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How 24-hour headlines are breaking news
Round-the-clock media and the scramble for instant information is forcing us to closely examine the
‘menace’ of a reporting blizzard, writes Gerald Isaaman
THE highly intelligent wife of a friend of mine has just bought herself a pair of ear plugs. She uses them whenever the news comes on radio or TV – because she is fed up with the constant diet of pervasive doom poured out.
Her belief is that we are talking ourselves into submission by listening to forever-screaming headlines that too often crumble like broken biscuits and prove to be untrue speculation. And she declares that, if anything is dead, it is the political parties, as well as the bankers, whom she would politely strangle.
People need positive help and assistance more than anything, not negative reactions from pontificating politicians and so-called media economic experts, she claims.
Indeed, she refuses to join the lemmings heading for the nearest cliff as clouds of gloom descend, and, at weekends, prefers to read the FT and Le Monde for their more serious and sober reflections on events that are affecting us all.
These thoughts come to mind reading this significant new book by two veteran American journalists, who believe that 24-hour news is not only a menace in itself, but gives us no time to sort out fact from unsound opinions and analytical fiction – and to our cost.
Everything becomes a blur as the media blizzard we suffer from scrambles our perspectives, they believe, and there is no doubt that the information overload is so intense, the internet too increasing the turmoil, that we suffer as a result.
While the evidence the authors produce is based mainly on what happens in America, much of it during the presidential election campaign – “Never has falsehood in America had such a large megaphone,” says the Los Angeles Times – they quote Tony Blair’s withering description of the British media as a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits”.
And they tell how it took just 12 minutes after the security protected publication last year of Alastair Campbell’s 800-page memoirs on The Blair Years for one TV station to announce on air: “There’s nothing new in this book!”
They are not opposed to speed as such, or the freedom of the media, provided its foundation has a sense of responsibility based on accuracy, and is not intent on repeating sloppy salacious celebrity gossip. Indeed, news of earthquakes and tsunamis benefit immediate aid getting to trouble spots, as do momentous government decisions on interest rates, for example.
It’s the way that we are going towards imploding mobile news on mobile phones round the world that is their worry. Yet, when it comes to emphatic empirical observation proving their theory true, it is difficult to point an accusing finger.
Perhaps the test case of a doomsday scenario is that of the Cuban missile crisis 1962 where, under today’s mounting media pressure, President Kennedy wouldn’t have been able to keep secret for a week that he knew there were Soviet missiles on America’s doorstep.
Kennedy and the White House engineered enough time to be able to decide what was the right and precise action to take.
No doubt the great nations have built that fact into the way they act in the 21st century, although it doesn’t allow for the way maverick counties intent on fundamental change operate, as no doubt Barack Obama is totally aware.
As the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out in reviewing the 2008 presidential election: “What we can say definitely is that conventional wisdom is vulnerable in large part because it is often based on imperfect and incomplete information – and that the source of the vast majority of that information is under assault as never before.”
Why? Maybe it is because newspapers and TV channels are now under threat of extinction as never before and, at the height of this recession, cannot find the tycoons whom, in the past, funded them – to promote their own political aspirations, for profit – and for fame.
Rebekah Wade, editor of the Sun, has declared that newspapers will die without investment, but an equally important part of the equation is that a new survey shows that only 19 per cent of the British actually trust their native media. Indeed, newspapers hold back in reporting their own dismal failures until, as happened last month, a Russian oligarch and former KGB spy bought a controlling interest in the London Evening Standard after many months of secret negotiations.
The late Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, both former owners, must be revolving, amid a red mist, in their graves. Trinity Mirror has closed 42 local newspapers, and others elsewhere will follow, though there is even surprising talk of government subsidy to keep weekly newspapers alive.
Let’s hope there is adequate time to think before that ever happens, so that those original fighters for the freedom of the press don’t haunt all our future headlines.
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