While the news media globally is cutting back on its facility for covering international news, it is channelling increasing resources into opinion. The economic and cultural causes of this shift are well documented, including on this blog. But what is not often canvassed are the possible consequences – not just for the media but for politics – of the now routine branding of opinion as news.
Making some valuable insights on this issue recently was Ted Koppel, one of the icons of the classic era of American television journalism from the 1960s and 70s. Koppel spent four decades at the US network ABC and was most widely known for his coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and his long-term anchor role with the late evening news program Newsnight. Now 70, Koppel retired from ABC in 2005 and these days provides occasional analysis for the BBC (he’s British-born) and National Public Radio.
In a a guest column this week in The Washington Post, Koppel muses on the irony of outspoken MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann (a sort of left-wing bizarro world Bill O’Reilly) being suspended by that network for making political donations to favoured Democratic candidates. As Koppel says, one could have imagined the outrage if, back in the 1960s, Walter Kronkite had been caught writing cheques for the Republicans. But in an age when journalists are encouraged to share their political opinions with us before they even learn to be reporters, this controversy seems rather, well, quaint.
But Koppel’s bigger point is to muse on the effects of the shift in the sense of news from the old ideal of a public service aimed at a mass audience to, now, a corporate profit machine targeting niche markets with versions of opinionated “reality” that are tailored to their own particular world views.
“The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me,” Koppel writes “While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted observation that ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts’ seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.”
Of course, there is a counter argument to this that the post-war, optimistic, cosmopolitan liberalism that foreign correspondents like Koppel, his colleague Peter Jennings and our own George Negus represented was always an ideal embraced by a small elite disconnected from the cares of the “ordinary” folk. And, as is depressingly familiar, the likes of Fox and, here in Australia, Murdoch’s local mouthpieces such as Janet Albrechtson gleefully exploit the notion that the “liberal elite” is out of step with the majority. (Janet’s paper says of her in her bio that says she is “roundly disliked by judicial activists, the human rights industry, old-style feminists and assorted rent-seekers. None of that troubles her.”).
But away from the mischief-making of professional contrarians and hit-seeking online columnists, the media’s wholesale closures of foreign news bureaux and the reporting of international news through reliance on wire pictures and local, poorly paid stringers does have real world effects. And those effects relate to our ability to come to grips with the deeply complex international issues now confronting us – irreversible climate change, a fragile financial system, a retreat to nationalism and protectionism and the global movement of people. (Strange, isn’t it, that the Right proclaims with missionary zeal the right of capital to cross borders, but turns xenophobic when people attempt to do the same thing?)
As Koppel says, as the media becomes ever more willing to sell its niche audiences a version of the truth that suits their own prejudices, the need for facts and context (the old currency of journalism – however unfashionable it might be) becomes ever greater. In the absence of that need being met, one shudders at the consequences for this world.
8 Comments
@blackbobs · November 13, 2010 at 11:12 AM
“None of that troubles her.”
So why did the legally trained well-married trollumnist, or her stooges, shut @jantalbrechtsen down on twitter, for the LOLZ?
(might have mispelt that handle)
David Irving (no relation) · November 15, 2010 at 4:04 AM
I guess Planet's a self-hating rent-seeker, then …
Anonymous · November 16, 2010 at 8:50 PM
Yes and it seems the abc also does it,
i would love to know what the abc s charter is
i thought it was set up to tell australians about new, not tell us how to think
has the abc charter been updated in this age of modern communication.
if not why not
Andrew Elder · November 21, 2010 at 11:02 AM
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrew Elder · November 21, 2010 at 11:36 AM
Firstly, here's Olbermann's response – conventional journo practice suggests he's worth equal time to Koppel.
Second, you're wrong to bemoan the closure of foreign bureaux. They existed as enticements for jounos stuck in boring rounds, dreaming of escape to Washington or wherever rather than the drudgery before them.
There was a generation of journos who did important work in understanding and covering the Asia-Pacific. That generation (including David Jenkins and Sean Dorney, to name two) were playing catch-up after the previous generation of Australian journalists failed to adequately explain that the Vietnam war was about more than just communism and dominoes. That generation has gone and not been replaced. Closing the gate after the horse has failed to enter is no tragedy, just a necessary task.
Everything done by Phillip Williams (ABC, London) or Robert Penfold (Ch 9, LA) could be done from Australia, or from satellite feeds, or even from these here interwebz. If the Aussie accent is important to you, satellite feeds can be dubbed like TV ads are.
Look at the 2008 US election, or the 2010 UK election – substantial events, all beyond the imaginary “24 hour news cycle”. Foreign bureaux merely passed on the conventional wisdom in an Aussie accent.
Mr Denmore · November 21, 2010 at 9:20 PM
Andrew, I hadn't seen Olbermann's response at time of writing, but I must point out that I did include as a link Jack Shafer's equally critical swipe at Koppel from Slate.
I agree with you that Aussie journos in the major western centres (New York, Washington, LA, London) capitals add very little to what's available from the networks in those places.
I was talking more about news out of the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. The ABC has had some excellent correspondents in those parts of the world, adding real perspective not available from the wires/big networks.
I'm thinking of the likes of Sean Dorney in Melanesia, Geoff Thompson in Indonesia and Sally Sara in South Asia. Phillip Williams added real value when he was Tokyo correspondent for the ABC.
So while I agree with you that foreign postings often can be used as a career development carrot, I don't think having foreign bureaux is a complete waste of money.
I certainly think it's preferable to helicopter reporters that fly in and out of troublespots purely for the marketing appeal of the piece to camera. That's just wallpaper journalism.
Andrew Elder · December 9, 2010 at 2:13 AM
I'm glad we agree on Dorney and your fourth par generally. Shafer is consistently good.
Interested in your perspective on this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/08/long-live-the-foreign-correspondent
Mr D · December 9, 2010 at 3:39 AM
That's a great piece from The Guardian, Andrew. I especially like the idea that what we want to preserve out of foreign correspondents is the three pillars of “witnessing, deciphering and interpreting.”
I used to work at Reuters and this seemed to me the epitome of what a news organisation should be in those terms. Perhaps there was less of the “interpreting” than what was required, but there were no questions over independence or accuracy.
I recently read Hugh Lunn's book 'A Reporter's War' about his experiences in Vietnam in the '60s. What stands out is the extraodinary efforts some foreign correspondents made to get a story other than the official military spin.
You rarely see that today. Everyone is happy being spoonfed. And the information peddling machine has become a lot slicker.
I suppose you could argue that if Lunn was reporting today, he could form an online relationship with his Vietnamese source…but it could never be so fruitful without the shared experiences.
But it's worth a post on its own how Australia's major commercial media organisations base their foreign “correspondents” in western media hubs that only require them to do stand-ups in front of the White House or Westminister using agency footage – when the real untold stories are elsewhere.