WHEN print journalism was king and the internet was a stranger, it was easier to see how newspaper bosses had made decisions about the prominence of stories and whether there had been any changes or corrections made to reports day to day.
But in the fast-paced world of online news where front pages of websites change hour to hour and the original story can become lost in constant live updates, people’s understanding of how reports have evolved over time has become blurred.
Author and writer Mic Wright, whose media criticism newsletter Conquest of the Useless has more than 12,000 subscribers, said this is the top thing he would like to see change about the news today.
Speaking to The National Media Watch podcast, he said newspapers and broadcasters should be detailing where adaptations to framing or information have been made.
Why? Because it matters more than we might think.
Wright highlighted a subtle yet important change BBC News made to a photo caption within a report about the riots in the town of Thetford in Norfolk , where people attempted to storm homes they believed to be housing asylum seekers earlier this month.
The original caption on a photo beneath the image of a house attacked by rioters said: “A large group stormed three properties, including this one on Bracken Road, amid fears they were used to house asylum seekers.”
But this was eventually changed to: “A large group stormed three properties including this one on Bracken Road, which protesters believed was being used to house asylum seekers.”
The only reason Wright spotted this change, of course, was that he had been keeping a close eye on it, as he and others had raised concerns online that the phrase “amid fears” in the original caption suggested asylum seekers were automatically something to be legitimately feared. The BBC did not say it had changed the caption.
Wright said: “[It suggests]the very fact someone is an asylum seeker means they’re someone who should be feared.
“Obviously, you could have a situation where people were being housed in a location and those particular individuals had committed crimes, but there’s no evidence of that here, that’s not what was happening. So, to use that language, it does carry an implication.
“My other issue is – and this happens a lot now – where changes are made in articles and there is no indication that a change has been made. The good practice should be if you make a change to the text of an article, you should show in that article ‘this article has been updated to change this thing’.
“It’s happening on a lot of newspaper websites where you have articles changed days and weeks after the fact and it makes it very difficult to write about what news organisations are doing because things are changed and there’s no indication of the changes, or you can have stories mashed together so the original story no longer exists anymore.
“In print you see stories in context placed around other stories and see how choices have been made whereas the front page of a website changes so quickly that understanding contextually how a story has been told is lost very soon.”
Wright – who has written for an array of national newspapers – was also critical of rioters being described as “protesters” by the mainstream media, more language which subtly legitimises the violent disorder taking place.
He said it’s not easy to see how papers attempt to influence audiences with careful language choices though, particularly when any changes are not spelled out.
“Once you’re engaged in what could be reasonably be described as an attempted pogrom, your purchase on the word protest is probably lost at that point. It’s a riot,” Wright said.
“We’ve seen the phrase ‘legitimate concerns’ used a lot in the press over the years when it comes to questions of immigration and asylum and a lot of racist stuff gets trafficked under the term legitimate concerns.
“If the Daily Mail is politically quite sympathetic to your positions and aims, then you’ll be a protester, if it’s not then you’ll be an agitator or a rioter. There’s not consistency in a lot of these papers’ attitudes to violent disorder, but to see that you have to look quite closely at the copy and framing and it’s easy to not necessarily see that unless you’re being alive to it.”
Elsewhere on the podcast, Wright speaks to Media Watch about the disappearance of in-depth reporting in the mainstream media and how this has failed audiences during a summer of wildfires and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis.
He suggests news outlets are “underestimating” young people by constantly telling stories in short-form videos that favour “novelty over depth”.
Wright appeared on the Media Watch podcast after releasing his book Breaking: How the Media Works, When It Doesn’t and Why It Matters, with the paperback edition out on August 28.
You can listen to the full episode when it is released on Tuesday evening on The National YouTube channel.
