Harry Browne - Village Magazine

 —  March - April 2012

hen,  years from now, the his-

tory of commercial professional

journalism in these islands is being

written, there is a considerable

chance that the events of - will feature

in the ﬁnal chapter.

Few moments could be more emblematic of

the terminal condition of the practice than the one

that saw Rupert Murdoch remove his son from the

helm at his British newspapers – once the crown

jewels of his empire – and eﬀectively install in

James’s place none other than his -year-old self.

The move seemed to suggest that the Sun and the

Times will be doing well if they manage to last as

long as he does. His Irish editions might not last

even that long.

It would nice if we could limit Rupert’s, and our

own, poor prognosis to physical, for-sale, daily

papers on newsprint, which are widely agreed

to be hobbling on their last legs. Unfortunately,

recent events have demonstrated that the illness

runs deeper.

The parade of horrors exposed at the British

“Leveson inquiry” into news-media culture, prac-

tice and ethics is not simply a description of the

awful string of eejits who have testiﬁed on behalf

of their tabloid newspapers. What Leveson has

already established is that a large section of the

British press has for decades been piggybacking

on the high-falutin’, high-modernist self-concep-

tion of journalism as an essential public good, vital

to democracy, vindicating the people’s right to

know yada-yada-yada – while cooking up criminal

schemes to invade the privacy of celebrities, most

of whom have no bearing whatsoever on the basic

functioning of a healthy state and society.

I’m no enemy of pop culture. I love lots of it.

But to suggest that journalism of the sort that does

very little other than to report, elevate, celebrate

and exploit popular-culture should enjoy special

social status as a Fourth Estate and watchdog on

the powerful is absurd. No matter how much peo-

ple may enjoy reading it. (The circulation statistics

would suggest “less and less”.)

Of course there is some other journalism

that is often worthy of that special social status.

Indeed, Nick Davies’ revelations in the Guardian

about goings-on at News International fall into

that category. But what is now inescapable after

the scandals of the past year is that there is really

no such practice as “journalism”, singular. There

are, rather, “journalisms”, most of which – and

this is the crucial point at the present juncture

– most of which would never be missed in any

serious way if their current commercial trajec-

tory delivers them, as seems likely, into oblivion.

These journalisms have often made themselves

indistinguishable from, say, public relations, or

reality-TV, and their future lies, if it lies anywhere,

within those industries.

Unfortunately, the other sort of journalism,

the careful, accurate, legal kind, increasingly sees

that the only commercial trajectory that doesn’t

point hopelessly downward is one that links its

practice to the information needs of a capitalist

elite that is willing to pay for a bit of care and accu-

racy in its news.

Thus, in the English-speaking world, the “leg-

acy” publications that have been able to insist on

some sort of paid model for internet content are

the likes of the Economist, the Wall Street Journal

and the Financial Times. The jury remains out on

the recently back-scaled metered model favoured

by the more generalist New York Times – which

keeps a stock-market widget in plain sight near

the top of its home webpage – and here at home

it’s too early to tell if the Sunday Business Post

experiment in mixing daily-free and Sunday-paid

content is a runner.

That’s the context for the recent Irish Times’

campaign to position itself as a business news-

paper. The saddest element of this campaign was

Dan O’Brien’s opinion piece to launch expanded

business coverage: it consisted, essentially, of an

assurance that though the business community is

loathed by the Irish people as a whole, it is loved by

the Irish Times. Dan backed up the assertion that

Ireland is anti-business with the thinnest of survey

evidence, and the unsupported claim that Irish peo-

ple say “captains of industry” a lot, mainly using the

phrase with, God forbid, tongue in cheek.

Those of us who are not captains of industry

will doubtless continue to ﬁnd more or less reli-

able information in such capitalist tools. But we

will need to use other venues to discuss what we

could possibly do with that information to create

a better world.

Harry Browne lectures in the School of Media at

Dublin Institute of Technology

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

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

Too often, careful journalism links to the information

needs of a capitalist elite, while the reality-TV sort

piggybacks on its undeserved reputation

Harry Browne

opinion

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