Journalists’ path to the truth has never been rockier
Opinion
From trust to news avoidance, from ‘jokes’ of death to actual deaths, there are serious problems facing journalists and journalism, and solutions are as yet unclear.
April is the cruellest of months for journalists and journalism. Except that most other months are not much better.
We have long been familiar with the ancient challenge of how to replace revenue from declining print sales with digital sales in a difficult world.
It is a familiar story of apparently inexorable decline, but sometimes a single fact brings the trend into a terrifying perspective.
The News Letter in Northern Ireland is the oldest newspaper in continuous publication in the English-speaking world and has been with us since 1737.
The weekday circulation of the Unionist-supporting publication has fallen to 4,000 — on a good day — and the paper is really only kept afloat by the weekend edition, which sells more than 14,000.
Another dangerous echo from the past came at the recent Society of Editors conference from Sir Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons.
He reminisced about the early days of his 28 years in parliament when the press gallery and lobby were teeming with regional reporters. They are all gone now, apart from a few exceptions such as The Yorkshire Post.
Hoyle also bemoaned the hollowed-out local papers, often no longer on their local high streets and no longer able to carry out basic functions such as covering councils and courts.
Constellation of problems
The examples are stark, although the situation is well-known.
It is the constellation of linked problems that can give even the greatest of optimists pause for thought.
Stir in the lack of trust of journalists and journalism, seen in its extreme form in the contemporary US, and that’s before accounting for the disappearance of the under-35 audiences to often unreliable social media outlets.
Then add in active news avoidance by increasing sections of the population because the news is simply too depressing — and you have a potentially existential problem on your hands.
Risky business
And that isn’t even the worst of it.
Covering wars has always been dangerous for journalists and across the years there have been famous casualties such as Nick Tomalin on the Golan Heights in 1973 and Marie Colvin in 2012 in Syria — both from The Sunday Times.
But now the numbers are greater and journalists are being targeted in a way that was unusual in the past.
According to the International Federation of Journalists, at least 104 journalists and media workers were killed last year — more than half in Gaza.
Last week, two more died in Gaza, with others seriously injured, when an Israeli air strike hit a media tent.
The attack came the day after journalist Islam Miqdad was killed alongside her husband and child in another attack.
According to US-based think-tank Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Israeli forces have killed more than 230 journalists and media workers since the war in Gaza began following the 7 October attack by Hamas on southern Israel.
Jokes aside
Obviously, the attacks in Gaza are extreme and it is difficult to know whether journalists are being deliberately targeted or not.
Yet there are examples of people who should know much better saying the most outrageous, and potentially dangerous, things about journalists.
Very few may have heard before of the Republican senator for Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, although he is more than a little notorious now.
Mullin suggested that politicians could “handle our differences” with journalists by shooting and killing them.
In a two-minute video, he said: “I bet they [reporters] would write a lot less false stories… if we could still handle our differences that way.”
Naturally, Mullin said he had only been joking and that he had earlier joked that caning might be brought back to settle such political disputes.
He may or may not have been joking, but there was nothing funny about Nevada politician Robert Telles, who was last year found guilty of stabbing Jeff German, a reporter from the Las Vegas Review-Journal who had written articles critical of his political conduct.
Elsewhere, while the Associated Press and Reuters have been excluded from presidential briefings, the new head of news at X has, however, been able to join the White House pool.
So social media are publishers, after all.
Solutions needed
Back home, there are different worries about the danger that might arise from online trolls who target journalists, particularly women, with both online abuse and death threats.
Investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr warned at the editors’ conference that all news organisations should have safety officers and we should now have to wait until there is a death resulting from online abuse before action is taken.
In a current interview in InPublishing — conducted by yours truly — Cadwalladr also explains how she is rebuilding her career after her long-term freelance contract with The Observer was not renewed when the paper was bought by Tortoise Media.
It is a lot easier to set out the serious problems facing journalists and journalism than come up with solutions.
One modest example came from Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, who was awarded the fellowship of the Society of Editors.
“We have to keep doing what we can,” said Bowen, adding: “We have to get people through the disinformation and lies and point a path to the truth.”
The society’s president, Sarah Whitehead, head of news gathering at Sky News, urged us all to be more proactive.
“We publish great journalism, but we need to talk about the very best of it much more and over a longer period of time,” Whitehead urged.
At least that all sounds as if it’s on the way to part of a solution.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.