Call me an idealist, but I believe in a world where the media serves the public interest. Where it acts as a titanic RSS feed – if you will – that furnishes the average punter with essential information they might not have the time or inclination to find for themself. I believe in conscience, integrity, responsibility, and access to knowledge.
Or I’d like to believe in that. Instead, we’re faced with a media that seems to care little for its duty to the public, its employees, and indeed itself.
And this isn’t really anyone’s fault. By its very nature, the media is subjective, at the disposal of its bankrollers, and never realistically able to fulfill the wishes of the idealists. Hell, does anyone really know what ‘proper news’ constitutes anyway? And if so, how can we quantify it and assess its value to society? There’s an apparent decline in journalism, which is beyond the control of journalists and editors everywhere.
So we work with what we can. A constant flow of budget cuts wipe resources from the newsroom, and the media is ever more reliant on news subsidy, which is content from third parties – news agencies, user generated content and PR.
In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies and a team of Cardiff University researchers found that the content of most UK national papers contains between 65 and 69 per cent news subsidy. And this isn’t just the ranting of an embittered hack – it’s backed up by almost every related academic study of the last decade.
So we’re now in a position where it’s not just the media that has a duty to the public interest, but PR practitioners too. And PRs have to offset this responsibility against their duty to their clients.
In this age of multi-platform news delivery, we’re inundated with news content from all directions – the majority of which is free. It’s a challenge to gauge the reliability of media providers, but those displaying a high degree of integrity and transparency are clearly ahead of the game.
Thanks to the Internet, a lot more people have become content providers. And this is both a great and terrible thing of course. But with a multiplicity of perspectives, and increased accountability to media-critic-bloggers (the new integrity police), the workings of the media can be much more transparent.
And with great virtue comes true glory…
