Journalism that gives hope isn’t naïve. It’s necessary
Who really benefits when news is driven by blood thirst, alarming headlines and a cynical idea that the world never gets better?
Let’s begin with a supposition. Imagine you are the managing director of a detergent manufacturer. You have a top-notch workforce, and you and your employees take pride in delivering a good product to your customers. Let’s say that your slogan is: “For even the blackest stains,” or something like that. And let’s say that the day comes when it’s no longer true. Your detergent does its job some of the time, but it’s not nearly as good as what you claim. In particular it’s the blackest stains the detergent can’t handle, and your customers’ reaction isn’t surprising: they complain about the stains, and they stop using your detergent.
What do you do?
Do you keep on doing what you’ve been doing? Do you insist that your detergent is a first-class product, that the problem is the way people wash their clothes, or the clothes they buy?
Or do you do the opposite? Do you take a critical look at your product? Do you consider where your business has gone wrong, or how you can change the product so you actually can make the difference in people’s lives you want to?
My guess is that you choose the latter. My guess is that most reasonable people would choose the latter. And that’s why the following is still an absolute mystery to me:
Since the turn of the century, basically journalism has failed. Of course there has been lots of important and extraordinary journalism in the past two decades, but news journalism on the whole, as a profession characterized by a distinct mindset, has suffered a historic defeat.
The financial crisis of 2008 came as a shock to most people, including us in the press that normally claims to exist to expose serious flaws in the system and big-league crooks in suits. In 2016, a faceless political movement arising out of unfulfilled hopes and aspirations culminated in the USA with Donald Trump’s election as President and in Europe with Brexit — both completely unexpected by many of us in the press who believed the world was in fact the way we portrayed it. Finally, the most significant historical change in the past century — climate change and the shameful extermination of plant and animal species caused by humans — was for years in many media covered without any particular passion or special resources earmarked for it. Nature was relegated to the house-and-garden sections. The few who claimed the concern was blown all out of proportion were given just as much coverage as the many who believed the opposite.
In other words, journalism, which is so set on tracking down the new, stood in its own way when the foremost scandals and conflicts of our time snuck up on us. The preference for drama as it unfolds and the endless hunt for sensation blinded journalism to the slow, gradual changes most crucial to forming the new framework for our lives and the workings of the world. The paradox is that the critical press failed in its most basic mission: being critical.
That’s why I, like others in my profession, have been forced to acknowledge that the type of journalism I learned wasn’t suitable to meet the greatest challenges of the times. This realization has not led me to any definitive, ready-made proposal as to what type of journalism is adequate and therefore should be taught to the coming generations of journalists. It’s a question that we at Zetland, as well as editors and journalists all over the globe, are still struggling with. At the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, the program for the past several years has almost exclusively been various euphemisms for “collective soul-searching.”
But despite all the intense and truly compelling discussions, there are still many in the establishment press who insist that the detergent is fine as it is. Many are not even questioning what it means to be critical. The idea that a “good story” first and foremost is news with a sudden conflict or fly in the soup still prevails. I’ve seen “bloodthirsty” used as a journalistic badge of honor. I’ve heard journalists claim that every person in power is synonymous with a villain. There’s no reason to change our detergent. It’s the world — society, progress, all the others — that’s gone to hell. Not us.
What should we call the craft or mindset at the root of this worldview? I think of it as the cynic’s craft, and in what follows I will argue that it’s not only useless, but shallow and manipulative too, if the aim of journalism truly is to describe reality.
The Roman politician Cicero believed that to solve a crime, you have to ask the question, “Cui bono?” — “Who profits?” Who stands to gain by the deed? The question is also relevant for us: who benefits from the journalism driven by the conviction that everyone has something to hide, that all those in power are idiots, and that the best stories are the sensational deviations from the norm — the catastrophe, the absurd, the odd, the embarrassing?
The journalistic field’s answer is that it benefits society. It benefits democracy. In a democratic system it’s necessary to hold those in power accountable for their deeds, and therefore the press must act as society’s unofficial fourth branch of government alongside the three official — the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. And that’s absolutely true. A good press shines light into the darkrooms of power. A good press is critical, a press that drags false prophets down from their pedestals and exposes important matters that some wish to keep from the public eye. We need to know if a swindler is selling us a bill of goods. If the banks are being managed by greedy crooks. If a government minister has no respect for the law. A free people is a people who knows who they are — as well as who their villains are.
