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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
J
OURNALISM is the ‘fourth estate’ of a func-
tioning pluralistic society, an essential
component of democracy. Journalists act
as a tribune of the people, and a watchdog
keeping a wary eye on the actions of the pow-
erful. Journalism is what someone, somewhere,
doesn’t want you to know. The information and
scrutiny that news media provide are so impor-
tant that, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we’d be
better off having journalism with no government
than government with no journalism.
Would it be too strong to refer to these persist-
ent, oft-repeated ideas as myths, or even, more
definitively, as fictions (since myths don’t actually
have to be untrue)? They certainly bear absolutely
no reference, relevance or relation to about .
per cent of the journalism I’ve encountered over
my whole news-consuming life. The high-minded
notions of journalism’s importance, along with
other ideas (more recent than Jefferson) about
good journalism’s commitment to objectivity and
balance, are an ideological construct, the central
Journalism: the practice and
the theory
The media must challenge power and the state, and resist their
interference and regulation
opinion
harry browne
Then: the ideal
thought-structure of journalistic professional-
ism, one that most journalists would probably say,
publicly, that they adhere to. At least in theory.
The practice, as we know, is very different. But
the theory continues to govern our responses to
the practice. As the reaction to Britain’s Leveson
inquiry make clear, the image that is largely
deployed to fend off the possibility of heavy-
duty regulation is the largely mythical one of a
robust, adversarial press that it is a vital site of
resistance to, or at least restraint on, the abusive
behaviour of governments, companies and other
centres of power.
And the irony is that politicians, business peo-
ple and various other potentates are the ones
generally most eager to promote the myth. Of
course, they protest, we would never want to de-
fang the press, it’s vital that it continues to play a
vital role, blah-de-blah-de-blah. When of course
most of them know very well that the vast bulk of
journalism involves far more use of the tongue
than of the teeth. Some of them, of course, can’t
bear even a tiny proportion of negative coverage,
and they buy newspaper groups and radio sta-
tions to try to eliminate it.
The unpurchasable media too can generally
be counted upon to offer their services to the
powerful, free and gratis, even when circum-
stances demand a more quizzical approach. The
English-speaking world’s biggest and best-re-
garded public-service broadcaster, the BBC, is
the subject of a study recently published in a
highly regarded academic journal, Journalism.
The author, Mike Berry, found that as the British
banks faced their version of the global crisis of
, the Beeb’s flagship radio show, Today on
BBC Radio - Britain’s equivalent of Morning
Ireland - turned mainly to ‘experts’ from the very
institutions that had brought the country, and
the world, to the brink of ruin. And of course the
dominance of those plummy City voices ensured
that the range of solutions to the crisis offered
on the programme was restricted to those that
would not unduly discommode those same bro-
kers and, eh, bankers.
Does anyone dare imagine that a study of
Morning Ireland would reveal anything differ-
ent, with slight adjustments for accents?
The most powerful myths of journalism go back
a few generations, but my generation, born in the
mid-to-late th century, had it drilled into us
especially deep. I read All the President’s Men at
home in New Jersey when I was about , and
went to see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford
in the film the day it was released, when I was
. Much of the story was surely beyond me, but
I knew, I think, what it meant to me: that to be
a journalist was to flirt with the possibility and
promise of heroism, at a time when the battlefield
version of that promise had been so rightly dis-
credited in America by the Vietnam war.
Before Robert Redford got to play Bob
Woodward, he turned up in the cynical and
slightly schlocky spy thriller Three Days of the
Condor, as the accidental CIA renegade Joe Turner.
At the end of that film (spoiler alert!) Redford/
Turner confronts one of his erstwhile CIA bosses,
Higgins (played by the ridiculously coiffed Cliff
Robertson), and almost literally takes shelter
near the entrance of the New York Times build-
ing in midtown Manhattan. He reveals to Higgins/
Robertson that he has taken his story of CIA skull-
duggery, roguery and murder to the newspaper.
Woohoo, the power of the press!
But this is a film from the dark, conspirato-
rial days of , so it’s not left at that: instead,
Higgins asks Turner pointedly: “How do you know
they’ll print it?”. Turner says they will. But when
this well-placed CIA executive asks again, “How
do you know?”, we can see the confidence fall off
Redford’s face. Even at the height of journo-ma-
nia, a year after “Woodstein” had brought down
a president, the film had the sense to suggest that
you couldn’t be sure the press would exercise its
power against the CIA.
As it happens, in the real world, the New York
Times had published a major CIA exposé, by the
great Seymour Hersh, late in . But that
paper hadn’t been particularly good on Watergate,
and rumours abounded, then and since, that the
Washington Post’s famous Watergate sleuths had
been spun by the CIA into underplaying the agen-
cy’s role in the scandal.
I was reminded of that Redford-Robertson
scene, and the question it leaves hanging in the
air about the press’s willingness to confront gov-
ernment, when poor, brave Bradley Manning
testified to a military court that, before he went
near Wikileaks, he had offered his treasure trove
of US military and diplomatic documents to both
the Washington Post and the New York Times --
but they had ignored (Times) or long-fingered
(Post) his efforts.
Then there is the fate of Woodward himself,
who has become something like Wikileaks’ evil
twin. While the despised Assange and his organ-
isation have laboured to live up to elements of
journalism’s professional ideology, publishing
material that governments don’t want to see the
light of day, Woodward has become the “inves-
tigative journalist” who reveals precisely the
material that government officials do want to
see published. As many US commentators have
pointed out, Woodward’s lucrative books are
based on “secrets” that often have a much higher
security classification than anything Manning
leaked and Assange published, but he is not holed
up in a London embassy or a military prison - or
like the intrepid Anonymous-linked investigative
journalist, Barrett Brown, in a Texas penitentiary
- because Woodward prints only the secrets that
have been chosen by politicians and officials to
portray them in the best possible light.
Yet Woodward remains the celebrated investi-
gative journalist, and Assange the anarchist freak,
a handy index of just how far the professional ide-
ology is from the reality.
One is tempted to reach for the cliché that
what Woodward and most hacks do is “stenog-
raphy, not journalism”. But isn’t it time to admit
that, since most journalists do one version or
another of stenography, this sort of crap is what
we should mean when we use the word “journal-
ism”? Media, the great Irish-American journalist
Jimmy Breslin is reputed to have said, is “the plu-
ral of mediocrity”.
But, ah yes, what about that other . per cent,
the really good stuff? Social and online media
offer the glimpse of an alternative, a new way to
get at real and challenging information and ideas.
But as the recent fuss about cyberbullying shows,
politicians really, really don’t like the idea of Just
Anybody being in a position to exercise the power
that their friends in the press gallery are so care-
ful not to “abuse”.
If we’re going to build a better media, we can’t
expect the state’s help. On the contrary. And
despite the temptation, we must resist using the
present crisis to introduce forms of regulation
that ostensibly target tabloid excesses, but could
and would ultimately be used against all of us.
Woodward remains the
celebrated investigative
journalist, and Assange the
anarchist freak; a handy
index of just how far the
professional ideology is from
the reality
Now: the compromised reality
