Breaking News?

Speed kills. So the traffic ads tell us. At 30 mph a child has an 80% chance of survival. At 40 mph an 80% chance of being killed. Just as the faster a car is travelling, the more likely it is to inflict damage, so the faster that journalists feel it necessary to report something, the more likely they are to be inaccurate, and the more likely they are to inflict damage to reputations, to the quality of decisions, to the political process and, indeed, to the quality of our national life. For the most part, according to Howard Rosenberg's and Charles S Feldman's new book No Time to Think, this is precisely what is happening.

Several factors have combined to radically change journalists' jobs and the media environment in which they operate.

Firstly, as it relates to news, we now enjoy the decidedly mixed blessing of 24-hour news channels. The good news is that you can tune in any time to get the headlines. The bad news is that media owners found themselves with a commercial problem. How do you attract advertisers to stations that people are constantly tuning out of? After all, the goal of most media organisations is to deliver audiences to the advertisers that pay everyone's salary. The answer: find a way to keep people listening and watching. The problem is that, in reality, there usually isn't that much new news. Nevertheless, the time must be filled - broadcast media are as insatiable as fire and death.

What do you do?

You can, like CNN, redefine news as pretty much anything that can be filmed, in much the same way that the Sun still calls itself a 'newspaper', despite having proportionately less news per column inch than the amount of water in a lunar crater.

Your second choice is to pad the programme out with pseudo-expert speculation, gaseous punditry, self-congratulatory PR, idle chatter and shameless time-wasting. Examples abound. It's been common practice in sports coverage for many a year: Who will win? Who will be in the team? What their tactics will be? Whose scoring record is better on balmy days on soft ground when the moon is the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars? It's the kind of good-natured pub-chat that builds excitement, engenders debate and whiles away the time afore the big match. Of course, this is one thing when it's a football match, but usually utterly useless when it comes to political commentary. Here's an example.

'What would the Ayatollah Khameini say?' That was the question the media were wrestling with as I sat in a cab on Friday June 19th, listening to the BBC World service at 06.00 GMT. As you may recall, it was the day that, in the wake of protests at alleged rampant election-fixing, Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah, was to address the nation.

The two presenters set up the story and they offered an expert academic three choices. Would Khameini come out hard and stand four-square behind Ahmadinejad? Would he take a middle road and ditch Ahmadinejad in an attempt to placate the modernisers and preserve the framework of the Islamic Republic? Would he come out soft and placatory and go for unity? The academic agreed - those were the choices. They usually are.

That was followed by an interview with a correspondent in Iran. He indulged in guesswork. At the end of it I was none the wiser. Why not wait til Khameini had spoken? It was, after all, only a few hours away. The time had been filled not by news, not by analysis or by educative information but by speculation. And this was the BBC World service.

Of course, if this were not part of a much wider trend, you could attribute it to a lack of expertise on a breaking story. But the trend is ubiquitous and a tributary of an even more alarming stream away from substance to style, from the communication of facts to the display of opinion, from the rigorous checking of data to trigger-happy burble, from painstaking and oh so slow research to speedy, but often authoritatively delivered, decidedly so-so guesswork.

Increasingly it is the media's needs that set the agenda, not the needs of an intelligent democratic society. The media need to fill time and hold people's attention. The more time they have to fill the more demanding they are for 'news', and the quicker they expect politicians to respond to issues with wisdom, concision and flair. No one has any time to think. Neither the journalist, nor the politician.

This demand for speed is aggravated by the second big change in the media newsscape. The rise and rise of blogging. Clearly, the blogosphere has served the cause of truth and justice well in many recent conflicts - blogs from Iraq and Iran have fed us with pictures and perspectives on current events that would otherwise have been barred to the West. However, overall, the blogosphere is as unruly as a saloon in Dodge City on a Saturday night in 1873.

Bloggers are not subject to the same disciplines as journalists. For the most part, the BIG bloggers' reputations are not predicated on a reputation for groundbreaking, justice-seeking investigative journalism but for sassy opinionation. And increasingly newspapers and mass media are competing with the bloggers for attention. More and more people go to the web for their news and opinion. And that's why more and more newspapers have websites that report breaking news. And that in turn puts pressure on their finances. The inevitable result is that journalists have more to do and less time to do it in. Accuracy, schmaccuracy.

'The Medium is the Message'- so said Marshall McLuhan, the pioneer and patriarch of contemporary communication studies. He said it before there was a shopping channel, before Facebook and Twitter and the blogosphere and long, long before the web.

McLuhan saw that the way a particular communication medium operates may have a greater impact on society and on the way people think than the content which that particular medium carries. So, for example, the invention of the printing press made the mass circulation of books possible. This not only facilitated the dissemination of a huge amount of knowledge and opinion but changed the way people thought and communicated. Books privilege linear, reasoned, reflective thought. Book culture therefore puts a premium on the rational, and, hey presto, along came The Enlightenment.

TV, by contrast, is a conversation in images. As a medium, TV doesn't like long speeches or lectures or focusing on one person for a long time. TV wants to change the pictures. This is not because the directors and writers have a preference for quick cuts and sound bites but because that's the way the medium works best. No wonder the structure of a TV newscast is almost identical to the structure of Eastenders. TV inevitably tends to entertainment.

In sum, the medium determines the way issues are presented. And the dominant media in any society determine the way we receive information, the way we debate the key issues of our time and therefore the basis on which we make our decisions.
So today, the incessant demand of the media for new material has given us a predilection for fast-food news, for the sensational, and for the superficial. Sound familiar?

Still, the genie is out of the bottle. Viewer beware. Reader beware. To grow in discernment, we will need to retain Jesus' love of truth, and his disdain for gossip and rumour. We will need to develop a healthy but not cynical scepticism. We will need to break our own addiction to the speed that our media-culture seeks to foster and develop the patience to rootle out those sources of information that are characterised by the traditional reporting virtues of truthfulness, non-partisanship and humility.

Mark Greene

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For a truly excellent overview of the issues raised in this article, check out Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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