WHY IS THIS LYING BASTARD LYING TO ME?
Is it becoming worse? Again I would say, yes. In my ten years, I’ve noticed all these elements evolve with ever greater momentum. It used to be thought—and I include myself in this—that help was on the horizon. New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory.
—TONY BLAIR, “FERAL BEAST” SPEECH
In 1970, the French philosopher Paul Ricœur used the phrase the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to describe a particular feature of modern thought. “Three masters,” he wrote, “seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” All three, in Ricœur’s account, detected a layer of falsity and deception in human consciousness and utterance that must be torn away before the truth can be revealed: “All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.”1
The specific “art of interpreting” and the nature of the unmasking varied. For Nietzsche, it meant finally putting aside the moral and intellectual legacy of religion and confronting the reality of human existence after the death of God. For Freud, it consisted of psychological theory and the use of analysis to penetrate beneath the conscious mind to the unconscious truth. Marx prophesied a mass political awakening in which the scales would fall from the eyes of the world’s urban proletariat and they would recognize the struggle between the classes for what it was. According to Ricœur, the underlying narrative is the same. The truth is hidden. People are deluding themselves and each other. The seeker after truth must develop a way of interpreting, and thus seeing through, the layers of deception.
The relevance to journalism is obvious. What is a story? In the mid-1980s, an older BBC colleague told me the answer that every young journalist sooner or later hears: a story is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want you to report. The quotation that forms the title of this chapter—Why is this lying bastard lying to me?—smacks even more of Ricœurian hermeneutics. Over the past twenty years it has been widely cited in the debate in Britain about journalistic cynicism and is often attributed to the famously scornful BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman. In fact the line, which originally referred specifically to the risk of being manipulated by a politician offering a nonattributable briefing, was first used in the UK by the London Times journalist Louis Heren, who in turn claimed to have heard it from an unnamed American newsman. It calls for its own “art of interpreting.” Ask yourself why this politician is giving you this “story” at this moment. Explore motive, dig deeper, get underneath the words.
But the presumption in the quote that the politician is a liar—not just in this, but in all instances—gives the game away. The phrase is not a dispassionate piece of professional advice but a declaration of permanent war between journalists and the political classes. By the end of the century—and whether you warmed to it or regarded it as evidence of a moral crisis in British journalism—it had come to stand for a relationship in crisis.
The hermeneutics of suspicion is not based on fantasy. Even those politicians, probably the majority, who avoid outright lies do often offer partial or misleading versions of the truth. Many are also capable of what feels like a suspension of disbelief in which they seem genuinely to be able to forget early statements or actions that contradict the policy or image they now want to project. Donald Trump seems to have attained a unique Zen state in which random and rambling invention is truth, and the actual truth is a litany of lies cooked up by the pygmies who oppose him. And companies and institutions really do hide and distort things. They may be rarer and messier than in the movies, but sometimes real conspiracies take place. The journalist’s instinct to challenge and investigate is a necessary one.
Even before the arrival of spin, however, the presumption of bad faith—as if we lived in, and had to report, a world where no politician ever told the truth and nothing could ever be taken on face value—had gone far beyond this for many British journalists. It had become a fundamental orientation, one so ingrained and unquestioned that they had ceased to be conscious of it. No doubt this extreme and eventually almost involuntary skepticism was more pervasive among journalists than the public, but there too a shift was taking place. In 1991, the novelist David Foster Wallace diagnosed that our culture had become permeated by
sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem … It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing.2
You can decide for yourself whether Wallace is right about our culture as a whole. But I’m certain that this passage is an accurate picture of the professional worldview of many of the journalists I worked with—not always individually or privately, but collectively and publicly, because to argue openly against these background assumptions was, and still is, to risk being taken for a dupe or worse.
A Bias Toward Understanding
Toward the end of the 1980s, I played a role in one of the most determined efforts ever made to push back against this prevailing journalistic wisdom. I was still at the BBC but by now had returned to London and become a senior editor on Newsnight. This was a period when the relationship between the BBC and Mrs. Thatcher’s government had more or less broken down. A flawed 1984 Panorama investigation into extremism in the Conservative Party (“Maggie’s Militant Tendency”) had led to a messy and, for the BBC, disastrous libel action. A year later, the Thatcher government attacked a BBC documentary—Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union—which featured the IRA commander Martin McGuinness as a threat to national security. Next, her ministers argued that the BBC’s reporting of a 1986 American bombing raid on Libya, which had received British support, had been inaccurate and partial.
