The threat of better journalism? Responding to David Loyn

How ironic to read BBC correspondent David Loyn’s paean to the good old religion of objectivity in journalism on this dark day when the New York Times, paragon of US news objectivity, is genuflecting on a scandal that has tarnished its reputation. Our “newspaper of record” is in an uproar because it has to admit that its highly vaunted standards of accuracy were violated by one of their own.

From New York to London, the same issues are being debated.

With your indulgence I would like to respond to BBC correspondent David Loyn, whose reporting I am sure I would admire but whose cantankerous, one-dimensional ‘attitude’ makes me squirm. When I see him pledging allegiance to all the old homilies, singing to the choir from a dusty hymnbook, I realise how hard it is for journalists that are open-minded to realise they need not be empty-minded.

Loyn’s sermon from Lord Reith’s tomb ignores deeper questions about the interests journalists serve, and the impacts we have. It also obscures difficulties we all have in divining, much less in presenting “truth”.

The real problems of journalism and war

The humble suggestion that perhaps journalists might do more to examine how conflicts could be resolved rather than focus on the blood and gore, is challenged as a heresy to be scoffed at as worthy and worse.

Loyn writes, “I want to appeal for more traditional values such as fairness, objectivity and balance – the only guiding lights of good reporting. News is what’s happening and we should report it with imagination and scepticism (where appropriate). Full stop. We do not need to load any other demands on to it. And we certainly do not need to seek out peacemakers unless they are actually successful.”

Is “success” the criteria to be used to determine what gets covered? Come now.

How about war makers who are unsuccessful? How about unilateral pre-emptive warriors who cite one set of reasons for going to war, and then substitute others. How about journalists who fuse jingoism with journalism and become cheerleaders for government policies?

Good journalism, indeed.

I am still suffering from the shock and awe of watching almost all the US networks (with some exceptions) take sides without appearing to and cover a conflict without any real concern about the truth, which was in this war what it has been in others: the first casualty.

Just this week, a new study is out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a US media watchdog that uses those very “holy” terms that Loyn invokes to confront us with an unpleasant reality. Needless to say it was not referenced in this media system that rarely covers itself. May I quote it in detail?

Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent: FAIR study finds skewed TV coverage of Iraq war

“During the Iraq war, the guest lists of major nightly newscasts were dominated by government and military officials, disproportionately favoured pro-war voices, and marginalized dissenters, a new study by FAIR has found.

Starting the day after the invasion of Iraq began, the three-week study covered the most intense weeks of the war (3/20/03-4/9/03). It examined 1,617 on-camera sources in stories about Iraq on six major evening newscasts: ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’s Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Some key findings:

• Official voices dominate: 63% of all sources were current or former government employees. US officials alone accounted for more than half (52%) of all sources.

• Pro-war chorus: Nearly two thirds of all sources – 64% – were pro-war.

• Anti-war voices missing: At a time when 27% of the US public opposed the war, only 10% of all sources, and just 3% of US sources, were anti-war. That means the percentage of Americans opposing the war was nearly 10 times higher in the real world than on the news.

• Soundbites vs. interviews: When anti-war guests did make the news, they were mostly relegated to man-on-the-street soundbites. Not a single show did a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war.

• International perspectives scarce: Only 6% of sources came from countries other than the US, Britain or Iraq. Citizens of France, Germany and Russia – the countries most vocally opposed to the war – constituted just 1% of all guests.

The six shows’ guest lists had a lot in common, but there were a few differences. Of US sources, NBC Nightly News had the smallest percentage of officials (60%) and the largest percentage of anti-war guests (4%), while CBS Evening News had highest percentage of officials (75%) and fewest anti-war voices (a single soundbite from Michael Moore’s Oscar speech).”

‘When independent policy critics and grassroots voices are short-changed, democracy is short-changed,’ said FAIR’s Steve Rendall. ‘Not one show offered proportionate coverage of anti-war sentiment. If media are supposed to foster vigorous, inclusive debate during national crises, it’s clear that during the Iraq war, TV news let the public down.’”

Context and contest

That’s not journalism, I can hear you say. That’s opinionising. Ok, but all of it appears under the mantle of news and is presented by news networks and on newscasts in an environment where pundits outnumber journalists three to one.

And before you point the finger at America, read some of the criticisms of media watchers in Britain who were distressed by aspects of BBC boosterism of the war. Even the BBC’s news chief Richard Sambrook has acknowledged that some of those criticisms may have some merit.

We all need to look at what we do – not just what we say.

I agree that real reporting has to be undertaken without fear or favour, but journalists have to take some measure of responsibility for the impact their work has, as do media companies.

If all you cover in the Middle East is an endless exchange of violent attacks, you miss the larger context. The media focus on the daily incidents, on the bloodshed, just reinforces the sense of tragedy and futility of two peoples pictured only as hating each other. The cumulative impression: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond redemption, beyond solution. The reality of the daily experience of occupation is not understood widely in my country because our media outlets rarely explain it, rarely contextualise it, and rarely provide the background that makes for meaning.

