RUPERT MURDOCH’S DECISION to charge users to access online news across his publications is his answer to the steep decline in advertising revenue this year. While it is appealing to try to turn millions of news surfers into paying customers, how realistic is that move?
 
“It is a huge gamble,” said Stephen Jukes, former global head of news at Reuters. “If he fails, surely there will be more blood on the wall.”
 
Jukes, who is the Dean of Media School at Bournemouth University, draws a distinction between what he calls ‘news’ and ‘news’. The first is an everyday commodity, the second a value-added, exclusive product.
 
Jukes believes it is possible to charge for the value-added variety, where the reader gets more. But if it goes wrong, users would avoid clicking through to ordinary news items, and Murdoch would end up with less revenue to pay for the ‘quality journalism’ his plan aims to ensure.

Journalist-turned-academic Liisa Rohumaa is of a similar opinion. A former deputy editor at FT.com, Rohumaa has seen a monetised system work. FT.com runs a three-tier access system, the top of which is a premium-level service for £199 a year, but she doesn’t believe this business model would work for websites that do not cater to niche markets. “It’s a question of who would be prepared to pay,” she said.
 
While a financial analyst may pay for the information that FT.com provides, Rohumaa cannot see consumers approaching The Sun‘s celebrity gossip or The Times‘s general news with the same attitude. Daily news can be accessed from a plethora of sources, including citizen reports and blogs. Convincing consumers they should pay to read what they may read for free elsewhere is unrealistic.

“I think our audience are starting to realise that information isn’t just in the hands of the elite,” Rohumaa said.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and journalism professor at the City University of New York, thinks the decision is more than impractical. “Pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it,” he wrote in The Guardian, “is not only futile but possibly suicidal.”
 
By cutting content off from what he calls ‘google juice’ – the searches and links which draw users and advertisers in – publishers will not only alienate themselves from the real value of the web, they may even make less money. The escaping genie, he believes, should have been bottled up long ago.
 
Rohumaa’s thoughts exactly. The first internet browser was launched 15 years ago and newspapers have had that long to monetise their online content. “There was a chance to cash in,” Rohumaa said, “but the industry failed to see that and I can’t see it working now.”
 
Murdoch is pushing forward, though. He has announced he is looking at ways to block search engines from his content. He thinks Google and others have been acting as “parasites” and it’s time they stopped. 

Google’s response to Murdoch is this: if you don’t want to be on our search index, tell us, and we will remove you. A Google spokesman pointed out that Google News and web searches promote news organisations and bring users to their site – but only if they wanted it.
 
Professor Stuart Allan, author of Online News: Journalism and the Internet, believes the precarious relationship between news organisations and the search engine has been underestimated. He thinks charging users for news content may cause a two-tier effect across the Internet, dividing those who can pay and those who can’t.

“Such a divide would be a great shame,” he said, especially as the net is based on an ideal of access for all. While he is unsure how Murdoch’s plans will play out, he does believe any plans to charge for online news items will have a “chilling effect on the industry”.

A survey conducted by Lightspeed Research shows 91 per cent of people were unwilling to pay for news. In the same survey, five per cent said they might pay for a single news items. Only four per cent would consider a longer term subscription.
 
Vivian Schiller can relate to these figures. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it charged for content and then stopped two years later. She thinks asking users to pay for online news is ‘mass delusion’. And yet the current executive editor of nytimes.com, Bill Keller, has announced he expects a decision to be reached soon about whether or not the website will charge for content… again.
 
The issue, it seems, stretches further than one of should or can. For news organisations losing money daily it may be a case of must. Somehow.
 
Tom Hill, journalism trainer and founder of Up to Speed Journalism, believes it is vital for the news industry to make profit and that the online product can in fact contribute to the bottom line. One of the factors to consider, he says, is the behaviour of consumers. For every rational consumer there are millions of irrational ones; imagining that they are all discerning just will not do.
 
The presentation of the online content and the way in which payment is taken are crucial. If a pay-per-view approach could be integrated with an iTunes account or something similar, users may be more willing to cross the pay wall for unique content. It needs to be what Hill describes as an ‘invisible expense’.
 
One effect of this pay-per-view model, commodifying single pieces of news, is that it will clearly show what stories users value. “Journalists are going to have to earn their spurs if they are to produce content that people are going to pay for,” Hill said.
 
While newspapers need more money, and fast, Rohumaa believes Murdoch is looking for it in the wrong place. “We shouldn’t look to online as the saviour of everything else,” she said. She believes there are other ways to recover revenue and that the search for a business model that builds truly convergent multimedia empires is the way forward.
 
Murdoch is yet to announce how exactly he plans to change the ‘malfunctioning business model’ of the web, though he has said his publications – among others, The Sun, The Times and News of the World in UK – will begin charging for content by next summer. While what that move means for the industry remains to be seen, many media observers are of the view that something must change.
 
“We will only survive if we reinvent ourselves,” Rohumaa said.

Angelica Jopson is a UK-based journalist. She can be reached at angelica.mediamind@googlemail.com

TO ASSERT THAT Britain’s regional and local press is in crisis because of the recession is to state the obvious.

But in fact, the reasons behind the crisis sweeping through newspaper titles and broadcasting alike are far more complex. We are witnessing the convergence of a series of deep rooted changes which are fundamentally reshaping today’s creative media industry. It is a mix of technological revolution, new economics and recession or, to use what has become a journalistic cliché, a perfect storm.

That storm has its origin in global trends that have been gathering pace over the past decade.

Instant communications technology has brought far reaching change which makes the Internet revolution of the 1990s look tame by comparison. Today’s generation of media consumer is, to use a phrase I will examine in detail later, a “digital native”. This means that social networking and user generated content is now the norm. News is no longer the prerogative of the chosen few journalists, it is now in the public domain. Put simply, the media are no longer in control of their destiny.

