Towards Compassionate Journalism?
Owain Wilkins reviews Newspeak in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Press)
12.03.10
Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News (2008, reviewed in Planet 191) was widely reviewed and praised by the UK mainstream media with many agreeing that our newspapers’ pursuit of profit at the expense of accurate news coverage damages their credibility. By contrast, David Edwards and David Cromwell’s first book, Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media (2005, reviewed in Planet 183), received very little press attention, and their new book, Newspeak in the 21st Century, seems destined for the same fate. This is not because the authors’ work is not worth reading. Rather, it is because since 2001, the Davids, via their Media Lens website, have continually held journalists from the supposedly liberal UK media to account with some uncomfortable home truths: while Nick Davies asserts that the press is driven by profit, the Davids delve deeper and argue that media coverage is in fact steered by powerful, elite interests.
They highlight, for example, the fundamental hypocrisy of newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian that claim to be “green”. While these papers regularly run stories and comment pieces on environmental issues, they also publish advertisements for cars, cheap flights and other consumer products harmful to the environment. The authors argue that the layout, structure and format of newspapers are actually designed to attract the advertisers on which they depend to survive. The media are therefore tied to an economic model that promotes “growth”, which has “consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.” Such issues are rarely (if ever) discussed in the media, meaning that “the elite consensus on the need for relentless economic ‘growth’, a cancerous process that is killing the planet”, goes unchallenged.
The fallout from Iraq also looms large, especially the lack of media coverage given to two epidemiological studies (in 2004 and 2006) in the scientific journal, The Lancet, on the number of civilian deaths as a consequence of the 2003 invasion. The second report estimated that, by 2006, the number of such deaths was in excess of 654,965. Despite the sound scientific basis of the studies, the media chose to report the much more conservative findings of Iraq Body Count, which estimated that, by 2006, 49,000 Iraqis had lost their lives as a result of the invasion. Professional epidemiologists and other experts considered The Lancet studies to be credible, but the media sided with politicians such as George W. Bush, who questioned their methodology. The Davids refer to the affair as “the most shocking and outrageous example of media servility to power we have yet seen.”
Newspeak in the 21st Century also exposes the journalistic concept of “balance” – referred to by Tim Llewellyn, who was the BBC’s Middle East correspondent for ten years, as a “crudely applied device for avoiding trouble” – to be a smokescreen for preserving the status quo. This is particularly true of coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, where reports repeatedly fail to provide the dispute’s historical context.
The authors are passionate about the internet’s potential to provide an alternative, not-for-profit media, “offering our only serious hope for compassionate change”. Although there have been recent success stories for web-based activism (the influence of Twitter on the Trafigura affair for example), an awful lot of nonsense, particularly in relation to climate change, also appears on the blogosphere. Questions could therefore be raised about the authors’ optimism in that regard. I also had problems with the book’s final chapter, in which the authors argue their case for compassionate journalism. Their commendable starting point is that all suffering is equal and that we “should take the side of compassion against indifference, greed and hatred”. The chapter then develops, however, into something of a lecture on the merits of the Buddhist goal of selflessness, and one consequently feels as though one is reading a self-help guide rather than a call for political change.
Nevertheless, journalists’ responses to the Davids’ work imply that they must be doing something right. In 2008, they were threatened with legal action by The Times for encouraging people to write to them, and Peter Beaumont of The Observer has accused them of being “a train spotters’ club run by Uncle Joe Stalin”. Perhaps the most appropriate response to such censure comes from the Davids’ riposte to a journalist who likened their tactics to bullying. “The technical term for what you have experienced”, they wrote, “is: democracy.”
Owain Wilkins |