Categories: uncategorized
Date: 13 December 2007 09:22:21
I moaned about the media.
It's kind of a national sport isn't it - complaining about the newspapers and the TV news reports. How they create scare stories and distort the facts to make things more interesting. Terrible really, but it's inevitable because they're just giving us what we, in our basest and most honest moments, want. Well, to be more precise, they put in what will sell. Mundane reassuring stories don't sell as well as crises and dramas. If you've a lot of faith in human nature then you make demands that the media raise their standards and refrain from such market-driven journalism. If, on the other hand, you're like me and somewhat pessimistic about human nature, then you'll look to re-shape the conditions that make the media behave like this. And those conditions are, primarily, that we buy newspapers and, indirectly, TV news, forcing the media to make themselves more sellable. In other words, the fact that newspapers etc are businesses, and thus legally obliged to try to make money, directly causes the sensationalism that we moan about.
Put like that you can start to realize how good our news services actually are. After all, if they're businesses, then to be fair we should be comparing their performance with other businesses. Such as Tescos, to pick one particularly prominent business. How would you feel about buying the Tesco Gazette, or the Enron Times say? What standard of journalism would you expect from it? As I say, put like that you can start to realize how good our media actually is.
Besides, what is the alternative - state-controlled media? Like the perfect two-word argument that Paddy Ashdown found (or maybe just promoted) against republicanism: President Thatcher, so there is a one-word argument against state-controlled newspapers: Pravda. Isn't that how state-controlled media inevitably end up? If that is too remote then try looking at the `newspapers' that local councils produce - full of inane babbling about how the £1bn they've just spent relaying the pavement on High St is the best investment ever and makes them the most wonderful council you've ever had. So our experience of state-controlled media is just as bad as the worst that the private sector can produce.
Or is it? Hang on a minute - isn't there another example of state-controlled media that isn't quite so bad? One that actually has quite a good reputation and standards to match? Yes, the BBC. By typical British fluke the powers-that-were decades ago found a model that enabled the corporation to be free of commercial pressures and yet sufficiently independent of the government to actually serve a useful purpose. And ever since then it has, despite the odd blip, provided broadcasting services of an incredibly high standard. Long may it continue to do so.