The cynic’s journalistic craft, however, mistakenly assumes that the only way to smoke the bad guys out is by smoking everybody out. By suspecting everyone. In this way, the cynic equates criticism with cynicism itself. He tosses a hook with fourteen barbs, two harpoons, and an attached depth charge into the pond, to catch all the fish, not only the big ones. In the worst cases, smaller offenses become magnified. A single statement gets blown out of proportion. Politicians resort to vague, trite, empty answers, because they’re afraid of misspeaking a fragment of a sentence and getting caught, and when everyone is held to the fire the same way, it’s difficult to pick the real bad guys out from people who maybe just have made a mistake.
So does suspicion benefit us — the citizens in our society? No. The only ones who stand to gain by it are those of us who wish to maintain the status quo. That monster fishing pole wielded by the cynic’s craft is in no way neutral; on the contrary, it’s an effective weapon in a reactionary battle. The cynic’s view of the world nourishes a frightened culture of fault-finding, where the school of fish keep an eye on each other, while the big fish — a looming financial or climate crisis — swim around unnoticed, because their story can’t be told in the preferred dramaturgical model: some idiot does something stupid, so someone or the other has to demand a thorough accounting.
But the biggest problem with the cynic’s craft might actually be the smaller, almost invisible transgressions. That the mindset at the core of the craft seeps through the multitude of small fissures in our consciousness and establishes itself as a type of common, routine mistrust. And I believe it manifests itself in the general sense that things are getting worse. In Denmark, for instance, when we’re willing to accept Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s wish for much greater access to video surveillance, we must ask ourselves, if it’s because we feel there’s much more going wrong nowadays than there actually is? A timid society is definitely more apt to accept mass surveillance and how it throws suspicion on everyone, than a society characterized by the trust that the PM claims to defend. As the late Professor of International Health Hans Rosling stated: “There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”
So. Who then benefits from the cynic’s craft, if not citizens? Does the media stand to gain anything? The journalist class? You can make the argument that hunting for headlines with words such as “scandal” and “shock” and “panic” should form the basis for a sound media business, especially in the age of the internet. “Problems scream, solutions whisper,” as I recently heard Nina Fasciaux of the Solutions Journalism Network say — which is why problems are so very well suited to catchy headlines. But does it benefit journalism in the long run? Today we see signs that citizens actively seek to avoid news, often because they feel it’s depressing. According to a 2017 survey, 29% of people from all over the globe put themselves in this category. Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford recently published a fascinating survey of young people’s view of the news media, in which it’s also clear that the prevailing attitude among the youngest generations — those who will be paying for journalism in the future — is that the news media covers too much of “the negative.” They believe that violence, hate, and criminality receive more attention than positive change, while those in public life often are attacked unfairly. Also, radical opinions are given too much priority in the name of what the media call “impartiality” and “balance.” Does the suspicious cynical craft among journalists in fact benefit the business that pays their salaries? I doubt that more and more all the time.
Who does that leave, then? Cui bono? Who profits from it? Who benefits from the thirst for blood, the manhunt, the alarming shock-headlines, the prioritizing of the negative, the cannons pointed at the sparrows? It benefits all those who gain from us believing the world is a lousier, more dangerous, and more risky place than it actually is. It benefits all those who win, when our collective grasp of the truth is distorted.
And who are they? Paradoxically it’s precisely the worst liars among the power brokers and the biggest crooks. The very ones the cynics claim to be fighting. They win because this cynical view of the world nurtures a culture where rationality, honesty, curiosity, modesty, and courage doesn’t pay. For when everyone in power is considered to be an idiot, you win by being the idiot who is best at figuring it out, not by not being an idiot. When headlines are given to the one who says the most insane things, you don’t win by insisting on rationality. When the media chases the one who creates the most havoc, you don’t win by finding amicable solutions. Acting respectably doesn’t attract attention. As Thomas E. Patterson, a professor of Government and the Press at Harvard, wrote after the in many ways enormously problematical press coverage of the 2016 American presidential election:
When everything and everybody is portrayed as deeply flawed, there’s no sense making distinctions on that score, which works to the advantage of those who are more deeply flawed. Civility and sound proposals are no longer the stuff of headlines, which give voice to those who are skilled in the art of destruction.
The press, Patterson pointed out, covered both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in an overwhelmingly negative manner, and they failed to make a serious effort to answer whether or not Clinton’s misdeeds were in the same league as Trump’s. He wrote:
The car wreck that was the 2016 election had many drivers. Journalists were not alone in the car, but their fingerprints were all over the wheel.
