The downfall of quality journalism
Where is it, where has it gone and why?
It’s one of those things that people notice yet rarely is anything done about it – except making it worse, possibly – but journalism, amongst other industries, has been descending to new depths of the garbage pile especially over the last decade. Obviously, the reasons are many, varied, and complex, but it saddens me that a crucial part of society continues in its downward spiral. I want people to understand the importance of good, rigorous, investigative journalism which takes time, resources, skill and integrity. Sadly, what we see now is a lot of agenda-based articles, opinions, commentary, even entertainment and marketing, masquerading as journalism.
Starting with the economic reasons, print and advertising revenue have both decreased and completely changed. The tech revolution has ushered in a new landscape of digital news. Media ownership structures have led to the erosion of locally-based news in a lot of areas along with the cost-cutting involved, also impacting on quality.
With the reduction in revenue and changes to the landscape, clickbait became the norm as media outlets fought for the attention. In the outrage economy, headlines and entire articles themselves became increasingly focused on engaging audiences emotionally, designed specifically to increased interaction by eliciting maximum negative emotion. A lot of this is working simultaneously, the rise of social media and use of algorithms targeted to give you more of what you looked at/interacted with, complimented clickbait journalism and helped keep people outraged in their respective echo chambers online.
“In this age of un-enlightenment and enshitification, journalism is breaking like the news.”
The public’s distrust in media outlets and journalism is at an all-time high with the credibility, especially of legacy media, at an all-time low. We’ve become desensitised to the sensationalism and hyperbole in the news. In order to get stories out so fast we’ve discarded with accuracy, so much so, that the term “churnalism” was coined. The control, use and proficiency of the English language leaves a lot to be desired in modern journalism. The industry is partially self-destructing as they shifted away from any sense of objectivity and towards clearly biased reporting, cherry-picking, blatant distorting of facts, and pushing particularly narratives.
“Traditionally, there was limited competition for attention and a largely consensus reality. Now, we have a ridiculously insane competition for our attention spans, and we seem to collectively agree on less and less.”
Another factor in the downfall of quality journalism is the fact that the people aren’t demanding it nor seem to be willing to pay for it. A lot of people get their news in bit size amounts via social media for what they believe to be “free”, so that has been what they come to expect. For the masses, 30 seconds of low quality something that requires little to no effort on their behalf beats paying $X a month for a subscription with investigative deep-dives on prescient topics. Journalism isn’t one of the greatest paying industries either, or as the saying goes, “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys”, and if the story is already written and the majority of the audience doesn’t really seem to care, why would you do more at a greater cost?
Following on, with the increased polarisation, echo chambers, and people only wanting to hear what they want to hear and that which is emotionally comfortable to them, there is less demand for critical thinking, a balanced point of view, and nuance – ironically, that which we desperately need. Sadly, a significant amount of what we see today is broken up into politically-biased news i.e. left-wing news, right-wing news. This does nothing to bridge the divide across society, only affirm what I’ve previously said. People have become mistaken that everything is political and that everything starts from politics.
There is a certain saying that goes, “we get the politicians we deserve”, and I believe it’s largely attributable to journalists too. Primarily, the role of media and journalism is to hold governments to account – this is the foundation of free speech. Except, what we’ve seen more of over the years is akin to becoming mouthpieces for propaganda rather than any real hard-hitting criticism, exposing corruption etc. Regularly, it just turns into a finger-pointing contest as to who is the bad one (the one at fault) between the media and politicians with both sides dodging accountability and responsibility, further increasing the public’s distrust (of both institutions).
In an associated topic, good and/or objective news doesn’t really sell. As Bond villain Elliot Carver put it, “there’s no news like bad news” – and the media is in the business of selling news. Bad news is more evocative and likely to get you to respond, in this sense it animates and motivates. Fear controls the people, and with thanks to social media, people are increasingly more vain and narcissistic making them more prone to impulsivity and hostility to others. For the most part, the media doesn’t want you feeling good about yourself or society as it’s bad for business. They show just enough good news to give hope, but ultimately it’s not in their best interest and it’s easier to focus on bad news. You don’t need good quality journalism when you aren’t trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
Sadly, a lot of independent news outlets rely heavily on donations by way of reader help, philanthropy, or they run the organisation in a “not for profit” manner which hinders journalistic output. Still, I urge you to seek them out where you can. In the meantime, now more than ever, we need skilled and articulate human beings working together to bring awareness and understanding to an increasingly complex and potentially (more) disastrous world. I’m not looking forward to an AI-driven tailored propaganda future of news.
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