Triple crisis of journalism

Like the Greek goddess Hecate or the Slav god Triglav, the crisis of contemporary journalism has three heads. The first is widespread government censorship, the second is elite sourcing, and the third is economic decline.

The standard focus on social media and fake news ignores the fact that in many countries the entire media system is regulated in order to generate doctored reports and officially approved views in national ‘filter bubbles’. This goal is advanced in five ways. First, repressive laws limit free expression, backed by severe sanctions (such as 1000 lashes ordered for dissident blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia in 2014, or the closure of 170 media organisations in Turkey in 2016–2017). Second, editorial guidelines are issued by the Ministry of Information (or equivalent agency), which set out approved narrative lines in reporting specific topics, and specifies what is off limits. Third, state licencing has become a key method of control. In some countries (such as Yemen and Zimbabwe), journalists need a licence to work in a news organisation. In numerous countries (such as Bulgaria and the Philippines), licences to broadcast on commercial TV channels are awarded to government allies. This is often extended in an informal process in which leading newspapers and websites are controlled by government cronies (as in Russia). And in virtually all authoritarian nations, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, the state licences Internet service providers and requires them to censor online content in accordance with official guidelines as a condition of retaining their licence.

The fourth means of authoritarian state control is surveillance and filter technology aimed at taming the Internet. It begins with the blocking of specific websites (such as Facebook in China), and the proscription of keywords. It is backed up by the rapid deletion of offending posts by site censors, and buttressed by paid publicists and pro-government supporters who promote official perspectives online. It is reinforced by pro-active ‘state hacking’: notably through emails and online petitions that appear to come from a trusted source, with attached malware to gain backdoor computer access, and through intrusive ‘deep packet inspections’ seeking to identify the originating source of subversive communications. In emergencies, authoritarian states can use the nuclear option – closing down the Internet (usually in one locality).

The fifth way in which journalists are kept in line is through escalating ‘informal’ intimidation – threatening phone calls, online warnings, car break-ins, arson attacks and personal assaults. This happens especially in countries, such as Russia and Mexico, where there are links between organised crime and the state.

Sustained, mass opposition can weaken these different methods of control. But in normal circumstances, they are highly effective. Thus, the first problem besetting journalism is that in many parts of the globe the media are not – in a most elemental sense – free.

The second problem blurs the difference between the media in authoritarian and democratic countries. In many democracies, the media are independent of government: yet are closely linked to their country’s Establishment. The main reason for this is that journalists tend to rely on elite sources.

In a comparative survey of nine countries, the state and experts accounted for an average 60 per cent of all sources (that is people cited or interviewed) in television public affairs news. This rose to 64 per cent for leading newspapers and 70 per cent in the case of leading news websites (Curran et al., 2013). This is in line with other research which reveals media reliance on political, administrative, financial and knowledge elites in reporting public affairs.

This is often shrugged off by journalists on the grounds that they are not saps. Journalists, they argue, need access to elite information: their sources need publicity. In the ensuing tug-of-war, journalists have usually the upper hand because they determine what is reported.

This claim is true, as far it goes. But it does not take into account situations when elite sources say broadly the same thing, and when this accords with prevailing ideas that journalists themselves share. This would seem to explain why leading media in the US, Britain, Germany and Japan framed the possibility of the electoral victory of the far left Syriza party in Greece in 2012 as a threat to the international economy. They were responding to the cue of political leaders gathered for a summit in Mexico, and to experts working for the financial sector or international agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF; Curran et al., 2017).

Similarly, elite sourcing and the dominance of neo-liberal ideas explains the circumscribed way in which British broadcasting reported how Britain should respond to the 2008 economic crash (Berry, 2016). Likewise elite consensus (in the context of the Cold War and, subsequently, the War on Terror) seemingly accounts for why leading American media favoured military intervention in the run-up to the Vietnam war (1962–1964), invasion of Grenada (1983), bombing of Libya (1986), and the invasion of Panama (1988), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). The one exception was the run-up to the first Gulf War in late 1990s when the US media staged an open debate about whether to go war in response to elite dissensus. ¹

This closeness between the media and the Establishment has circumscribed democratic debate, even though important examples can be cited in which the media have occasionally held power to account. It has undermined the mission of core media to bring antagonistic groups into communion with each other (something already rendered more difficult by audience fragmentation). And in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom, the media initially paid little attention to the anger and economic insecurity that led to the rise of protest politics. This contributed to declining trust in their media institutions.

The third aspect – the economic decline of journalism – is more widely recognised. The migration of advertising to sites like Facebook, Google and Craigslist has led to newspaper closures and local news blackspots where public affairs are no longer adequately reported. It has led to a total decrease in the size of the journalism workforce employed in many countries, and to smaller editorial budgets. This has resulted in less investigative reporting, more reliance on public relations, and more office-bound, derivative journalism.

Legacy media still dominate the most visited news websites, and have prominence on Google and Facebook. Their continued dominance is partly a consequence of the way in which leading publishers gave away online content free. At a stroke, their anti-competition strategy undermined the business prospects and viability of online news start-ups. Very few independent news websites have made a breakthrough (Elvestad and Phillips, 2018).

In short, established media have become less good: yet they have not been dethroned and replaced by effective alternatives. Of course, the situation is complicated, as commentators increasingly emphasise. Public interest websites, supported by charitable foundations, do good work, bloggers supplement, users respond to articles and programmes, the facilities of the Internet perhaps mean that fewer journalists are needed, circulations in some parts of Asia are increasing, and so on. However, the web and social media – despite their many benefits – have not brought into being the citizen-based renaissance of journalism that some experts mistakenly foretold (Curran et al., 2016).

What is to be done? Democratic states need to back the efforts of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in opposing media control. Media freedom should have a higher priority in the competing demands of international relations. When there was a horrified reaction from governments, friendly to Saudi Arabia, to the proposed repeat flogging of blogger Raif Badawi, the sentence was suspended after the first week.

Weaning media from over-reliance on elite sources can be addressed in two ways. In countries where there is a powerful professionalising reform tradition (as in the United States), journalism education and critical debate between journalists represents one way forward. In countries where public service broadcasting is strong, reform is easier (and has already been effectively advanced in Norway where civil society and ordinary people have greater access to the airwaves than in most countries).

There is no simple solution to the economic decline of journalism. Where this is consistent with the political culture of a nation, a levy should be imposed on profitable social media and digital intermediaries (like Google). The proceeds of the levy should be distributed by an independent trust (with all-party representation) on the basis of explicit criteria. It should be deployed to support not only ailing news media but also web news start-ups. The object should be not just to prop up ailing media but to encourage the green shoots of recovery.