New technology has also ushered in new business models. In short, New Media equals New Economics. And while media organisations grapple with this and the still unresolved conundrum of how to make money in New Media, recession has brought the regional and local industry to its knees.Together, these trends have combined to create an unprecedented crisis that is creating lasting structural change in the industry. The greatest threat is that we are seeing less and less original reporting, a homogenised news agenda which focuses on image and sensation and a consolidation in ownership which drastically reduces the plurality of the news offering.

Of course, it is true that the digital revolution has brought new tools which are being used for the generation of news, not least mobile phone images, blogs and – the latest innovation – Twitter. But this material often does not stand up to scrutiny as news and it is no means certain that it will compensate for the growing deficit in traditional reporting.

The technological revolution

It seems incredible to think that when I started in journalism thirty years ago that I was using a typewriter, ‘sandwiches’ of paper and carbon paper which subeditors would ‘cut and paste’ into shape. By the mid-1980s, as a Reuters foreign correspondent in the Middle East covering amongst other things the Iran-Iraq war, I was struggling to master what Fleet Street was calling ‘new technology’. In my case, this was a Radio Shack Tandy 100, complete with acoustic coupler. Given a good phone line, and a bit of luck, stories could be transmitted back to London, followed of course by a phone call to see if the text had actually landed somewhere. But if the phone receiver happened to be the wrong shape and didn’t fit into the coupler, it simply wouldn’t work!

By 1989, communications were slightly more advanced but when the Berlin Wall came down we had no mobile phones to compare with today. It was a matter of holding normal telephone lines open and hoping that you could find one! But soon after that the pace started to pick up – the 1991 war against Iraq put CNN on the map, by 1996 America Online was starting to make a name for itself, and in 1988 the Drudge Report broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (although it has to be said only because Newsweek decided not to run with the story).

But the pace would quicken still further in the last eight years. The 2003 Gulf War saw television correspondents reporting live from the battle front by video phone;  and then something else changed — the ability for everyone to take and transmit images ushered in the age of user generated content or the ‘citizen journalist’. When bombers struck the London transport system on July 7, 2005, film crews couldn’t gain access to the Underground tunnels. But passengers caught up in the bombing took pictures with their mobile phones and sent them in their hundreds to the BBC and other news organisations. The same was true when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; or when the Asian tsunami wreaked its havoc on Boxing Day 2004.

The mobile phone, in the hands of a digitally literate population, suddenly changed the relationship between the media and consumers of news. Under the old model, foreign correspondents would tell the public what they needed to know, when they ‘needed’ to know it (i.e. when it suited them). Today, consumers of news pull down what they need, when they need it and how they need it. Sometimes, as in the examples above, they have actually contributed to the news gathering.

These are today’s digital natives, a term popularised by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 2005. There he set out the dilemma facing his generation of “digital immigrants”, none other than the owners, movers and shakers of the established media organisations.

“The peculiar challenge then is for us ‘digital immigrants’ to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience of dealing with,” said Murdoch.While immigrants often succeed in learning the language of their adopted country, they often retain an accent. In the digital world, the immigrant’s accent manifests itself differently but no less clearly. How often have I caught myself printing out an email to read, or ploughing through the instruction booklet of a digital camera that a digital native would simply switch on and use!

While Murdoch was pondering the generation gap and its consequences, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was spelling out how technology had fundamentally shifted the balance of power away from the media organisations. In his parting shot at the media in June 2007, Blair spoke of “a radical change in the nature of communication.” The Media, he said, were no longer the masters of this change but its victims. He went on to bemoan the impact of web-based news, blogs and 24-hour news channels to draw the conclusion that standards were unravelling. He spoke of a “Media that increasingly, and to a dangerous degree, is driven by impact.”

“Impact,” he said, “is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed.”

More news? Or less?

So did Blair call it right? Certainly he didn’t pull his punches but nor did he really address the idea that there may be some sort of trade-off between new and old media. Clearly, instant communication is driven by image, is emotionally charged and does tend to be superficial. It caters for a short attention span and often shuns the less sensational, analytical story. On the other hand, it is certainly true that new media has brought a wealth of content we would never have otherwise seen.

There are two key questions here.

Firstly, to what extent is this user generated content news? Does it stack up when judged by traditional news values of being fair, objective and free from bias?

Secondly, does this user generated content stand alone or is it, at best, complementary to a traditional feed of news about a specific subject?

Assuming video captured on mobile phones or otherwise is genuine, and has not been doctored, it is reasonable to suggest that footage of the Asian tsunami uploaded to YouTube does pass the test of being free from bias. It simply shows what happened and offers no comment. Another strong example is the video footage of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson who died during clashes with the police at G20 demonstrations in London earlier this year. Had it not been for a U.S. investment banker, who filmed Tomlinson, the public would never have known that he was struck on the leg and pushed to the ground by a police officer. The case was taken up by The Guardian and quickly became mainstream news. Arguably this had a profound impact on the British public’s perception of policing, shattering the cosy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ image of the friendly neighbourhood bobby.

On top of this feed of complementary news material, comes the latest technological innovation that is Twitter. By the end of June this year there were already 45 million users worldwide. News of the U.S. Airways jet’s miraculous crash landing on the River Hudson was captured by Twitter, as Janis Krum, on a ferry close to the scene ‘twittered’: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up people. Crazy.” It has become so pervasive as a medium that it seems to be almost backward not to twitter from a meeting. So much so that the Editor of Reuters, David Schlesinger, felt it necessary to remind his reporters about basic ground rules for using the new medium.

But here it is clear that we are talking about a communication medium that may not be just about news in its traditional sense. It seems that Iranian opposition figures, frustrated by the outcome of June’s re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used Twitter to coordinate demonstrations and rallies. That in itself is a story but it serves to remind us that not all communication is news in its own right.