To the government and other critics, these incidents suggested a journalistic culture that was arrogant, sloppy, and shot through with left-wing bias. The BBC refused to accept that there was any systemic problem at all. The truth was more nuanced. Some of the attacks were preposterous, in particular the crass government assault on Real Lives which, disgracefully, the BBC’s own governing body abetted. Nor was the charge of deliberate political bias true of the overwhelming majority of BBC journalists. But the editorial oversight of investigative journalism had been erratic, and there were occasions when, in the absence of an effective political opposition, the attempts in Current Affairs to scrutinize and challenge the Thatcher government came across as hostile. BBC News, which at this point was separate from Current Affairs, took its responsibility for accuracy and impartiality seriously but, particularly on the television side, its agenda often had a middle-market flavor (with the Royal Family looming large), and there was a lack of editorial depth and distinctiveness in much of what it did.
By early 1987, the chairman of the BBC governors, Marmaduke Hussey, had had enough. The director-general and editor-in-chief, Alasdair Milne, was fired and the job was effectively split. Michael Checkland, a formidable administrator but neither a journalist nor a program maker, would be known as DG but would in reality be a CEO charged with modernizing the corporation and delivering the efficiency savings that the government had demanded. As his deputy, the governors appointed John Birt, the ITV program executive whose campaign to end “the bias against understanding” we discussed in chapter 1. His first task, in their minds, was to address the BBC’s troubled journalism, and he became de facto editor-in-chief. For Birt, this was a chance to put his ideas about a new approach to news and current affairs into practice in one of the world’s largest and most influential journalistic institutions.
A few months after he arrived, I was asked to move from Newsnight to the BBC’s main television newsroom. Shortly after that, John Birt appointed me editor of The Nine O’Clock News with the brief to turn this flagship TV news bulletin into a model of the new journalism. I was thirty. If he was the leader of a revolution in news and current affairs—and both he and his critics agreed that, for good or ill, revolution was the right word to use—then this was its first call to arms.
And so with two close colleagues, Mark Damazer, another refugee from Newsnight, and Richard Sambrook, a rising star in the newsroom itself, I got down to work. From the start, we decided that the Nine would have a different agenda from every other BBC news program. I wanted it to compete not with that night’s news on ITV but with the following morning’s broadsheet newspapers. There would be more international stories, more and better reporting about economics and business, and no more royals unless they were part of a real news story. The BBC had always had a few specialist correspondents. Now John Birt was prepared to invest in a regiment of them, including in new areas like social affairs. Critically, the big stories would be allocated more time—no longer just a brief video report of the events of the day, but a second, and sometimes a third package that would attempt to put the immediate news in context, or explain the underlying policy question. All of that might then be followed by a live interview. The idea was to do in the grammar of television what the most serious newspapers, and magazines like the Economist, had always tried to do—which was to go beyond the slavish reporting of events and to try to make sense of it. To accommodate all of this, and at a moment when every other broadcaster was trying to reduce the space devoted to news and current affairs, the whole program would become longer.
The new version of The Nine O’Clock News was launched in late 1988 to a mixture of amusement and consternation both inside the BBC newsroom and beyond it. Christopher Dunkley of the Financial Times, one of the most distinguished TV critics of the day, wrote a scathing assessment under the headline “The Nine O’Clock News Goes Serious.” Far from welcoming the move upmarket, Dunkley worried that the “more solemn, more austere, more didactic” tone would fail to satisfy either sophisticated viewers (who wouldn’t need the “Janet-and-John lecturettes”) or the public at large. He also detected something inhuman in the new approach: “The tone is not that of a friend passing on information. There is, rather, a sense of the tablets being handed down from some superior being to the hoi polloi.”3
To Dunkley, in aspiring to meet the expectations of elites who already had access to their own appropriate sources of news (like the FT itself), the new program was turning its back on its true audience, the mass of ordinary citizens whom the BBC was meant to serve.
In the event, the relaunch of The Nine O’Clock News coincided with a stream of exactly the kind of news events that best suited our new approach. Lockerbie, Tiananmen Square, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War all took place in the year after the launch, and with the time and resources now at its disposal, the Nine acquitted itself well. To everyone’s amazement, viewership went up. Partly as a result, the core recipe—specialist journalists, analysis alongside reportage, an agenda closer to the broadsheets than the tabloids, disproportionate airtime for the top stories—became the norm across the BBC’s main news programs and remains so. John Birt’s clarity of purpose and determination had achieved a permanent improvement in the quality and seriousness of one of the world’s great news providers.
