost of Keir Starmer’s glasses against Labour’s decision to place pensioners on the sacrificial altar of austerity, or the billion-pound corruption of the last Conservative government, or the enabling of Israeli genocide in Palestine, or the monstering of people fleeing from conflicts?
The British media has always had rogue proprietors – in the ′30s Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere was mates with Hitler and Mussolini. “The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing on Germany,” Rothermere intoned.
But today’s news values of titles such as the Mail, the Express and Telegraph would revolt journalists who worked for them in their glory days.
In the United States, a compliant media – press and broadcast – has enabled Donald Trump and might well usher in a second Trump presidency in spite of clear evidence that he is unfit for office, a threat to the nation and constitution, and a clear and present danger to the global community.
There, control of the ‘message’ has fallen into the hands of oligarchs who have made their money in tech. Elon Musk has made Twitter Trump’s megaphone, while owner of the LA Times Patrick Soon-Shiong has blocked its editorial board from backing Kamela Harris for the presidency and, in an even more shocking intervention, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has silenced senior journalists at the Washington Post who were poised to endorse Harris.
Trump is a thug, and the failure to stand up to his threats of retribution against those he dislikes flies in the face of the countless journalists throughout the ages who have spoken truth to power – not least from the pages of the Washington Post which brought down Richard Nixon.
Have we left it too late? Something has gone badly wrong in our journalism schools here, and in the States where journalism education is taken even more seriously.
But the primary source of corruption in journalism lies not in the newsrooms, but in boardrooms where truth and lies are just another commodity like electric cars, smart speakers, and real estate.