Despite the Crowngate and Blue Peter scandals earlier this year, 61 per cent of respondents to a March 2008 online survey said they trusted Beeb journalists “a great deal or a fair amount”, ahead of ITV, Channel 4 and up-market reporters, and way ahead of red-top and mid-market newspapers.

That is the good news. The bad news is the BBC has fallen from grace in the last five years.

The British Journalism Review-YouGov poll, which had 1,328 adult respondents, found 20 per cent less people trusted the BBC now than they did in 2003. Then, 81 per cent of the population had said they believed in the Beeb.

This trend is not limited to the BBC. The whole of British journalism has taken a tumble: ITV and Channel 4 are trusted by only 51 per cent (against the 81 and 80 per cent of 2003, respectively), up-market and local journalists by 43 and 40 per cent (down from 65 and 60 per cent, respectively), mid-market papers by 18 per cent (down from 36 per cent), and red-top scribes by 10 per cent (down from 16 per cent).

Though the BBC rates better than senior police officers (but below local police officers and schoolteachers and family doctors, mind), and ITV fares better than the local MP, trade union leaders and ministers in the current government, that is no cause for celebration.

“What ought to worry all journalists is the massive slide in trust, relative to other organisations or groups, since this question was first asked 5 years ago,” writes Professor Steven Barnett, who analysed the survey findings in a BJR paper titled On the road to self-destruction (2008: 19; 5).

The only comfort from the findings is that tabloid journalists are not at the bottom of the pile anymore. They now have the dubious consolation of being the second-least trusted, with estate agents faring the worst among the 23 professions compared.

Up-market and local journalists are among the top nine on the trust scale, though mid-market scribes have not done well. They are only a notch higher than their red-top counterparts, below NHS managers, ‘people who run large companies’, senior council officials, Labour government ministers and senior Whitehall civil servants, in that order.

There is a sliver of silver lining for the broadcast media in all this. People trust television more than they do the news in ink — BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are among the top nine, while the print journalists are ranked further down the ladder.

Discussing the many reasons for the “crumbling faith in British journalism”, Barnatt writes: “Just as one man-biting-dog story provokes a flurry of canine-biting tales, so exposés of ‘failing’ journalism have become fashionable.”

He feels the media might be adding to the widespread scepticism by exaggerating – at times even inventing – examples of media misconduct.

“Good journalism makes a difference to the kind of society we live in, and to distrust it is eventually to destroy it,” he writes. “That’s why trust matters, and that’s why we should all be worried by the findings of this survey.”

Jameela Oberman can be reached at jameela.interjunction@googlemail.com.

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LET’S ADMIT IT, most of us think Sabrina Harman is a total freak.

In case the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell, Harman is the centrepiece of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the military policegirl who earned herself a court-martial and more by posing with a pile of corpses.

Since the media framed her pictures (pun very much intended), many have reported she was a scapegoat, but none so eloquently as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in this New Yorker piece, Exposure: The woman behind the camera in Abu Ghraib.

Gourevitch and Morris present Harman as a “numbed” being, awkward in her prison role, who did what she did not for kicks but to preserve her sanity in a job that made terrible demands on her.

You get to see Harman in a different light, as a pizza-seller-reservist pulled into a situation she wasn’t trained for, someone who wanted to “substract” herself from the crimes she witnessed routinely by “repositioning … as an outsider, an observer and recorder, shaking her head”.

Insightful. But something tells me the public’s mind is already made up.

Courtesy, the Internet

Bad news for the American newspaper industry: adspending down by 10 per cent.

More bad news: print ads fell more than 11 percent, while online newspaper ad expenditures soared 19 per cent.

Take those together with Eric Alterman‘s indepth piece Out of Print and you get an idea of how bad the news really is.

But it isn’t epitah yet. As Arianna Huffington — she of the interesting experiment called Huffington Post, which taps into citizen journalism remarkably — puts it:

“People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous. Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

Times, Telegraph, you heard the lady.

PS: Try this related Poynter piece by Jonathan Dube, on how a radio station harnessed citizen’s media to make the best of the US presidential polls.

Not kidding

The Beeb’s future is the kids. And that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.

Ever since he learnt a quarter of the 15-to-24-year-olds in Britain do not consume any BBC, Beeb boss Mark Thompson has been determined to net them — even if it meant pouring it down their throats.

His all-out Internet plans are in that direction. Since that particular age group would rather fool around online, Thompson wants to make sure everything the BBC creates is available online.

And there are kids channels among the dozen-plus channels the BBC Worldwide intends to launch in the next year — which will have dedicated web sites, of course.

All of which is good for the kids but ‘bad’ for British newspapers. Seems the BBC’s ‘big digitial push’ is stealing traffic away from them.

Never mind, it’s for the kids. Besides, a little kick in the back never hurt nobody.

Adieu

The man who survived the killing fields of Cambodia succumbed to cancer at the age of 65.

NYT photojournalist Dith Pran was the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields.

He was captured by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, but lived to work for the NYT again, surviving four years of back-breaking labour and torture through — as Doughlas Martin writes — “nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation”.

Pran escaped to Thailand in 1979, after a 40-mile trek across an expanse with clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims — the killing fields, as he dubbed it.

He later moved to the US and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.

Shut up, scribes

An item from dictatorial Belarus. As reported by Yuras Karmanau of the Associated Press:

Security agents detained at least 16 journalists and searched their houses and offices for material that libel President Alexander Lukashenko.

Not good (and shame on you Lukashenko), but a quick thought in the form of two questions.

Was that Lukashenko behaving like an authoritarian?

Or was he just being an in-power politician?

Happens quite often in ‘democratic’ societies too, if you ask me. A while ago I remember investigative reporter Duncan Campbell telling us how the MI5 took him for a long ride (literally) without quite checking if he was okay with it.

Worse is the Indian Tehelka incident (let’s keep the US out of this, lest we run out of space). After the web site published its Operation West End report, which exposed army anomolies and caused then defence minister George Fernandes to resign, remarkable was the harrasment the elected government of the world’s largest democracy unleashed — in relation, Lukashenko appears a mewing pussycat.

Let’s just say the press has as much freedom as the politicians allow, shall we?

Also read: And papa can’t do a thing

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