The critics had a second and more pointed line of attack against The Nine O’Clock News and the rest of “Birtism.” In its most extreme form, this argued that John Birt had been inserted into the BBC by a hostile government with the express purpose of emasculating the corporation’s journalism, and that he planned to do so by replacing challenging reporters and presenters with harmless automata. The counterclaim by the most outspoken advocates of Birtism (which included some of the colleagues he had brought with him from ITV) was that this supposedly “tough” and “challenging journalism” was in fact self-indulgent and intellectually incoherent.
Behind this debate, we can see two different ways a journalist might seek to get at the truth. We can call the first forensic. It relies on some blend of detection and cross-examination, which in the context of the BBC of the 1980s meant investigative reporting on programs like Panorama, and kinetic interviewing on Radio 4’s Today program, Newsnight, and the like. It is intrinsically adversarial, psychologically as well as methodologically: it is prone to see whoever is the subject of its story as a target and to pursue them accordingly. The second is analytical. It gathers facts, data, and opinions, and processes them dispassionately into a rational account of our current knowledge of the story, the range of options facing the protagonists, the likely outcomes, and so on. This second approach had been John Birt’s trademark at ITV and was indeed now his central ambition for journalism at the BBC as well.
Of course, there was never any doubt which was the more glamorous of the two. The romance of the investigative journalist was well established by the 1960s—think of the courageous young reporter in Costa-Gavras’s Z—but it was real-world events, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, that brought it to a peak. By the 1980s, if you thought of investigative journalists, the faces that came to mind were those of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. And note the ideological orientation. Although in real life conservative newspapers like the Sunday Times and The Wall Street Journal had their own strong investigative traditions, in popular culture the prevailing narrative became one of liberal journalists uncovering the nefarious doings of right-wing governments. If you were a young journalist and you had a black leather jacket and a Nikon or an Arriflex with a telephoto lens, you too could uncover a cryptofascist. I’d had a crack at that myself in the very first piece of investigative journalism I took part in for the Oxford University magazine Isis in 1977.*
Was it ever part of the Birtist agenda to undermine investigative journalism? It was certainly never part of mine. I came to The Nine O’Clock News believing it needed more, not less, original reporting. When I became editor of Panorama, I put all the money and resources I could into the investigations, which I thought were the raison d’être of the program.
During John Birt’s early years as deputy director-general, when his confidence in the professionalism of the investigative teams was low, there were occasions when I thought his approach was overcautious. But soon he came to trust frontline investigative reporters like John Ware and Peter Taylor, and editors like me, and continued to back investigative journalism when he became DG in 1992. Although his critics could never bring themselves to admit it—the rhetorical battle lines and personal enmities were too fixed and bitter for that—the ultimate result was, if anything, to strengthen the BBC’s hand in original journalism.
Other trends were at work too. The character of the investigations changed. The stories required more specialist knowledge and became increasingly analytical themselves. Rather than running down a street with a camera crew in pursuit of some villain, the reporters now spent more time in the office sifting through mountains of documents. In due course, outstanding reporters arrived at the BBC—Robert Peston was a striking example—who were patently capable of delivering major scoops and delivering authoritative explanation and judgment on important running stories, and the whole premise that there was a necessary opposition between the Birtist focus on expertise and analysis on the one hand, and a full-blooded commitment to courageous investigation on the other, ended up looking shaky.
It was a very different matter when it came to the other main expression of forensic broadcast journalism, the adversarial political interview. The issue was never resolved during John Birt’s period at the BBC, or subsequently, and it remains a point of contention. It also reflects one of questions at the heart of this book.
We’ve already heard the case for aggressive broadcast interviews. Under this view, the public statements of politicians and other public figures are automatically suspect. The interviewer’s central task is to puncture the interviewee’s rhetoric and uncover the truth. If that’s too big an ask, then at least the interviewer can expose inconsistencies, or a refusal to answer a question, so that the public can draw the appropriate conclusions. Seen like this, political interviewing becomes a heroic and manly form of journalism. More or less literally manly, by the way, because in those days in the UK—though not in the US where such encounters tended to be less gladiatorial—the task of interrogating politicians was traditionally only rarely given to women journalists.