New economics and old-style recession

The other main factor in play is economics, both new-style and old-style. These economic forces seem to be working against the plurality and diversity of news and are combining to create the crisis in the regional and local press. The whole thrust of New Media economics is to gather the news once and produce it — and sell it — multiple times across multiple platforms. In practical terms, this means that journalists, especially on regional and local newspapers, are multi-tasking, writing a story, taking still pictures and shooting video. And then editing the package, uploading it to the website… and so it goes on. It is a classic triumph of form over content. Journalists are almost chained to the production desk, becoming factory-style processors of content rather than generators of news. So there is less and less time to gather original news.

In addition to that, the actual number of journalists is shrinking as the industry consolidates worldwide. This trend had been gathering pace over the past decade and is particularly marked in America where Disney, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner and News Corp dominate the landscape, supplemented of course by Microsoft and Google.In the UK, the same consolidation has swept through the newspaper industry. In 1992, some 200 companies owned newspapers. By 2005, 10 companies owned 74 per cent of the British regional press.

The recession has given this trend added impetus as advertising revenues plunge and organisations seek to reduce costs. In Britain, the picture in broadcasting is one of crisis. ITV has cut its news regions to eight from 17 and laid off 1,000 jobs last year. Channel Four has mounted a vigorous campaign for public finance while also shedding staff. In the middle of all this, the BBC is clearly on the back foot, defending its state funding from a series of attacks, not least in the government’s Digital Britain report. The fortunes of regional and local newspapers are even more dire. Sixty titles closed last year and well over 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Overall sales declined by seven per cent and advertising revenue fell by 15.8 per cent.

With hindsight, it is clear that newspapers made two fundamental strategic errors.

Firstly, newspapers believed that they could protect advertising revenue — their lifeblood — by setting up web sites. But advertisers, instead of simply transferring their business loyally across to the newspaper site found they had far more effective ways of doing business. In short, those small ads migrated to specialist web sites, for car sales and the like, which are able to draw on a far wider market and offer customers greater choice. UK newspaper advertising revenue is expected to fall further still this year, by some estimates by up to 21 per cent.

Secondly, newspapers believed that news would have a monetary value on the web. This too was wrong. So far only a handful of newspapers, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, have managed to charge customers for news. This is, to use the jargon, ‘value added’ specialist financial news, out of the mainstream commoditised pool of what is general news and widely available for free. Murdoch is now attempting to turn back the clock after 15 years of free news, stating what is frankly the obvious, namely that the current economic model is not sustainable.”Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch stated recently.

But many media commentators believe that even Murdoch will not get his way this time. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest newspaper publisher, posed the obvious question: “Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?”

Shrinking news

The impact then of new and old economics is hugely damaging. Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, last year broke the taboo that dog doesn’t eat dog by writing a scathing book about the state of the media. Entitled Flat Earth News, the book sets out Davies’s central argument that less and less original news is being generated. Partly because of cost cutting, and partly because of the need for speed, fewer stories are being written, fewer stories are being checked and increasingly newspapers are falling back on agency copy (within the UK principally from the Press Association) and public relations material.

“The profession (of journalism) has become damaged to the point where most of its members are no longer able to do their job,” he writes. “They work in structures which positively prevent them discovering the truth.”

This damning verdict on the media is supported by academic research that Davies commissioned at Cardiff University. Their researchers examined the news sections of five mainstream newspapers, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Mail. They found that 60 per cent of stories were wholly or partly made up copy either taken from the Press Association of from public relations agencies. A further 20 per cent of stories contained clear elements from these sources. In fact, the researchers were only able to state with any certainty that 12 per cent of the copy was original and generated by a newspaper’s own staff.

That shocking finding illustrates the extent to which the content of today’s newspapers has been reduced to a commodity and become infiltrated by PR. There is also another threat to newspapers in the form of a wave of alternative players now emerging — online only newspapers such as The Huffington Post, local council newspapers (proliferating at a rapid rate), community websites and blogs of all flavours and persuasions.

But does this proliferation of new media, much as Twitter or mobile phone pictures, compensate for the shrinkage in traditionally generated news?

In my view it does not. Not least this is because so often, these new media outlets do not offer news that passes the most basic tests of objectivity and freedom from bias. The journalist Henry Porter, who writes in the Observer, put it very succinctly in a recent article for the paper:

“All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an inquest or badgering local bobbies, democracy and accountability in Britain would not be possible…”

…the web might give you the cinema times but it won’t tell you which planning official is in bed with a supermarket chain.”

The impact of the digital revolution is now being subjected to increasing scrutiny and was the subject of a recent analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A paper written by Andrew Currah, an Oxford lecturer specialising in the digital economy, reached an alarming conclusion:”

Increasing commercial pressure, driven by the inherent characteristics of the digital revolution, is undermining the business models that pay for news,” Currah wrote in his study, ‘What’s Happening to our News’ earlier this year.

“…this threatens to hollow out the craft of journalism and adversely impact the quality and availability of independent factual journalism in Britain.”

Change is here to stay

So where does this leave us all? Certainly the industry is still very much in state of flux or, to return to the original analogy, the storm is still raging. But I think it is safe to say that the changes we have already witnessed are here to stay.

There is a clear danger that our news today is a mile wide and an inch deep, on the face of it a huge offering but actually very shallow. Technology and economics have combined to reduce the amount of traditional news gathering. Regional news appears to be most at threat but the same processes are narrowing the scope of reporting at a national and international level.

Without doubt, technology has brought us news we would never have seen before. YouTube, Flickr and Twitter are new tools which clearly can play a role in newsgathering and do have the potential for significant social and democratic impact alongside more traditional notions of journalism. But these new tools are not at the moment fully compensating for the shrinkage in traditional news.The one clear lesson is that news in no longer the prerogative of a chosen few journalists but of the many. And the new media landscape will undoubtedly see the profession of journalism and the community of others who are generating content — of all types — working far more closely together.

