Not that it will add much to the debate, but I am personally quite pleased that Mr Hislop has spoken at Leveson, and I find his comments to be worth recommending. I don't think that there can be any doubt that there has developed over the last twenty or so years an increasing feeling within the mainstream media that the public are only interested in juicy, sexy stories and that certainly in the tabloids there has been a move to feed the public a continuous diet of “celebrity” gossip rather than any attempt at real journalism. In spite of the outcry over the News of the Word hacking scandal it seems unlikely to me that there has been any real change in the way in which the press operates. Why do I say this? One very simple reason. I am rather afraid that the tabloid editors and their advisors who have reached this decision about what the public wants are correct. The evidence is that in spite of the coverage of the tabloid press and their activities we still see the same type of stories selling the same number of papers to the same people as we did before all of this came out.
The conclusion that I draw from this goes against the generally held conspiracy theorist view that the public are controlled by the media. I think this is pretty clear evidence that this is not now, nor has it ever been, the case. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that the opposite is in fact the case. That the public, who have the purchasing power are the ones to control what the media puts out. I think that it is quite clear that in the main editors are at the mercy of what the public will actually pay for. I can quite easily imagine editors at the News of the World meeting to discuss a story that they knew had been procured by non-standard means, and making a decision on whether to run it not based on anything ethical or moral but simply on the criteria of is this something the public will pay money for? I can even imagine them losing sleep at night thinking about how the driver of commercialism was forcing them to make editorial decisions that they themselves found morally repugnant.
This may seem an odd position for a blogger to take, and please don't misunderstand I am no defender of the actions of private investigators and lazy journalists, but I feel that the blame is being misplaced at least to some extent, and that we also need to look at society as a whole and why we are in a position that news stories have a lifespan of days, no matter how offensive, and why the criteria for what is considered news is decided y what is commercially acceptable rather than what is from a journalistic viewpoint a good story. This is not to try to shift blame but to raise awareness that the answers to getting a better, more responsible, more useful media are more complex than they are being portrayed. It is not simply a case of a few bad apples, or rogue elements, but a more deep rooted societal problem. It will be interesting to see what Leveson comes up with, but I suspect that one thing it won't do is address the issue of the public getting the media and therefore the stories that it deserves.
My own feeling is that this is symptomatic of the psychological condition within the human mind that drives us to always want more, more violence, more sex, more action, more drama, just more. Look at the development of horror films – each generation has to be more shocking than the last. The same is true in music, it has to be faster, louder, more extreme. In sport the standard of players at the top level is constantly being pushed. We are a species that thrives on the edge, tha exists to push boundaries, and this is partly what has driven us to our position of strength as a species, but is also what leaves us vulnerable to the charge that that same drive has negative implications that are just as damaging as the positives are healing. I'm not sure that there is a solution to this, or if there is that it is something that can be summed up easily, but I guess that we will have to see....
No comments:
Post a Comment