But there is a case against the aggressive political interview as well, and a couple of years after he succeeded Michael Checkland as DG, John Birt delivered it in a set-piece public assault on what he called the “disputational approach” and “the ritualistic encounter which is little more, normally, than a brief opportunity to bicker, to exchange insults and to assign blame. Such encounters add little of substance to general understanding, and irritate our audiences.”4
In this speech, which was given in Dublin in 1995, Birt went on to say that “politicians have a higher claim to speak for the people than journalists.” Given the particular legitimacy which democratic elections confer on successful candidates, that statement might seem unobjectionable. But in the strained climate of the late twentieth century BBC, it and the rest of the speech confirmed to the old guard, and to many media commentators, that John Birt was a better friend of the political establishment than to their conception of “proper” journalism.
John Birt’s call for a drawing back from the “disputational approach” had no discernible effect on interviewing at the BBC. Indeed, his claim that it irritated audiences was true only of some of them; there were plenty of viewers and listeners who thoroughly enjoyed a good dust-up first thing in the morning on Today or last thing at night on Newsnight. When asked in surveys about their attitude to the way BBC interviewers treated the politicians, far more said that the corporation was too soft than too hard. A gap had opened up, one that would widen greatly over time. On one side of the divide was an elite who thought that the aggressive style was both discourteous and dangerous for democracy, because it prevented politicians from talking directly to the people, and because it favored heat over the light of meaningful policy discussion. On the other side were most journalists, but also a significant slice of the population whose level of trust in that elite was such that they thought that the politicians on the receiving end of those nasty interviewers deserved everything they got. Over the next two decades, this sentiment would grow.
I’ve described a set of trends that were already much in evidence, within but also far beyond the BBC, before the official arrival of spin. That of course served only to intensify the atmosphere of distrust and vituperation between the press and the politicians.
Meanwhile, much the same story unfolded in the United States. During the period after 9/11, when an understandable spirit of national solidarity prevailed, most American newspapers and broadcast media accepted the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction with too little scrutiny and skepticism. When they learned how badly they had misled their audiences, they swore never to fall into the same trap again. Those associated with the Left gave George W. Bush no quarter in the final years of his presidency, while conservative news sources decided to pay the next president, Barack Obama, the same compliment. In common with their counterparts in most other Western countries, they have all been living the life of maximal distrust ever since.
The news media famously likes to think of itself as a separate estate within our democratic polities, distinct from and thus able to challenge the political establishment. But more and more people—at the edges of politics, in protest groups, in the now rapidly expanding blogosphere—were beginning to wonder aloud whether mainstream media weren’t themselves part of that elite. A growing number of citizens on the Right had come to suspect that political correctness was causing the main news providers to suppress or distort coverage of immigration and crime, while many on the Left thought they couldn’t be trusted on big business, the economy, and the environment. Add to this individual emotionally charged news stories, like Israel/Palestine, with increasingly uncompromising and media-savvy advocates for both sides complaining almost daily, and it is unsurprising that a generic hostile narrative began to gain currency: the media claim to be impartial but in fact have any number of agendas; they accuse the politicians of saying one thing and doing another, but that’s what they do themselves. In Britain, public confidence in the media—and especially in the popular press—had always been low, but now it underwent a further slide. Even the supposedly more high-minded public service broadcasters found themselves routinely in the firing line.
It had also become clear that we faced a paradox, not just about how best to conduct political interviewing but also about the wider challenge of doing justice to modern politics. Challenge the politicians too little, and many listeners and viewers would conclude that we were in cahoots with them, and their faith in the politicians would fall farther. But challenge them too much, and we might stoke public cynicism and disillusion. In theory, it should be possible to find a sweet spot between the two. As I discovered myself, however, when in 2004 I took on the job of editor-in-chief of the BBC, defining that sweet spot and guiding the institution’s colossal journalistic machine toward it was by no means as easy as it sounds.
Howlround
It’s difficult to identify the start, but at some point in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, journalism entered its own permanent revolution. The story of media is the story of the age, and the drivers of change were the same. Digital technology greatly expanded consumer choice in news and other forms of content and, through new devices and distribution networks, made that choice available whenever and wherever audiences wanted it.
The cost of making and distributing many forms of content tumbled, and in journalism, along with many other content categories, the barriers to entry came down. Digital also triggered a complex convergence between what had once been the largely discrete activities of content consumption and social communication. As a result of all these things, the business models of many legacy media were severely weakened or destroyed, while the conditions were ripe for new and quite different content companies to spring up and succeed.
