Vocation of the Contemporary Journalist
by Conrad Black http://www.conradmblack.com/1131/vocation-of-the-contemporary-journalist
Since I was commissioned by the Chesterton Society to write of the role of the journalist, some reference should be made to Chesterton's own ideas of journalism. Of course, he was an extremely unrepresentative journalist. He was a brilliant prose writer and a man of extremely high culture, but also he was a thoroughly benign and generous personality, although he was anything but naïve. Chesterton was such an engaging writer that he advised that the best course for a journalist was always to surprise readers. The example he famously gave in his autobiography was "to write an article for the Sporting Times and another for the Church Times and put them into the wrong envelopes. Then, if the articles were accepted and were reasonably intelligent, all the sporting men would go about saying to each other 'great mistake to suppose there isn't a good case for us; really brainy fellows say so.' And all the clergymen would go about saying to each other 'Rattling good writing on some of our religious papers; very witty fellow.' " While he acknowledged that this was "a little faint and fantastic as a theory," he said it was "the only theory upon which I can explain my own undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet Street." He explained: "I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafés and Catholic Cathedrals; and they loved it because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended a Medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit. What is really the matter, with almost every paper, is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper." He judged it unlikely that others would repeat what he called "my rare and reckless and unscrupulous maneuver; of anyone waking up to find himself famous as the only funny man on the Methodist Monthly; or the only serious man on Cocktail Comics." Chesterton lamented the passage of what he called the old Bohemian life of Fleet Street. "The very name of Bohemia has faded from the map of London as it has faded from the map of Europe." He was disappointed that Bohemia ceased to exist and became part of Czechoslovakia. "I went about asking people in Fleet Street whether this change was to be applied to the metaphorical Bohemia of our own romantic youth... When Fleet Street grew riotous, would people say "I hate these rowdy Czechoslovakian parties?" Chesterton naturally gravitated toward eccentric fellow journalists and in his autobiography, described a number of them. He wrote of Johnston Stephen that he had said to Chesterton "The only little difficulty that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it." When asked whether the Roman Catholic Church was not corrupt prior to the Reformation, Stephen replied "How horrible must have been the corruption which could've tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox, John Calvin, and Martin Luther." One of his favorite working colleagues in Fleet Street was a woman who produced melodramatic serials for weekend publication in the newspapers and on one occasion received a telegram from her editor: "You have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not married." Sometimes when writing about people but needing to disguise their identity to avoid the danger of defamation claims, he attached fantastic names to real characters, such as "Splitcat Chintzibobs." Not much more need be said to illustrate the endearing intellectual eccentricity of G.K. Chesterton, journalist, than the part he played in promoting an exchange involving H.G. Wells. A reader wrote to the newspaper criticizing Wells' meeting with the black American leader Booker T. Washington. It was signed "White Man." Wells wrote back subscribing himself " 'The White Man of Bexley,' as if he were a sort of monster." This led to a letter from "Brown Man" and finally to a letter from "Mauve Man with Green Spots." I think this is sufficient to show that Chesterton's genius, so evident in almost all his writing, and an important part of his eccentricity, makes his journalistic experiences and impressions, while extremely entertaining, rather unrepresentative. Chesterton was so oblivious and invulnerable to the biases and shortcomings of the media and was so firm and well-informed in his own views that he was rarely more than whimsically entertained by the vagaries of the working press. Through most of his lifetime the British national press was controlled by only a few famous and assertive proprietors, especially Lord Northcliffe and his brother Lord Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Astor, and Lord Camrose. These men were a very mixed bag in terms of their balanced judgment and responsible exercise of the great influence that they enjoyed. As all of the United Kingdom is in the same time zone and the distances are quite manageable by North American standards, the London morning newspapers circulated throughout the country and their owners were all members of the House of Lords and were all very politically involved. The prime minister at the time that Chesterton died in 1936, Stanley Baldwin, famously referred to Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook as possessing "power without responsibility, the traditional position of the harlot." Rothermere was for a time the head of the League of British Fascists and had been considered a candidate for the position of king of Hungary, (which was in fact never filled), after World War I. Beaverbrook was the only one of these newspaper owners to enter politics directly, achieve elective office and serve in the wartime cabinets in both World Wars. But all of them exercised great influence over their newspapers, and to a large extent in Chesterton's lifetime, a discussion of the quality of the press was a discussion of the journalistic ethics and political preferences of the principal newspaper proprietors. The vast broadening of the media, first with radio, then television, and more recently with the explosion of the Internet and social media, has altogether decentralized it and made almost completely obsolete the perspective that Chesterton and his contemporaries had of a British press effectively controlled by a handful of individuals. The North American newspaper industry was never as centralized, though it was subject to chain ownership. The United States and Canada span four full time zones and the regional differences in those countries make them much less homogeneous than the United Kingdom. In the circumstances of his lifetime, Chesterton could therefore afford the luxury of focusing on the foibles of the individual journalists while laying the credit or blame for the quality of the media on its principal proprietors. Today, throughout the English-speaking world, it is difficult to justify such an amused view of the peculiarities of the working press as a group as Chesterton so entertainingly expressed about old Fleet Street, where most of the country's newspaper circulation was generated from a few blocks of offices and press buildings. The extreme decentralization