New years mean new leaves mean new challenges. And if there is one compelling challenge for journalists and their rough trade in 2018, it lies in re-establishing some modest degree of public respectability: in short, a measure of trust. For without a doff of the cap as big news breaks, there is only a shrug of the shoulders – which really means nothing at all.
And shrugging, when you contemplate the media wasteland of 2017, has been the pervasive reaction. Trump tweets across fields of cultured, East Coast derision. In Politico’s view, he defines the press as his “prime adversary”, not a foreign power, or terrorism, or an energy crisis; “he has changed the way we view the press and the way the press views itself.”
For Trump, says Politico, “the struggle is Manichean, with him representing good and the press representing bad. In a recent tweet, he wrote: ‘Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative, with numerous forced retractions of untrue stories. Hence my use of Social Media, the only way to get the truth out. Much of Mainstream Media has become a joke!’ At a recent rally, he said journalists are ‘sick people,’ ‘liars’ who are fomenting ‘division’.
“In statement after statement, he and his advisers, like Steve Bannon, have cast the national press, not the Democrats, as ‘the opposition party’. This trick of classification has paid steady dividends; it allows him to nullify every critical story as politically motivated and corrupt.”
And increasingly, for Britain, these echoes resound, as a series of Brexit buffoons decide to send in the clowns. There is no steady, sober state of governance: and, all the while, the messengers get shot.
So Corbyn wasn’t PM by Christmas? Blame it on a demented Dacre – or the lingering remnants of the Blairite hegemony. In each and every case, though, make sure there are media prophets in the firing line. Everything, with only the most cursory examination, is deemed fake news. Nothing has the validation of truth.
This, of course, is deadly for the ebb and flow of information. It casts malignant shadows wherever it goes. But it is worse, indeed worst of all, for journalism. And the essential challenge is knowing what to do about it.
One answer is cleaning the stables. See the long string of allegations against American news TV, the top presenters of breakfast and public service broadcasters suddenly removed from sight for good and all; then examine the relatively puny list of UK equivalents shuffling in their wake. It feels like a job half done. As for print reporting and editing, the job seems barely begun. Perhaps British journalistic integrity leaves America in the shade; or perhaps, bizarrely, this is a challenge we haven’t risen to yet.
The usual buzzwords – rigour, transparency – rise as usual for scrutiny and pursuit. Transparency because newspapers launching investigations into their own behaviour is the best answer to public cynicism. Rigour because, edition after edition, such targets cannot be allowed to slip away.
From Panama to Paradise, the enveloping stories of the last few years have concerned tax avoidance at the top, from politicians to bankers to media moguls. Has that last category of avoiders been pursued as hard as it deserved? Have the bowers of tax-free status been stripped bare? You need no particular barrels of cynicism in your cellar to believe that the chase may have faded because it came dangerously close to touching some men and women very near to home – too close to validating the undermining of trust in journalism.
There’ll be plenty of articles on such themes over the next few months as Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks echoes Ben Bradlee in The Post, the almost-true Hollywood tale of a paper at war with a succession of grubby Washington administrations. Gosh! Who needs to glamourise journalism’s image when Tom Hanks holds centre stage as its arch defender of probity? Touched by Hanks means touched by a golden halo of US saintliness. Enter heroism stage left.
We remember Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and similar triumphs. They burnish our business. But they are not, by any means, the whole of the business: a business that means treating readers in a jam like human beings, identifying distress, becoming a functioning part of society rather than commentators at its edges. In short, seeking to be worthy of trust in the hole where admiration ought to be.