For the most part, policy makers encouraged this direction of travel and declined to erect the regulatory obstacles that might have slowed the revolution. The threat to traditional media jobs was immense, but the unions were in retreat and would focus more on getting the best exit deals for their existing members than on how many jobs there would be in the future. It became easier to get a toehold in journalism or television—at the BBC, it no longer depended on the long odds of one of those graduate trainee schemes—but much harder to plot a career. More open, more casual, less secure and, often, at least at the front line, lower paid: jobs in journalism and the media began to feel less like those of an industrial elite and more like other creative careers—trying to make a go of it as an actor, say, or a novelist. And disruption increased competition not just among newspapers, magazines, and TV channels but also within them. This competition between members of a more transient workforce, often with less training and less knowledge of or allegiance to traditional professional values, would lead to problems of its own.
But the most important effect of both the new technology and the opening up of the media industries was to put far more power into the hands of the public. In the era of constrained choice, TV controllers and schedulers had immense influence on what the public watched. With relatively few channels, even less intrinsically popular programs could command significant audiences; indeed, schedulers could help such programs by hammocking them, that is, placing a less audience-friendly piece—a brand-new comedy, for instance, or an arts documentary—between two tried-and-tested hits in the hope that inertia would lend it viewers it might otherwise not have received. If hammocking was a tactic, the strategy was bundling. Both newspapers and TV channels proceeded on the basis that consumers would accept a package of many different kinds of journalism and programming, including much in which they had no interest, and which they would simply doze through or flick past, as long as they could find enough that they did value.
Bundling is still central to the strategies of many media companies, but from the 1980s onward, multichannel TV and then the Internet began to erode it. It became increasingly easy for people to find precisely what they wanted and to avoid what they didn’t. Now you could watch music videos all day long if you wanted, or never, keep abreast of the news 24/7 or ignore it altogether.
All this posed a question that has troubled cultural theorists for centuries: what will the audience choose to read, watch, and listen to when they can choose anything? By favoring the consumer, the new balance of power also presented newspaper editors and TV bosses with a dilemma. Should they accept that the world had changed and abandon any hope of badgering refractory readers and viewers into consuming worthwhile but initially unappealing fare? Or should they stick to their guns, even if that meant losing much of what was once their audience? Or was there a sustainable position somewhere in the middle, a new form of hammocking or some new contract under which the public would accept a little of what they didn’t want along with a lot of what they did? Would they notice the drop of medicine in the sugar lump?
Media editors, managers, and proprietors were being forced to confront the same dilemma as the modern rhetor: to give a more empowered, more restless audience what it wants to see and hear; to hold true to some preexisting set of principles and objectives; or to venture out into the middle ground in search of some new equilibrium. The questions sound abstract, but the disruptions of digital made them real, and much of my time as an editorial leader was spent wrestling with them and watching other media organizations doing the same.
The answers that individual editors and chief executives gave to these questions drove a wedge through the Western world’s journalistic institutions. On one side were public organizations like the BBC and America’s public radio that were constitutionally required, and in some cases funded, to continue to offer high-quality impartial journalism. Joining them were a relatively small number of commercial enterprises—The New York Times was one—that took their mission to report the news “without fear or favor” and with adequate resources just as seriously as the public media organizations, and shared their determination to consider the political, social, or cultural significance of a given story alongside its likely popularity in deciding their news agenda.
On the other side, profit-maximizing media companies, some of which had once been able to cross-subsidize serious but less audience-friendly categories of news like international, science, and arts reporting, now felt compelled to concentrate on the content most likely to attract eyeballs and eardrums and advertising revenue.
Sometimes the results were stark. The American broadcast networks had a strong tradition of international reporting. I saw them in action myself during the Tiananmen Square crisis and the first Gulf War. In those days they arrived on the scene of a large-scale news event like an American carrier group, scores of people, squadrons of cars, rows of phones open around the clock to New York. By the time of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007, it had all changed. She died in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, but much of the story was anchored out of Baghdad for the simple reason that the continuing conflict in Iraq was one of the few foreign stories the networks had to cover and reporters were already there. The mise-en-scène, the palm tree and the Kevlar jacket for the piece-to-camera, looked in keeping even if it wasn’t actually the right country.