Stephen Jukes, formerly the global Head of News at Reuters, is Dean, Media School, Bournemouth University. He can be reached at sjukes@bournemouth.ac.uk

TRAVEL WRITING LOOKS so easy. Instead of being stuck in some dreary paper-pushing job you get to go somewhere different every day. All you have to do is walk around a bit, chat to a few people, drink lots of sangria, then share your experiences with the folks back home — all expenses paid. What a deceptively easy life.

It is an ancient art too — about 2,500-years-old. In Dark Star Safari the American travel writer Paul Theroux, describes Herodotus, who was born around 280BC, as the “first methodical sightseer”. After over two millennia of travel writing you might be forgiven for thinking: “Where on earth is there left to see?”

Everywhere man has gone, a travel writer has literally been in his footsteps— almost to the moon and back. Even the Apollo astronauts had journalist Andrew Smith stalking them — albeit in a pilgrimage across the United States, for his book Moon Dust. Some of the greatest writers composed tales on their travels, including Dickens, Twain, and Steinbeck. You might ask: “Doesn’t everyone travel these days — what’s left to say?”

Yet travel writers can still provide valuable insights to the folks “back home.”

A A Gill, who declares his intention is to “interview” places, says: “Abroad is as foreign funny and strange and shocking as it ever was and our need to know our neighbours is every bit as great.” (See A A Gill is Away, pX)

Despite this enthusiasm, Theroux warns that travel writing is often poor and predictable. In his epic South American expedition, chronicled in The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux complained:

The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcial nose-against-the porthole view from the train’s tilted fuselage. (p12)

Theroux explains why this problem has arisen:

There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys…for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. (p13)

He felt “cheated” by travel books. So in the Old Patagonian Express he pledged “to end my book where travel books begin”. So he took the original step of getting on a subway in Boston and then crawling his way towards Southern Argentina on a series of ramshackle often frustrating train rides. Theroux’s tale is filled with anecdotes and snippets from people’s lives. He avoids the tourist attractions, museums, and fancy hotels, and instead endures cold, misery, and discomfort — all on our behalf.

Jay Parini calls such writing “the heroic journey:” In the traditional myth, a hero — whoever he might be — abandons his safe haven and pushes forward into the wilderness (or depths) in order to test himself to against the odds. In the course of testing he either discovers his own rich resources, or comes into contact with higher powers that assist him (see Travels with Charley, xii-xiii).

Parini describes how Steinbeck used this narrative structure in the book Travels with Charley. In this travelogue Steinbeck sets out across America, with his poodle Charley, and a specially converted truck — what appears to be the first-ever camper van, or RV– charmingly called “Rocinante” in honor of Don Quixote’s horse.

Parini adds:

The story inevitably involves a returning, which completes the cycle; the point being that, upon returning, the hero has been immeasurably strengthened by the knowledge gained in the course of his difficult journey. (Ibid)

As Steinbeck humbly puts it: “We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip — the trip takes us.” And the trip seems to dominate the writing — which invariably in travelogues is in chronological order.

Steinbeck concentrates on people almost trapped within the landscape he is travelling through. There is poignancy about the static characters he meets along the road at motels and diners. They are almost like the shadowy people portrayed in the melancholic paintings of Edward Hopper.

Alan de Botton shows that such small insights into humanity are rare. He concludes his book, the Art of Travel, with a quote from Nietzsche:

We are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much

Why in an age of mass tourism do the majority apparently gain so little from their experience? To find out it is useful to consider the British travel writer Tim Moore. His comical recreation of a European grand tour, Continental Drifter, includes Lord Chesterfield’s lament about the first European tourists:

They go abroad…but in truth they stay at home all that while…not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company…but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern. (p338)

This is key to understanding the main allure of travel writing and why it is still as vibrant and necessary as ever. Great travel writing highlights the things the tourist has become anesthetised too — because of home comforts. For proof of this Theroux offers an account of his hardships travelling across Africa in Dark Star Safari, which included:

…fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels, fleeing animals, rotting schoolrooms, meaningless delays and blunt threats… (p426)

He contrasts this with the pampered five-star tourist treatment provided for “over-privileged fatheads.”

In an age of mass tourism it is possible to be “transported” somewhere else by great travel writing – even more than your package tour. As Gill says: “Nothing alters your perception of who you are and where you belong to as fundamentally, radically, and permanently as being somewhere else.” (pX)
And the best advice of the travel writer is to travel light — leave your prejudices and snobbery at home. This is best illustrated again by Gill, who shows that travel writers endorse places that are considered beneath the consideration of worthy tourists — such as the Taj Mahal:

It is the most complete thing ever built by man and nothing can diminish it; not the queues; not the crowds; not the kitsch of endless reproduction and familiarity; not the sneers of Noël Coward or the epicurean India snobs; not the clicking lines of newlyweds waiting to be photographed on Princess Diana’s bench…if you go to just one place abroad in your life, it should be the Taj. (p124)

Finally, A C Grayling distinguishes between the traveller, who goes to understand and sympathise, and the tourist.

The tourist is not an active being, he is passive, he expects to be carried abroad, conveyed from the airport to his hotel, provided with entertainments and protected from foreign annoyance  (p193).

So the deceptively easy part of great travelling, and travel writing, is to understand the world and ourselves better. This is far from an easy task. As Grayling concludes: “…Seneca was right in remarking that however far we go, it is only to meet ourselves at the journey’s end.” (p194)

Dan Hogan is a UK-based journalist and journalism lecturer, currently researching literary journalism. Read his earlier piece, The truth about non-fiction.

Home

So it should come as no surprise that National Union of Journalists General Secretary Jeremy Dear called on fellow professionals to exorcise the demons that exist within the reporting of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. In a letter to journalists earlier this year Dear said: “The media plays a key role in how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and, ultimately, how they are treated by the public at large.”