Last spring, when a Danish internet rabble-rouser, Rasmus Paludan, practically overnight gathered enough signatures to run for the Danish Parliament, Politiken’s chief editor, Christian Jensen, wrote an editorial in which he reminded everyone that it was YouTube — not the press — who had paved the way for Paludan’s rise into the public spotlight. Several of Politiken’s readers apparently couldn’t understand why the paper devoted meters of column space to Paludan’s inflammatory speeches and the tumult that followed. But, the chief editor wrote, “we need to remember what created Rasmus Paludan, the founder of a political party, a man who was found guilty of racism in a court of law: the social media.”
The truth, however, is somewhat more nuanced. True, Paludan had attracted an algorithm-optimized audience through social media, and in a year’s time he’d managed to pick up around six thousand signatures to get his party on the ballot. But he first gained national notoriety when his provocations in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen sparked the idiotic throwing of rocks and cherry bombs, after which the press carpet-bomb-covered not only the alarming disturbances, but practically every little out-of-the-way hot dog stand he happened to stop at. Simply put, the journalistic craft aided Paludan in reaching his goal.
So again: who gains from the journalism I’m talking about here? Who profits from the bazooka’s view of the world? Those who don’t mind hoisting a bazooka on their shoulder, that’s who.
What is the opposite of the journalistic worldview I’ve just described? A journalism that covers only good news? A journalism that imagines a world where if we all would just sit around in a circle, we could agree on everything? A journalism that believes in peace and love and thinks everything is going peachy keen? Is it a journalism that clicks its heels together and salutes when the powers-that-be walk through the doorway?
No. For that would also distort reality. To picture the world as if all problems are solved, that no conflicts of interest exist, would be damaging and wrong. Humanity is facing challenges that appear to be absolutely enormous. Existential anxiety and instances of corrupted power apparently never go out of style. My solution doesn’t necessarily mean it’s your solution. I talked to a northern Jutland taxi driver who was happy about all the school closings in his area, because driving kids to school in the morning was good for his business. When some people lose, others win.
As mentioned, I have no definitive answer to how journalism should reform itself — journalism is a practice, a vocation that evolves with time by experiment, by fine-tuning constantly how it also can look like. This is what we at Zetland are trying to do every day, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it only were a mathematical equation to solve, it would have been easier. But fortunately it’s not.
The basis, though, for loosening the knots in the journalistic craft must be this: journalism isn’t facing a choice where it divides the world into blocks of either black or white. Other paths exist than those that lead either out to the poisonous battlefields of cynicism or inside a starry-eyed, glittery idealism. First and foremost, our cannons must be aimed at those we see a reason to aim our cannons at. There is every reason to sharpen our harpoons when power brokers and businesses must be exposed and made to answer for both greenwashing and money laundering, for example. But while journalists must pursue genuine scandals to the bitter end, they also need to stop and remind themselves that these bona fide scandals don’t always suddenly pop up one fine morning. The most powerful stories about what truly affects our lives are sometimes found in the perceptible exceptions, but especially in the imperceptible “rules,” in what’s normal. It’s the slow changes taking place over years that create the context for our lives — income, security, housing, reproduction, food, the flow of cash. To be critical is not only to direct criticism at a person who has done something wrong. Criticism is also criticism of the system, criticism of ideology. Criticism is not only being motivated by the drama, but also by the question: Cui bono? Who profits from the way we’ve set up the world?
In the chaos of all the news flashing by, part of the job of journalism must be to put crucial events into their proper context, and that includes making clear their proper proportion. How sleazy — or fantastic — is the event, actually? How large — or small — an alarm should we be setting off? If our job is to forge a more beneficial journalism, this is also part of it. At the former news director Ulrik Haagerup’s Constructive Institute in Aarhus, they use a definition of constructive journalism that I’m a big fan of — the journalist, they say, must give citizens “a fair, accurate, and coherent picture of the world, without overdoing the negative and the sensational.” Maybe it’s as simple as that.
And finally. The greatest power journalists possess is not the potential to bring down a government minister, but rather in the part they play in creating a conception of the world through their stories. If we only tell about what’s going to hell, we give the impression of an entire world going to hell. But reality is also filled with people who make the world a better place. Reality also contains ambitious ideas, courageous choices, new realizations. Of course journalists should tell all about that. Simply because it’s there, it exists.
To criticize cannot be reduced to seeing and drawing attention to the warts of the world. You’re simply wrong if you think that hope is the opposite of criticism, and that hope therefore doesn’t belong in critical journalism. Hope is not the antithesis of criticism, but rather its prerequisite. Without hope, criticism becomes empty, because it then only points irresponsibly to itself. Hope without critical thinking is naivety, as Maria Popova so aptly put it, but “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism.”