The news divisions had been under pressure to cut costs and, in any case, were shifting the agendas of their main evening news shows toward domestic news and human interest features. Many newspapers in both the US and the UK were doing the same. Around the world, the foreign press clubs began to empty. The head of one US network rang me not long after the Bhutto assassination to ask if the BBC was interested in supplying virtually all of their needs in international news. When I asked why foreign stories had become less of a priority, he told me that there wasn’t much call for them anymore; nowadays Americans tended to find the news from abroad dispiriting.
The story of newspapers was more varied in detail but essentially similar. Brutal competition was not new to the British national newspaper industry, and even before the Internet began to take its toll, “quality” newspapers had started to prune the detailed reporting of political debates, religion, science, and culture and the ranks of the specialist correspondents began to thin out. Once print advertising began to flee to digital, and circulation decline steepened, these trends accelerated.
The structure of the American newspaper business is different, with less than a handful of national titles and a tradition of strong metro papers serving the country’s major cities and regions. These metros had historically enjoyed near monopoly power in print advertising, and many of them used the generous revenue that resulted to fund outstanding national and international, as well as local journalism. But by the 2000s, their economics were heading south, and in most cases their proprietors made savage reductions to their newsrooms. They relied more on stories from the wire and syndication services. Investigative journalism—which is both time-consuming and expensive—wasn’t wiped out entirely, but it became rarer.
The newspapers launched Web sites but discovered that in the digital environment they wouldn’t enjoy the same reader engagement or the same advertising pricing power that they had in print, and consequently that revenue was going to be much harder to come by. They faced a multitude of new rivals on the Web, and their dwindling investment in journalism meant that they would struggle to compete with the best of the upstarts even when it came to quality.
With local variations and at different speeds, these structural forces played out across continental Europe and the rest of the developed world. The result has been a set of trends in the journalism and broader factual and cultural content that most people read or watch. Headlines, brief summaries, lists, and other formats that can be absorbed in seconds have all become prevalent. Across most of journalism, stories themselves have on average got shorter. Partly for this reason, partly also because of greatly increased competition for attention, stories also typically tend to the maximal: the strongest accusation, the most baleful statistic, is the one that makes it to the first paragraph or the anchor’s intro. Nuances and qualifications are likely to be pushed down the story or—because the stories are now typically so short—out altogether.
Across the media, moreover, logos has given way to ethos. In other words, the exploration of character—what the words, appearance, and actions of famous people tell us about who they really are—has expanded, while the presentation of facts and arguments, even the arguments made by those same famous people, has shrunk. And even within the realm of logos, there has been another discernible tilt.
To use Plato’s distinction, doxa has gained ground at the expense of episteme. Episteme is Plato’s term for true knowledge and understanding. For him, it belongs to science and philosophy and is grounded in the facts and well-formed argument. Doxa is opinion, common belief; it is what ordinary people believe, or could be made to believe, but without the same underpinning of evidence or structured argument. Doxa belongs to the world of rhetoric—it is the currency in which rhetors trade—and Plato’s objection to rhetoric is based on his belief that it promotes doxa and denies or disables episteme. Doxa is also an inescapable part of democratic debate and is therefore also at the heart of Plato’s objection to democracy.
But in the context of modern media, doxa has powerful advantages. Opinions, especially strong opinions, appeal to the heart as well as the head, whereas episteme is a wholly cerebral affair. More important, opinions and opinion formers can be a point of differentiation in a crowded market. Economics is not an ownable science, and the episteme associated with economics, such as it is, can be accessed by any digital or physical news provider in the world. But all things being equal, only one newspaper can have Paul Krugman as an exclusive columnist. And if Professor Krugman’s opinions on economics and politics are of interest to many readers—as indeed they are—then they confer a competitive advantage on The New York Times that its rivals will not easily counter. It’s not surprising, then, that opinion plays a larger part in the offer of many news outlets than it used to, and that in some cases, for instance, US cable news, it has to a significant extent replaced news as the core proposition.
Not of course that today’s would-be opinion former is limited to conventional news brands or settings. Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere have created a limitless marketplace for doxa, a public arena in which your ability to get your opinion across is now constrained not by the limitations of old media (the Financial Times and the Washington Post can hire only so many columnists) but simply by the challenge of being heard in the midst of a multitude in which everyone else is shouting too. Your fame or lack of it may count (ethos), as may the originality or pungency of your ideas (logos), but today the expression of them can make all the difference. It may not look like rhetoric traditionally defined, but in this environment the art and craft of persuasive public language matter more than ever. But what if you lack eloquence? Never fear—as we shall see later in this book, there is now an entire machine world that can come to your aid.
