The internet is killing newspapers.
I've heard that a great deal. Never having worked for a newspaper - except the big-on-integrity/low-on-catchment area G41 - I'm not quite sure who said it. But it seems a truism. The rise of the internet, and bloggers like me, who give it away, has destroyed the professionals who charge for it.
Only, I read a book I got out of Cancer Research on Sauchiehall
They haven't been doing their bloody job properly.
Apart from a plethora of statistics that gave me a headache - translated, they show that there are less journalists, doing more work, on bigger newspapers - Davies follows the adventures of modern journalism, and pursues a damning idea. In the last thirty years (coinciding with Thatcherism and the free market yabber), the owners of newspapers have destroyed a fine tradition of investigative reporting and getting pissed in the pub at lunchtime. They have replaced it with a commercial imperative. They has pressured the journalists into becoming hacks.
The proprietors are making scads of cash. They do not plough it back into the editorial and reporting teams. They have shareholders, mistresses and dubious members of the establishment to pay off instead.
Davies makes a great stand for the ideal of truth in journalism - bit naive in the post-modern era, but still. He uncovers a bunch of scandals that managed to escape the full extent of the law, describes a Press Complaints Commission that is as effective as my blindfolded mum doing the shopping on roller-skates. He marks the changes of The Times' Insight team (once a real 'truth to power' gang) and the antics of Paul 'Vagina Monologue' Dacre at The Daily Mail (it seems that their right-wing tantrums are part of a systemic dysfunction and not just ironic articles tossed off by giggling reporters).
Ironically, I believe Davies without having any way of checking his veracity. It is this quality of credulity - or laziness - that he identifies as the chief curse of the modern newspaper. No-one can bother their arse to check a story (even if they had time, which they don't, because Paul Dacre or someone is shouting that they are a cunt behind them).
Most of the shenanigans that Davies describes - my favourite is probably the story of how The Daily Mail decided that two women, who had been acquitted of a crime were, in fact, guilty and ought to be in prison because some gangster reckoned they were - happened before blogging was a major thing. The newspapers were fucking the public trust long before I came along and offered stupid reviews of local plays. The decay set in - funnily enough - about the time Rupert Murdoch got hold of The Times.
Other highlights of the book include that time Andrew 'Brillo Pad' Neil managed to let a source for an important article get abducted by the Israeli state (they used a honey-trap, while Brillo couldn't even give the poor bugger pocket money). Obviously, Brillo wasn't directly responsible for the chap getting dragged to Rome on the promise of a bunk-up, but his dithering on how to proceed and protect the source didn't help.
The war on terror gets a bit of page time too. I didn't realise that it was possible for someone to become a one-legged fanatic danger to the world just through the combination of press releases and lazy reportage. I'm going to get the MOD to do a press release that says I am suspected of having a hot-line to God and that my critiques are the only ones that are accurate and absolutely true, ever.
If the internet, the bloggers, are killing newspapers - I have suddenly become much prouder of my work. Of course, the journalists whom I know are all arts writers or sub-editors, and they are honest and hard-working specialists (they don't have the kind of jobs where writing bullshit to order matters, and they have a dedication to the arts which allows them more freedom, if not money). It's a shame that the good bits of newspapers (the art section and the cricket, except when they interview Chris De Burgh) are getting dragged into a commercial and moral morass.
See you on the funny pages. huh?
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