Breaking News

The media is broken. It didn’t take a load of reporters wandering around a terrorism suspect’s apartment like one of those teenage parties that gets out of hand after someone posts about it on Facebook to tell me that.

But the deliberate contamination of a building which is part of an ongoing criminal investigation nonetheless highlights something which has become all too evident for anyone paying attention to how news is collected and disseminated to the public these days: the media in general has no clear idea what is and isn’t acceptable any more.

The reasons for this are numerous, but broadly there are two main problems; firstly, there’s basically no consequences for getting something wrong. Depends what you get wrong and who you’re wrong about of course, but unless someone with a bit of pull makes a fuss, generally speaking fuck all happens if someone prints something inaccurate, particularly if an allegation does not refer to a specific individual, but trashes a somewhat amorphous group of ordinary people. As much as news was always very lightly regulated (in the UK, the Press Complaints Commission was run by newspaper editors themselves), with the proliferation of monetised blogs on the Internet, there’s now little hope of keeping everything in check, if people were to even try.

The second issue is one of revenue. The switch from print media to the online world has not been a smooth transition, especially in an environment where no one wants to pay for anything, or even so much as look at adverts when consuming information. As such, publications have increasingly resorted to the clickbait model in order to try and maintain profits, namely producing an increased number of articles with a suitably intriguing (ridiculous) headline and synopsis, with a body of text beneath it of compromised quality, certainly compared to what may have been produced if the writer had more time to consider their output. Right now, there’s no practical difference between Buzzfeed and the Guardian in terms of how they operate, the main note of difference being the international reputation for quality one of those outlets once had.

Like any tricks though, there are diminishing returns for those already familiar with them, and there’s evidence the public’s patience is wearing thin, based on the increased frequency of articles and their ever-dwindling quality. The battle for revenue has claimed a rather high-profile victim too, namely investigative journalism. While a few places keep the flame (barely) alive, many news outlets have been quick to dispose of the expensive, time-consuming practice. Its continued existence certainly hasn’t been helped by a number of shoddy, high-profile failures from journalists ill-equipped to the task, a la Rolling Stone.

Anyone hoping for cool, dispassionate reporting from trained journalists with at least the bare minimum of fact-checking find their choices severely limited nowadays, and that introduces another question - why is it so easy to write for a news outlet now? A lot of places don’t even require a journalism degree to work there, but shouldn’t that be something strongly insisted upon? You don’t get that with other professions. “Well, I don’t actually a have law degree, but I’ve watched a shitload of Law & Order. I think I can wing it.”

Right now, there is basically no such thing as objective, fact-based reporting; what there is are people with agendas seeing who can shout the loudest. The loudest, most consistent howler gets to document reality as they see it, or how they wish to see it, and everyone else has to slot themselves around that construction, lest they appear out of step, or more hazardously for them, actively in opposition to the prevailing gatekeepers of what is right and true.

The media has shown no signs of remedying any of these issues as time goes on, and indeed they only seem to be getting worse. I only wish that process would speed up and the entire media landscape crashes so that something new can be built in its place, as I now believe this is the only possible remedy to the current situation.

Though I fear impromptu live versions of Cribs from active crime scenes won’t be the worst we’ve witnessed before that happens.