The Union’s Code of Conduct, a “rulebook” designed to ensure ethical journalism is practiced by its members, has recently included a Conscience Clause in a bid to “nail asylum myths” by placing accurate reportage in the public domain.

So why is this an issue? And is there really a problem? The Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK certainly thinks so. The academic research group, which is based at London’s City University in England, has been highly critical of the British press for its sometimes “lazy” reporting of issues such as immigration, born perhaps of the continuing expansion of the European Union and the tens of thousands of annual applications for asylum in the UK.

Its research, which was carried out between January and March 2005, found inaccurate terms were used in a cross-section of (mainly national) newspapers. In particular, it found that the interchangeable use of terms with different meanings (e.g. “refugee”, “asylum seeker”, “failed asylum seeker” and “migrant”) that could be seen as “a reflection of the fact that global migration processes are complex and it is not always easy to distinguish between forced and more voluntary movements”.

However, in some reporting there was evidence of lazy journalism and a lack of understanding of the legal framework governing asylum applications. That phrases “asylum seeker”, “migrant” and “refugee” have been deployed in an apparent haphazard way surely contradicts the essence of journalism and the NUJ — that of clear, accurate and honest reporting.

A pamphlet issued in January to members of the NUJ provided a bitesize guide in defining these complicated and baggage-laden terms. In particular, attention was drawn to the erroneous description of an “illegal” asylum seeker, owing to the fundamental human right that, under international law, everyone is permitted to request asylum from his or her own country.

So why are these descriptions lazily employed in the first place? It could be argued that readers sympathetic to Enoch Powell’s notion of “floodgates Britain” may seek solace in a press that adheres to similar viewpoints. However, it is possible the more potent cause is subconscious reporting, where stereotypes are naturalised rather than challenged.

The Hutton Inquiry into the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly and the “sexed-up” Iraq dossier revealed a dispatch from then Today programme editor Kevin Marsh, who criticised his BBC colleague Andrew Gilligan’s use of “loose” language. With this in mind, it is little wonder that many have flagged up the “crisis of trust” in British journalism in recent years.

The NUJ’s attempt to help reclaim and safeguard that trust, through sensible handling of asylum issues and working with the UN Refugee Agency London, should therefore be seen as a step in the right direction.

UK journalist Ryan Hooper can be reached at rjhooper@hotmail.co.uk.

Home

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.

Home

Surely, and not slowly.

It’s PR that Nick Davies, award-winning investigative reporter and author of Flat Earth News, is talking about here. He believes public relation officials have an alarming degree of control over media content today.

A Cardiff University study shows the average reporter fills three times more news space than in 1985. So journalists are under pressure to produce more copy, and often recycle reports to meet deadlines.

Press ownership is at the heart of this trend, Davies said, and media giants are more concerned with checking their bottom line than checking facts.

“This injected commercialisation is killing the logic of journalism,” he said at a Westminster Media Forum conference in London on PR and Journalism – Government and Health Sector Media Relations.

The Cardiff research, which analysed 2,000 news stories, found more than 80 per cent of the items were composed from second-hand sources. Also, only 12 per cent had been checked for accuracy.

The way the news industry functions now, journalists do not take the time to research the press releases that land on their desks. “Instead of being news gatherers we are becoming information processors,” said Davies, who won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 1999 and the Europe Prize: Journalism for a Changing World in 2004.

So the model of the press as public watchdog is being undermined. Worse, this ‘cut-corner’ approach to filling up news space is resulting in a press that can be easily manipulated – and often misleads the public.

The conference also highlighted the uneasy relationship between the media and the government, projecting it as a particular roadblock to good journalism. Political communication veteran David Hill said while everyone tries to influence the news agenda, the way in which the media sees the government is a cause for concern.

“The media’s attitude shows assumptions that the government is without ethics,” said Hill, who was Tony Blair’s director of communications till 2003, “and that political figures are only in it for private gain.”

This mindset coupled with the journalistic belief that “only bad news is news at all” has kept the government on the backfoot. But gloomy headlines rake in more profit, and Hill said he doesn’t see a truce being struck till journalists show a willingness to be balanced.

“At the moment,” he said, “there is no incentive for the media to change and no reason for the government to play along.”

While some press offices may be benign, Davies said, it is the structure of the news machine that is allowing their views to be published unquestioned. “Even honest PR makes selections for us,” he said. “We should source it ourselves, we should decide.”

The rise of the internet means more people read news online, which is not profitable for corporations. This has led to job cuts. Which, in turn, has put pressure on reporters to file more copy is less time, and Davies said journalists need to demand more time and more space. Every time they do that, a battle is won.

“Good journalism isn’t dead, it’s just terribly ill,” he said. “But it’s worth fighting for.”

Angelica Jopson is a writer at Interjunction. She can be reached at angelica.interjunction@googlemail.com

RELATED REPORTS:
PR eats into quality journalism
War reporting is dead

Home
 

That was the focus of a Fleet Street conference organised by the International Communications Forum, which featured media academics and journalists of repute — among them, Phillip Knightley, Martin Bell, Yvonne Ridley, Rafael Marques, and Professor Stuart Allan.

“The real war and the war reported by the media are different,” said Knightley, author of First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. “Reporting conflicts in foreign lands become an extension of government justification for the war rather than the public reality of war.”

Knightley, Ridley, Marques and Bell were united in their criticism of the limited representation of conflicts by military-controlled ‘embeds’.

Bell, the BBC foreign correspondent-turned-politician, began the debate, saying war correspondents are stuck in the ‘green zone’, unable to reach the people affected by war. If they are not embedded they run the risk of being shot and killed, often by ‘friendly fire’. 

“News is run by the government,” he said, “the news organisations have to be in with the government.”

War reporting — where does a journalist’s duty lie, held at the St Bride’s Church mid-April, focussed on the conflict between the nationalist politics of a journalist and his responsibility towards the people affected by war.

