Here starteth the lesson. Photograph: PA
It is worth reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's attack on modern media yesterday in full, although the news reports of it give a fairly accurate summary. (They had to really, under the circumstances.)
One of the dominant themes of the Archbishop's sermon is that secrecy among public figures should not be taken as evidence of guilt and that the revelation of secret data should not be assumed automatically to be in the public interest. Indeed 'the public' itself when cited as the beneficiary of a scoop can be a media concoction. Dr Williams has a point there, but having read the speech, I'm worried by the lack of concrete examples. There are plenty of citations from books condemning current journalistic practice, but not many from newspapers themselves. He alludes to the News of the World's decision to publish pictures of alleged paedophiles, which is a pretty extreme case. But in the realm of political reporting he cites only hypothetical examples:
The calculation of what will surprise (or better still, shock) the public is based on a careful assessment of what is unassailable and utterly taken for granted by that public. The leftwing press needs to know that 'Secret Government memo reveals plans to restore death penalty' will attract attention. The rightwing press needs to know that 'Secret Government memo reveals plans to make national anthem illegal' will have the same effect. The public is assumed to be homogeneous; and this particular public is assumed to be representative of the real moral life of society.
This is how news is inevitably written; and it is written on the assumption that knowing about secret Government memos conveys to people some sense of increased power - if only in terms of warning about impending disaster.
Now I may be missing something, but secret government plans to bring back the death penalty or abolish the national anthem would both be newsworthy, important and worthwhile revelations, wouldn't they? I for one think society would have been well served by its media if they reported such things. But then, I'm a hack.
There are surely more nuanced cases from the real world. What, I wonder, is the Archbishop's view on the exposure of David Blunkett's intervention to secure a visa for his partner's nanny? Public interest or indecent and corrosive intrusion? What about Euan Blair's Leicester Square drinking episode? It's a shame the Archbishop didn't give us some clearer pointers as to where he thinks journalists crossed the line.
Meanwhile, a quick technorati search shows only a flicker of blogosphere response to the Archbishop's comments on internet communication ("indiscriminate information flow"), but the day is young. I'm sure this is the passage that will draw the most attention online:
Unwelcome truth and necessary and prompt rebuttal are characteristic of the web-based media. So are paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry. The atmosphere is close to that of unpoliced conversation - which tends to suggest that the very idea of an appropriate professionalism for journalists begins to dissolve. Many traditional newspapers and broadcasters now offer online versions of their product and many have allowed interactive elements to come into their regular material, for example by printing debates conducted on the web. But they have not thereby abandoned the claims of professional privilege.
Part of the problem - a part that, to be fair, Dr Williams touches on only briefly - is that there is no clear correlation between the vastly increased quantity of news and the perceived decline in quality. There is more of everything, accurate, inaccurate, measured, polemic. Whether or not greater volume of the bad somehow dilutes the output of the good, I don't know. It is hard not to feel in Dr Williams's comments a degree of bewilderment in a man confronted with limitless and unmediated choice of new media. That is a feeling with which a lot of people, old media journalists included, can easily identify.
The Archbishop continues:
The question that seems to pose itself is whether a balance can be struck between the professionalism of the classical media and the relative free-for-all of online communication.
That is a question indeed. We're doing our best Dr Williams.