It has been my fortune to work exclusively for organizations that have set themselves against these tides. As we saw, the leaders of the BBC made a decision to make its news more serious minded in the late 1980s, and the institution has maintained that commitment ever since in its new digital services as well as on TV and radio. Meanwhile, during a period when other US newspapers have savaged their newsrooms, The New York Times has stubbornly maintained its journalistic strength.
It has more foreign bureaus than ever. Most newspapers, including such bastions as the Wall Street Journal and the FT, have reduced the average length of their articles, perhaps in the belief that in the middle of a breathless modern life, even weighty news needs to be served up with what the hospitality industry calls portion control. The New York Times has moved in the opposite direction. Articles are longer than they used to be, sometimes much longer. When in 2012 the journalists working on Snow Fall, a multimedia feature about a skiing tragedy in the Cascades, presented their first draft to the executive editor, it was seventeen thousand words long. She still asked for additions. The editorial section of The Times is full of opinions, but the newspaper’s sustained commitment to the presentation and explication of the unadulterated facts also marks it out, especially in fields like science, medicine, and social policy.
But The Times is an exception to the general downward trend among legacy publishers. And despite assiduously marketed claims to the contrary, many of the new digital publishers do not invest significantly in original serious journalism. They have generally taken their journalistic cue from the gossip columns of the tabloids and from the world of comedy and entertainment. Some of the work, for instance on BuzzFeed, is witty and fresh and speaks authentically to aspects of our culture, but news is hardly a priority. When they do cover serious stories, the new players generally pilfer the raw material from traditional media and rewrite it with more search-engine-friendly headlines and, of course, without the caveats and the conditional clauses.
Watch the enterprising young reporters of the digital and TV media brand Vice and you could imagine we are living through a new golden age of democratized investigative journalism and foreign reporting. Then hear the morning alarm on your smartphone and wake up again. Like BuzzFeed, Vice has real energy and creative flair, but it is foremost a sophisticated marketing machine paid for by legacy programmers and commercial brands, all desperate to demonstrate to bosses and clients that they can connect with millennials.
Most of the young people who work for the new publishers find themselves not knee-deep in a war zone or with the time and resources to pursue a heroic long-range investigation but locked in a digital sweatshop, ripping off other people’s work, making lists and chasing clicks, racing to keep one step ahead of the scything blades of Facebook’s unforgiving algorithm.
Digital has had another effect, namely, to accelerate and intensify the news cycle. People react instantly to news on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Having initially been baffled by this phenomenon, legacy publishers quickly became obsessed by it. The result has been a noisy feedback loop, the phenomenon that the sound engineers call howlround. A news event happens, and within seconds, digital space is full of reactions and opinions. Old media reports these opinions as if they carried real weight and then that old media verdict is itself propagated across the social platforms. When continuous television news arrived, stories would be “called”—in other words, a settled view would emerge of the rights and wrongs of the matter—in hours rather than days. Spin was in part a reaction to this increase in news velocity. Now the time frame is often minutes.
Surrender to the feedback loop was based on the false premise that the early signals emanating from the social media platforms were likely to be representative of public opinion as a whole. Unfortunately, as anyone who has had to moderate online comments will tell you, the opportunity to offer one’s opinion on the news (and on people you disagree with) tends to attract a disproportionate number of the angry, the extreme, and the unhinged. The effect of ignoring the skewed nature of the contributors and treating them as if they were a statistically valid sample of the public often has the effect of exaggerating reaction and sentiment. That is then fed back into the loop, where it provokes yet more reaction.
We will return to the question of Internet rage later in this book. For now, suffice it to say that the language of (often anonymous) unbridled hatred that the digital platforms have enabled has damaged public discourse in other ways. It often triggers an equal and opposite response so that an entire debate descends into vitriol. And it sets a new dark standard for the expression of strong opinion, which some politicians and commentators are only too happy to meet.
It has also given the public unprecedented access to accurate information about their world and the issues we all face, given the will and the discriminatory powers to find it. The dream of a digital journalism and of an army of citizen reporters holding the state and society to account is not dead yet. But it is currently hard not to agree with Tony Blair’s grim conclusion in the passage from his “Feral Beast” speech, which I quoted at the start of this chapter, that when it comes to public discourse, digital has so far proved to be a false dawn. It was meant to make things so much better. When it comes to public language and constructive democratic debate, so far on balance it has only made them worse.