Knightley, who expressed admiration for war correspondent William Howard Russell — Russell brought home the reality of the Crimean War to the British public by way of the Times in the 1850s — said his own reports were criticised because he wrote more like a ‘peace correspondent’, which the establishment found unpalatable.

For his part, BBC World Affairs Editor Jonathan Baker defended the use of ‘green zones’ or ‘roof-top journalism’.

“You can still produce excellent journalism from within green zones,” he said. “The BBC tries to resolve the restrictions in which we are obliged to operate and have to weigh up the expense and risks.”

Press TV presenter Ridley, famously kidnapped by the Taliban when reporting for the Daily Express, said the media is used by the government to endorse conflicts. Un-embedded journalists risk being shot dead by the US military, as has happened in Iraq.

Times columnist Magnus Linklater said it is harder today to maintain high standards than before, because the war situation is more complex than it has been.

Freelance editorial consultant Martin Huckerby, who works for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, said it was the journalists’ responsibility to be aware of prejudices they may have when reporting foreign affairs.

Bell said independent journalism was virtually impossible in today’s professional media organisations. He expressed concern over how government spin doctors manipulate the media.

But if the conventional media do not tell people what they want to know, they now have the option of turning to citizen journalists. Marques, known for his investigative reports into the diamond industry and government corruption in Angola, said of this struggle over information:

“There are two conflicting wars — the military war and the public opinion war. The public can take more control over the news than the journalists. Citizen Journalism is a real challenge to the authority of professional journalists.”

Bournemouth University Professor Stuart Allan said unapologetic subjectivity in reporting connects with people. User-generated content appeals to readers because it offers them a diversity of perspectives from around the world.

Marques said western news is mostly dictated by the politics of UK and USA and this has to change. International reporting should focus more on the ordinary people affected by war, he said.

Jameela Oberman is a writer at Interjunction. Mail her at jameela.interjunction@gmail.com

Home

IN INDIA, UNLIKE IN North America and much of western Europe, newspaper readership is rising sharply. More newspapers are sold daily than in any other country except China.

Newsstands overflow with publications in English and one or two local languages. They sprawl across sidewalks, dozens neatly lined up or hanging from walls, pillars or trees — glossy colour magazines, inky daily newspapers, local flyers and pamphlets of mediocre quality.

In Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, at least 11 daily Hindi newspapers are available, along with at least three Urdu papers, and more than half a dozen English papers. Dozens of magazines are available in these three languages. They cover all topics — news, fashion, medicine, weddings, movies, motorcycles, religion, travel, sports, yoga. There is an Indian version of Maxim. There are women’s magazines such as Femina, Marie Claire, Elle, Cosmo, and Saheli. There are magazines and comic books just for kids. Nearly every shopkeeper in his small store reads Dainik Jagran, Jansatta or Rashtriya Sahara. Dainik Jagran is one of Lucknow’s more expensive newspapers, going for Rs 3.50, about 9 cents. Others sell for as low as Rs 2. There is so much available and yet what there is appeals only to the middle class.

Media and the middle class

The media is big business in India, relying on corporate advertising and the spending of the middle class. But it is hard to claim it is a public good that reaches most citizens.

Contrary to what we might think, there is an inherent tension between India’s much-hyped economic growth and its deepening democracy. Economic success has enabled a middle class to emerge, but middle class culture remains irrelevant to the many Indians left behind economically. Democracy has enabled historically marginalised sections of society to become politically powerful through sheer numbers and effective grassroots mobilisation, while the elite have tended to retreat from the political sphere. Economic growth has led to greater inequalities, while democratic growth has given a stronger voice to those who suffer from those inequalities.

The media may do a good job of providing news to the estimated 300 million members of the Indian middle class — in fact, coverage of political issues tends to be quite good — but as long as more than 700 million Indians are sidelined from its gaze by their inability to conspicuously consume, the media’s role as public service is severely limited.

Vinod Shukla, the 67-year-old Lucknow editor of India’s largest newspaper, the Hindi-language Dainik Jagran, decried the media’s decreasing emphasis on serious news reporting, its frequent complacency, and its general unwillingness to challenge government or big business. He believes this began with the Emergency of the 1970s. Under the censorship of the Emergency, when the media was asked to bend, it chose to crawl — a famous quote from the time, repeated to me by Shukla. He believes this attitude remains today. This doesn’t make the media unsuccessful, but it isn’t playing the role of watchdog or societal agenda-setter as vigorously as people like Shukla would like.

He added the Indian media today must cater to the interests of readers to stay in business. The fact the media is primarily a profit-driven industry limits the scope of what it is likely to report and at times promotes trashy sensationalism in the name of news. Paris Hilton’s jail term, Lindsay Lohan’s alcohol rehab, and Beyonce’s public statements fill the international news pages in some papers. Those who read papers and watch TV are often more interested in interviews with Bollywood stars than rural poverty. More people want to find out about the new iPod than Indian foreign policy. The Times of India has become a notorious example of this phenomenon. Competitors such as The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express and Hindi papers like Dainik Jagran and Amar Ujala provide a better balance of the serious and the frivolous. Yet, this often leads to inferior coverage of more important issues. The media often abdicates its role as an educator in favor of being an entertainer.

When the media does address substantive issues, its reach is often extremely limited, according to Dr Sanjay Kumar at Delhi’s respected Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He believes it is effective in spreading information, and studies by CSDS have shown that citizens have a high level of trust in the media. The influence of the print and electronic media during elections is growing, but is not as important as many assume, Kumar argues. Non-mediated, informal networks remain more significant in spreading news in rural India. He does not see this changing any time soon.

‘Why should I vote?’

There is a worrisome disconnect between the political power of poorer, traditionally marginalised communities and their consumption of media. Not only are these citizens unlikely to have meaningful access to the media, but they cannot afford the products appearing in newspaper advertisements and so would not be a profitable demographic under the current advertising model.