So please don’t give us that old, just-the-facts-ma’am mantra as if what we chose to cover as journalists doesn’t affect policymakers or public opinion.

It may be that David Lloyn works in an environment where he assigns himself his own stories. Most of us do not. We are told what to focus on, and what not to. News managers, and not the individual reporters, make decisions. And amazing isn’t it, that so many outlets tend to cover the same story the same way? When I worked at ABC News, the staff were called “the troops.” We were run like an army and people who didn’t follow orders didn’t last long.

Not just America

During this last war, we saw clearly how cultural and political values affected all of this. We saw differences in the war that Europe saw and the war Americans were shown; what Arab media outlets focused on and what US outlets covered. Interesting, isn’t it, that CNN did one feed for Americans and another for its international service, and that they were different?

I cite this to say that coverage follows institutional patterns and routines and tends to devote more coverage to an outside-in and top-down way of seeing things, an approach that legitimates power and authorities even when they’re wrong. What is needed is more of an inside-out, bottom-up perspective. Why do we focus on leaders, not ordinary people? Journalists were embedded with the troops, not Iraqi families or humanitarian agencies.

Don’t think we are ideology-free either.

War boosts ratings. It is action, excitement, our “boys” against the bad guys. Look at how the war in the Malvinas (oops, I should say Falklands, right?) was covered. Was that a great moment for British journalism? I don’t think so.

The ‘peace journalism’ option presents an enterprising and provocative alternative way of thinking about what is often missing in the coverage.

But Loyn says it is misleading – as if so much of what we see and hear isn’t. It is prescriptive, he complains – as if the focus of so much mainstream news is not when it reinforces certain ways of viewing stories and validates some voices over others, if only by repetition.

Human rights. Who cares?

Yes, David, I agree: “We need to be extraordinarily wary of spin, or ‘propaganda’ as it’s called in wartime.”

We also need to be wary of getting in a rut, not examining the way we think and work, not finding other ways of covering stores. The BBC’s Sue Lloyd-Roberts, for one, pioneered extraordinary up-close coverage of people in distress with a compassionate sensibility. Was it valid journalism? You bet. I am sure she had the traditionalists and worry warts fearing that she might engage too many emotions and evoke too much empathy, as if news is supposed to be a dry recital of selected facts and uncritical ideas.

I love your example of the gassing of the Kurds. Horrible, yes. But the lessons may be different. When we tried to cover it on Globalvision’s human rights TV-magazine, Rights & Wrongs, we were initially rejected by the PBS station in New York because we didn’t have an on-camera response from Saddam Hussein himself. Imagine. PBS told us, ‘human rights is an insufficient organising principle for a TV series’; just as you are saying that an approach to journalism that investigates how conflict might be covered is a no-no.

You write, “I remember it well, because I happened to do the story. (It wasn’t anything clever. I was on shift when the pictures came in on a satellite feed. I covered it from the safety of TV centre.) And I remember the pathetic Iranians and Kurds standing outside the Foreign Office for months afterwards with petitions and horrific albums of victims. But nobody cared – certainly not the government. It was only on the news for one day. It was an oddity – the use of chemical weapons towards the end of a war in which a million died. But now 15 years later it has propaganda value.”

Why didn’t the BBC, ABC or CNN cover it more and follow it up? Why? Because human rights has as much priority in news organisations as it has in governments. Some journalists did cover it, and some human rights activists like Peter Gabriel called for more media coverage. Back then, the Reagan Administration was silent for six months after the first reports came in and today there is a debate about whether the Iranians might have borne some responsibility.

What we have seen during this war is demonisation, not perspective.

The business of better journalism

News is too important to be left to the vagaries of news organisations. We have to be more assertive in demanding better coverage.

And that means not abandoning our values or social conscience.

You write, “Our job as reporters is only to be witnesses to the truth. There cannot of course be a single absolute truth – anyone who has ever interviewed two observers of the same incident knows that there is no perfect account – but once we step away from pursuing the truth, then we are lost in an area of moral relativism which threatens the whole business of reporting.”

This is pretentious; because it avoids discussing the pressures we all face from our employers, especially in the corporate world. Competitive pressures and the need for ratings and revenues increasingly affect what we do.

Let’s face it:

The business of reporting is a business.

A big business.

And a big business that is not agenda-free.

Like other businesses, it needs to be held to a higher standard of responsibility.

Accuracy sure. Fairness, of course. Balance, why not?

But, look around and recognize how and why journalism is in a crisis. Understand why so many today see the media as a problem, not a solution.

Peace journalism in its own way offers some suggestions for how to revitalise news, add more dimensions, feature more diverse perspectives, probe deeper.

Why is that so threatening?

Greeting these suggestions with defensiveness, finger pointing and the insistence that journalists operate outside a world in which, objectively – yes that word again – they are players, like it or not in the world, is not only wrong, but wrong-headed.