of press or media influence has transferred much of the power the proprietors in the industry formerly held to an almost unlimited number of journalists and commentators, hundreds of whom are prominent personalities in their own right. Where in Chesterton's time, as my friend Malcolm Muggeridge put it when he was an employee of Lord Beaverbrook at the Daily Express, he was writing for "a readership of one small elderly man in the Shires," (his employer), now anyone with a byline or access to the airwaves can create a constituency and exercise a direct personal influence on segments of opinion. In this era, with the exception of a couple of individuals such as Rupert Murdoch, it does not much matter to media content what the chairman of the media companies think. What matters is the groupthink of the bylined or on-air personalities who most directly influence public opinion. Some of the perceived problems of the Chesterton era persist and may even have been aggravated. Separating news, reportage, from the opinion of the journalist, is no more rigorously enforced and demarcated now than it was 80 or 100 years ago. And whereas in Chesterton's time it was possible to indulge the eccentricities of journalists and even marvel at them, today it is hard to be quite so philosophical about the tendency of many journalists to use their positions to manipulate opinion capriciously. Having employed thousands of journalists over many decades and on four continents, I have concluded that a very large number of them are fundamentally dissatisfied with being chroniclers and reporting what others say and do. The fact that no one is much interested in what journalists themselves think is a frustration that gnaws at the character of a large proportion of the Western press. Nothing is more important to Western civilization them a free press, and it must generally be true that, within reason, the greater the variety of choice for public information and general entertainment, the better. In that sense there has been considerable progress since Chesterton's time, of the overwhelming influence of the five or six British newspaper proprietors mentioned earlier, some of them of questionable judgment and even mental stability, and a BBC completely dominated by Lord Reith, an elitist socialist and a director general just as dominating as the most notorious barons of Fleet Street. (Reith was certainly successful at the BBC, which he effectively founded, but not in his ambition to rule the country. In his diary, he referred to Britain's greatest leader at the height of his prestige, in the greatest crisis in its national history, as "that bloody shit Churchill," a formidable example of the megalomania of many media chiefs.) One of the features of this present relatively diversified era is that the traditional national media of our leading Western countries have lost much of their former credibility, even allowing for the fragmentation of market that technology and other changes have wrought. It has always been a shock that so literate and generally informed a public as that of the United Kingdom was so terribly disserved by the sensationalism, irresponsibility, and nastiness of its largest circulation newspapers. If a yardstick of press irresponsibility could be established by multiplying circulation by a factor of reckless sensationalism, no matter how creatively employed, Northcliffe and other members of his family were contenders in this long term sweepstakes of disservice, but Rupert Murdoch would have to be the supreme champion, easing in just ahead of Robert Maxwell and Northcliffe. Murdoch has had the further distinction by these saturnine standards, of transforming the London Times, which for centuries was one of the most authoritative and respected newspapers in the world, into a tabloid shadow of its former distinction. Murdoch's News Corporation retains its preeminence at the lower quality end of the British newspaper market even as the industry shrinks, but is now mainly a television, satellite, cable, and film company. In the United States, where, as has been mentioned, centralization of the media, as was inevitable in so much larger a country then the UK, was always much less pronounced, the most influential national media never included an authoritative public broadcasting system. The influence exercised by the principal traditional American media outlets has declined in itself, as with Time Magazine, and generally as well, because of public disillusionment with the national media's handling of some of the greatest crises of modern American history. These have included what is widely regarded as misrepresentation of the Vietnam War, and a continuing and in historical circles, growing, controversy over the Watergate scandal. A very large section of contemporary American opinion believes that the national media unjustly accused a very successful and distinguished administration of crimes of which it is now clear there was no convincing evidence in respect of President Richard Nixon's own involvement. This I believe is one of the principal reasons why an immense portion of the traditional following of the American national media has migrated to individual commentators such as Rush Limbaugh as a source of their information on domestic political matters. Though it would require extensive research to substantiate this view in a technically rigorous way, it is almost certainly true that declining credulity amongst the public in the West is both a response to the revealed failure of the media to exercise their trust responsibly, and part of a larger process of the coarsening of life and a rise in cynicism and erosion of traditional institutions and beliefs. All credible public opinion surveys show that virtually the only occupations that are respected by the majority of the public are a few of the learned professions, in particular doctors, and up to a point clergymen and architects, the professional military, and the proverbial average person. Journalists are no more trusted than the politicians, lawyers, or used car salesman, and there is no shortage of justification for that general view of them. While journalists profess to regard themselves as a craft, and some lip service is still paid to the virtuosity of writing and speaking well, standards of written journalism have deteriorated, like public discourse generally. Most journalistic writing is now quite mediocre and peer attention is focused on the discovery of stories rather than the presentation of them. Television and Internet journalism is overwhelmingly a matter of appearance and fluency rather than elegance of formulation or quality of content. It has fallen upon the occupation of journalism to bear the greatest burden of the dumbing down of public taste as the triumph of the majority steadily prevails, and not without some benefit to society generally, over the previous elevation of elites. In their powers of self-regulation, professional journalistic associations do not remotely resemble associations in the learned professions such as the bar or the societies of medical doctors. Their activities consist chiefly