A 2006 CSDS survey reported that 26 per cent of respondents regularly (almost daily) watched news on TV, but 38 per cent never did. Only 15 per cent regularly listened to news on the radio; 48 per cent never did. Twenty-two per cent read a newspaper regularly; 47 per cent never did.

Raj Varma, a former editor of both The Times of India and Indian Express, asked me, “Why should I vote?” His argument was that he, a well-off city dweller, had all that he needed: a house, car, electricity, water, safety, a good school for his daughter, good doctors nearby. What else could the government do for him? If these are the people the Indian media caters to, it simply isn’t good business to trouble them with issues that don’t affect them and that they can do little about.

But poor Indians do vote. And if the media is not covering issues that matter to them, then how valuable is it to the process of political and social change? There was a dearth of meaningful coverage of Mayawati and the BSP during last year’s assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. Instead, the emphasis was on the political circus of Rahul Gandhi’s campaign (though his Congress party was expected to finish a distant fourth), and on the BJP’s bickering with the Election Commission over communal campaign material. In recent years, both these parties have been supported by the urban upper-castes and classes in UP — the same group that largely controls the media. The ruling Samajwadi Party embarked on an advertising blitz.

The BSP did not advertise, nor did its candidates or events receive much media attention, despite predictions the BSP was likely to emerge the largest party in the state. It still won dramatically. The coverage of the media, which virtually ignored the party, did not matter to its largely economically marginalised supporters. A study conducted by CSDS after the 2004 Lok Sabha elections found that voters for the BSP had much lower exposure to the media than voters for other major political parties. This data leaves the poorest and most politically active citizens outside the influence of the media. Consequently, issues relevant to these citizens are generally not found in the media — agricultural issues, hunger, poor rural health care and education, lack of jobs, and ways of addressing these problems.

This would not happen in the US. Not because the US media is necessarily any better than the Indian at playing the role of public good — it only has the advantage that media consumers are also voters. Ignoring the issues of poor or minority communities in the US does not hurt the media’s image because these communities do not have the political clout to produce election results that defy media predictions. The ‘surprise’ outcomes of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections and the 2007 UP Vidhan Sabha elections demonstrate the challenge that the news media faces in India.

The ‘tyranny’ of the market

As long as a majority of Indians live in poverty, it is unclear how a media driven by profit can expand its reach. Nor would a widespread return to news somehow subsidised by the government or non-profit groups be likely. Things could of course proceed unchanged, but this would relegate the news carried by the media to be little more than entertainment for the middle and upper classes, weakening the democratic process in India. Are other paths available?

An informed media is often referred to as the fourth estate of democratic politics. Shukla stressed the need for an informative media in a well-run democracy. Sevanti Ninan, a journalist and media critic in Delhi, also asserted the media is a business that relies on a democratic form of politics. In her opinion, this is no small reason why print and electronic news have flourished here.

Despite the best attempts by many involved in the Indian news media to provide truly meaningful content to all segments of India’s diverse population, the larger system of the media in India — based on a US-style media model — and its relationship to the electorate limits its effectiveness and relevance. Addressing this contradiction will require collaborations and discussions between journalists, media owners, activists, politicians, citizens, academics.

Happily, such constructive discussions — involving top journalists and politicians at least — have recently been occurring in various forums. High-profile journalists such as CNN-IBN‘s editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai have spoken forcefully in favor of a media able to “move away from the tyranny of the market that makes us cater to the lowest common denominator”. He asks broadcasters to sharply distinguish between “what is in public interest and what is of public interest” and to emphasise the first.

And yet, in the media at least, there are few examples of how to do this while remaining financially sound and competitive in a cut-throat media market. There is talk of industry self-regulation versus government regulation of content, but it is unclear if there is widespread interest in or political will to reach out to marginalised Indians or to reject the big money of a corporately-driven media. Regardless, one hopes that gatherings of journalists, politicians and activists will continue and will be more frequent and substantive in the future. Everyone in India has a stake in the debate.

And it is not an issue that only affects India. While India’s combination of an extensive free market media and high voting turnout by poor rural citizens may be rather unique, the media in other parts of the postcolonial world faces similar challenges to reaching citizens — low literacy, poverty, growing gaps between rich and poor, tensions between modern and traditional ways of life.

The media in the so-called developed world also needs to make its news content more reflective of the important issues facing the world. By dint of its size, wealth and influence, the Indian media seems well-placed to play a leading global role in producing a news media relevant to the majority of the world’s people, not just its elites.

This article is reproduced from SAJAforum.org, the blog of the New York-based South Asian Journalists Association.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

Home

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear sent members a fact sheet with key definitions and terminology about asylum, immigration and refugees in the hope it will reduce misleading copy.

In a letter to members, Dear said: “The media plays a key role in how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and, ultimately, how they are treated by the public at large.

“The NUJ is only too aware that inaccurate, sensationalist and inflammatory stories harm community relations and can lead to violent attacks against some of the most vulnerable people in society.”

The plea comes after attacks on immigrant workers in the UK. In January, a 39-year-old Polish worker living in Birmingham was beaten up and had paint poured over his face to create a suffocating ‘mask’.

Two weeks later, vandals daubed racist graffiti on a house belonging to a Polish couple in Shrewsbury, before setting it on fire.

In March, the Coventry Telegraph revealed that half of the 3,000 asylum seekers and refugees living in the city had no basic health care, and had “slipped the net”.

Dear’s call for accurate and sensitive reporting has been welcomed by Bemma Donkoh, the UK representative of the UN Refugee Council (London).

She said: “Balanced and well-informed media coverage of refugee issues gives readers impartial and considered access to sides of the story often lost or misrepresented.

“In recent years, strides have been made to address the danger that inaccurate, misleading or distorted reporting may generate an atmosphere of fear and hostility that is not borne out of facts.”

