The News: A User's Manual

Baddies & the Bad

The Member of Parliament Eric Illsley is facing jail after pleading guilty to dishonestly claiming more than £ 14,000 in expenses. The claims were made for council tax, telephone usage, service charges and maintenance, and insurance and repairs at his second home in Renfrew Road, Kennington, south London.

Daily Telegraph

1.

SOME OF JOURNALISM’S greatest triumphs have been connected with exposés of powerful figures, on a fair number of occasions triggering their subjects’ downfall and even their incarceration.

The idea that words and pictures alone might prompt a resignation or a custodial sentence is a heady one for journalists, many of whom continue to regard the Watergate investigation as the central inspiration and beacon for their work.

When journalists are asked to explain what their most important contribution to society is, they will tend to emphasize one function over any other: they will say that it is their responsibility to hold ‘power to account’.

2.

JOURNALISTS WOULD ARGUE that the powerful must be held to account because they have strong tendencies to break the laws of the land and to imagine themselves immune from prosecution: they steal money, hide untaxed income, bribe their way around legislation, contravene employment and environmental rules and intimidate and sexually abuse the powerless.

Journalism is, according to this argument, primarily a branch of the police force, as well as a proxy for the tax office and various consumer groups. It first uncovers and then helps to prosecute examples of law breaking and infraction which would have otherwise escaped attention, and so protects the interests of the ordinary, voiceless citizen.

A world made safer: the British politician Eric Illsley heads to prison for a year after a newspaper investigation into his expenses claims. This is the Watergate paradigm in action.

(picture credit 4.1)

3.

THE CLIMACTIC MOMENT when a powerful person is arrested at home after a news investigation can make for a mesmerizing spectacle. The police, acting in concert with news organizations, show up early; pictures are taken of the wrongdoer in his or her pyjamas, surprised in the act of eating toast or cereal. Sometimes a spouse or a child can be seen, crying, in the background.

Having the chance to bear vicarious witness to such an incident can provide appeasement for a range of emotions, including a sense of injustice, feelings of humiliation and a basic sense that the world must henceforth never again be left in the hands of incompetents and crooks.

In showing us the criminal about to be hauled off in the back seat of a police car, the news offers us the hope that the representative source of a myriad of our and our society’s ills has now been identified and safely neutralized.

4.

THOUGH MANY POWERFUL people are routinely and very usefully brought to book by the news, many of the most significant difficulties of developed nations do not stem so neatly from the actions of baddies. An honest audit of these nations’ greatest challenges reveals dilemmas and predicaments that include, but also range far beyond, criminal or contractual fraud at the top.

For example, it is often painfully hard to find an affordable and tolerably attractive neighbourhood to live in, but this doesn’t seem to be the ‘fault’ of anyone who could be sent to prison. Far too many jobs pay too little, lack interest and status and are overseen by unpleasant managers and bosses, but it would be hard to know how to frame such problems in the language of a news scandal. A lot of commercial products seem unnecessary, garish, wasteful of resources and insultingly advertised – but here, too, nameable villains are hard to locate and charge.

The arrest of a crooked figure can beget a period of deep satisfaction, but the hopes it inspires may be misleading. Even if every last rotten plutocrat or powerful minister were locked up, nations would still have a thought-provoking number of problems to grapple with. We are likely to miss a great many matters of importance if we continue only to look for baddies of the kind a Watergate-style of journalism knows how to identify. We will fail to delve into many of the more systemic, impersonal but no less poisonous kinds of wrong that stand in relation to law breaking as passive aggression does to domestic violence: behaviours and values that are life-destroying and dispiriting but leave no outward marks and slip through the legal nets.

As currently structured, the news does not ‘see’ the property developer who condemns thousands of people to live in humiliating environments but who nevertheless breaks no laws and steals no money. The most assiduous reporter concerned with fraud won’t be able to put a finger on anyone criminally responsible for the commercial messages that subtly erode the dignity and intelligence of public life or find anyone who can be arrested for a decline in politeness or respect between the sexes.

Properly conceived, investigative journalism should start with an all-encompassing interest in the full range of factors that sabotage group and individual existence. It would, among other things, investigate mental health, architecture, leisure time, family structures, relationships, the management styles of businesses, the educational curriculum and the status system – for these areas impact on our lives no less than events in the legislature.

The news may encourage us to imagine that the roots of a nation’s problems have their fundamental origins in criminality at the top and yet, though there is clearly a role for targeting individual rotten apples, there is an equally vital task in directing attention to the colourless yet far larger institutional failures that lie concealed within our political and social arrangements.

5.

HOWEVER, THE SHEER intellectual difficulty of identifying the ills of society, together with an almost artistic longing to find a few individuals to whose names one can tidily pin the evils of life, can give rise to that well-known escapist alternative to true investigation: gaffe journalism.

A journalistic gaffe is something a powerful person inadvertently says or does in a momentary lapse which (as everyone knows) in no way reflects their considered views and yet which the news seizes upon and refuses to let go of, insisting that the gaffe must be an indicator of a deep and shameful truth.

Behind gaffe journalism lies the impotent rage of journalists who know that many things are deeply amiss in their country but who lack the access to power or the patience with bureaucracy that would enable them to pinpoint the true problems with any measure of accuracy.

The gaffe is prosecuted not because anyone sincerely believes that its exposure will subsequently lead to better policies or finer government. The gaffe merely provides an occasion for vengeance by a set of beleaguered individuals who have run out of ideas about how else to make a change.

6.

WHAT SHOULD THE news do with the bad guys? Currently, it passes on the worst of them to the police. But the majority it deals with through journalism’s own distinctive instrument: humiliation. It shows reliable levels of enthusiasm for sarcastic stories, doorstep interviews, secret photographs and leaked correspondence. Flawed types must be turned into news and will then face the disgust of the moral-minded majority. The implicit idea is that society will be reformed through reputational ruin and public opprobrium.

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?

Too many of the stories about the misdeeds of bad people seem strikingly devoid of interest in the one goal that should rightly underpin all reports of wrongdoing and chicanery: the ambition to help the nation to flourish. These stories circle their fallen prey without any interest in the evolution of public life: they aren’t trying to get accountancy, marriages, universities, immigration or the tax system to go better. They are just inviting us to have a particular kind of fun.

7.

JOURNALISM HAS BEEN too modest and too mean in defining its purpose merely as the monitoring of certain kinds of power; a definition that has harmfully restricted its conception of itself and its role in society. It is not just a de facto branch of the police or the tax office; it is, or should be, a government in exile that works through all issues of national life with a view to suggesting ways to build a better country.

The only honest purpose of unearthing and publicizing error is to make it less prevalent. Faced with corruption, idiocy and mediocrity, rather than remaining stuck at the level of gleeful fault finding in the present, the news should seek instead always to nurture greater competence in the future. However satisfying and important it can be to bring down the powerful, journalistic investigation should start with a subtly different and not invariably overlapping goal: the desire to try to improve things.