in celebrating themselves and distributing commendations among their membership, frequently on the basis of the criteria of who is most disruptive to the subjects of their journalistic attention. The most egregious examples of this practice must be the Niagara of awards conferred by journalistic associations upon their own number over the Watergate affair, a great deal of which it has now emerged, was fiction, malice, and the nihilistic joy of destroying the president and his administration. The fragmentation of the media market has been, on balance, a constructive development. While it has thrown open the doors of media access and variety to a full range of perspectives and levels of truthfulness and distinction, it has reduced the influence of over-mighty media personalities, including the former directors and news chiefs of the three major American television networks. The profusion of choice, while it his confused many, has in promoting competition, at least encouraged some effort to raise the standards of public information at the upper end of the media menu, even as the scramble to dig lower and become more vulgar, unreliable, and defamatory, has also been accentuated. With all of these changes, the role of the journalists has remained essentially the same since Chesterton's time. They are the chroniclers who inform the public of newsworthy events and the activities of the news-making personalities. Conceptually nothing has changed, and certainly the importance of this process and the importance of the integrity of an independent press have not declined. It would be impossible to organize society on a democratic basis and be confident of even the most barely acceptable standards of public governance and behavior without a public as adequately, however imperfectly, informed as the major Western countries now have. As unsatisfactory as our media may be, and on balance I do not believe that they deserve even a passing grade, some indulgence must be shown them because the only avenue to improve media quality is a more informed and exigent public. And the only way of achieving that goal is in higher standards of public education. Here the failure of our society has been much more clear and damaging then in the partial deterioration of media quality. Despite the steadily larger commitment to public resources for our state-run education systems, the quality of teachers has steadily and alarmingly declined on the level of basic education in the traditional disciplines of language, arithmetic and general knowledge. Teachers have rivaled even journalists in putting on the airs of professional associations while conducting themselves like irresponsible trade unions. In the one occupation as in the other, strikes are frequent and are resorted to without any apparent concern for the public welfare. Where journalists have gained no ground in their intermittent pretense to being a profession, teachers have essentially fumbled their way out of the respect formally tendered to them as not only a profession but in some measure a learned profession. All comparative studies show that graduates of elementary school and those who matriculate from secondary school and those who conclude undergraduate programs, are less well-educated and less competent in the use of language and basic mathematics than preceding generations. In these circumstances it is very difficult to see how the demand of the public for higher standards of information and more tasteful levels of entertainment in the media can be expected to be met. Thus we find ourselves in the invidious position of superimposing upon a decliningly urbane public a media, (i.e. a mass of journalists and their product), that though its average quality has probably also declined somewhat, has been mitigated in the negative consequences of that decline by a dilution of the influence of individual media personalities and by the proliferation of a variety of sources of information. There may be a further and larger currant in this cake. It is possible that with the immense flood of choice to all those who sample the media, a premium will attach to quality. Whereas in earlier times such as Chesterton's, mediocrity in newspapers did not bring damaging consequences to the propagator of it because of the absence of competition, at least by present standards, today mediocrity, even mediocrity in the presentation of sensational news, drives the public into the arms of competitors who, if not of greater integrity, at least formulate the liberties they take with more originality and the news with greater professionalism. And the fragmentation of market also, although this too is very hard to prove with any scientific rigour, while it does not endow journalists with any greater sense of professional ethics, at least may insulate them against the dangers of megalomania that so evidently corrupted an inordinate number of the great media personalities of the past. The media proprietors have more competition than ever and must always be on guard against complacency or the attitudes of invulnerability. And those media personalities constantly in the public eye, prominent columnists and commentators in print and television and Internet, have a much smaller share of the overall market then did the corresponding people who preceded them a generation and more ago, such as in Chesterton's time, including Chesterton himself. Today there are comparatively few oracles like Walter Lippmann or Edward R Murrow, or Walter Cronkite, or even great British media figures like Richard Dimbleby and Malcolm Muggeridge. Some of those individuals had more restrained egos than others and some of them possessed greater genuine insight into the world than others, though all were presentationally talented. Now most news readers present abbreviated summaries and are popular chiefly because they are attractive women stylishly and even revealingly dressed, who read what has been put in front of them. The astonishing progress of information technology enables the whole public to be relatively well acquainted with the most distant parts of the world and what happens there, if they are so minded. The only pundits, as opposed to mere chroniclers, that can be found in the media now are authorities on current events and genuine specialists in relatively high brow outlets. No one really has the influence of a Walter Lippmann today, and that must be considered progress because although Lippmann was certainly an intelligent man, his opinions were as often mistaken as not, and his influence was at best neutral. In summary, the role of the journalist is what it has always been, and it is not better conducted now than it was in Chesterton's time. There is little hope for improvement but quality is there for those who seek it and the mediocrity or inadequacy of much of the media is mitigated to some degree by the reduced market share of every media outlet and of every single journalist. It could be, and could become, worse. © 2023 Conrad Black receive the latest by email: subscribe to conrad black's free mailing list ![]() |
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