The NUJ guide [PDF file] defines baggage-laden terms such as “refugee” and explains the difference between “illegal immigrants” and “irregular immigrants”, and offers advice when interviewing such sources.

Ryan Hooper is a UK journalist. He can be reached at rjhooper@hotmail.co.uk

Home

Greg Mitchell lays bare the psychology of the ongoing self-censorship in the American media. There was not so much a conspiracy of silence about the war as an ideological refusal by the media to listen, see, and ask, writes Rohit Chopra.

GREG MITCHELL’S So Wrong for So Long is an immensely significant work, for reasons beyond the apparent. The book is a record of the life of the Iraq war in the American media from the time it was a neocon idea gathering force in January 2003 to the imbroglio of the second half of 2007. It is a compendium of the complicities of the mainstream American media in creating a narrative about the inexorable need for going to war. It is an examination of the appropriate relationship between the media and the state and a provocative questioning of the meaning of journalistic autonomy during the exceptional conditions of war. Each of these aspects of the work in itself justifies the value of the book. Cumulatively, they amount to a powerful statement and inquiry about the very meaning of freedom and voice in a democracy.

So Wrong for So Long consists of more than 75 columns written for Editor & Publisher — which Mitchell edits — from January 2003 through October 2007, adapted for the book. Each chapter brings together one more columns from a particular month during this time period. These columns are prefaced by Mitchell’s reflections on the main war-related events of that month in Iraq and / or in the US and the actions, decisions, and products of American media organizations about these events. The structure of the book compellingly juxtaposes past and present. Mitchell has framed these columns with the lightest and surest of editorial touches, providing an apposite amount of contextual information and letting the columns speak for themselves.

As the title of the book suggests, Mitchell addresses the role of various actors, including the media, experts, political authorities, and the American people, in contributing to the American failure to establish a viable Iraqi state after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, the main focus of the book is on the many ways in which the mainstream media fell short of its obligations before and through the war.

Patterns clearly emerge from the story that Mitchell tells us about the media coverage of the war. He highlights the incredible consensus among the media that Colin Powell’s speech at the UN on February 5, 2003 had incontrovertibly secured the case for war, and shows the eagerness with which the media accepted the claim of ‘mission accomplished.’ With due acknowledgment of the fact that certain restrictions may apply to covering a war situation, Mitchell draws attention to the politics of embeddedness, and the problematic implications of the conventions by which the media have covered the dead and wounded, military and civilian, coalition force or Iraqi.

Mitchell notes the double standards applied by the media in evaluating the claims of pro-war and anti-war sources. He comments on the gentle self-recriminations of the New York Times and the Washington Post for their earlier failings in reporting the war, which, Mitchell argues, did not go far enough. He chronicles the stubborness of prominent media columnists in refusing to budge from the essential premise that the war was justified. The book addresses the anxieties about appearing non-patriotic and the fear of a backlash from the public that have haunted media coverage of the war from its inception.

But we also find that it is not the case that there were no skeptical voices in the media and the political arena. Mitchell provides us several examples of these voices. Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon papers, is one such figure who was unconvinced by the administration’s case for invading Iraq. Described by Mitchell as “one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism,” even though not a journalist, Ellsberg was also critical of the media for failing to do their job. Bill Moyers of PBS emerges as another dissenting voice, interviewing Mitchell for his PBS program NOW in April 2003. Four years later, in April 2007, Moyers also presented a 90-minute PBS broadcast “Buying the War” that offered a blunt, hard look at the responsibility of the media in contributing to the climate that made the war possible. In Moyers’ own words, quoted in an April 21, 2007 E & P column reproduced in the book, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses” (p. 237). Mitchell’s book chronicles how, as the war has progressed, more columnists, conservatives and liberals alike, have advocated a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Politicians such as Representative John Murtha and Senator Chuck Hagel have also recommended a withdrawal in light of the situation in Iraq.

And yet, as Mitchell notes, the editorial columns of major newspapers have continued to stay mum or have equivocated on a host of glaring issues related to the war. We read through E & P columns in chronological order, accompanied by a constant sense of déjà vu, knowing more or less what is to follow.

The book thus hints at an intriguing phenomenon, one that deserves close attention from journalists, mediapersons, and scholars alike. It demonstrates that that there was not so much a conspiracy of silence as an ideological refusal by the media and others to listen, ask, see, and believe. It shows us the pyschology of self-censorship in operation and the ongoing construction of a self-willed amnesia on the part of the American media in its coverage of the Iraq war. What we see is memory — or rather a particular memory and narrative of a war, a society, a time — in the making. Where and why, one might, inquire, do these imperatives come from? What are their historical and sociological roots?

The book also causes us to look at the politics of differential access to information. It is one of the cliches of our times that in our information age and networked society, flows of information can cross national boundaries in the twinkling of an eye, across national boundaries and beyond the grasp of national governments. Global media and communication technologies such as the internet, with the forms of hyper-literacy and global discourse communities that they have engendered, are often adduced as proof of this new informational economy. But Mitchell’s book is a sobering reminder that such flows of information cannot be understand independently of the structures of political power, the stark inequalities that characterize international relations, the calculations of corporate organizations, and the pressures that all of these factors bring to bear on individual voices, journalistic or otherwise.

Mitchell begins the Introduction to the book with the words, “If only this were merely a book of history. Sadly, the war in Iraq is still very much with us, which makes this a current affairs volume as well. More than anything, however, I hope it serves as a warning for the future” (1). One may disagree respectfully with his distinction between history and current affairs. Current affairs are, after all, predicated on history or histories. The value of the book too, one may observe, is as much as documentary record, a four year history of how the media in the world’s only superpower covered that superpower’s decision to go to war and its aftermath, as political commentary about the present or political critique. And, in the words of NBC reporter Kevin Sites who is quoted in the book, it is an urgent and poignant reminder that the “burdens of war…are unforgiving for all of us” (p. 107).

Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Home