Ah, so you were a journalist: the deceit of spin

What has happened to news journalism’s traditional commitment to objectivity? No one expects there to be much of it in what once was known as the yellow press, or on commercial radio and TV. But now even “respectable” media (broadsheet, television and radio) will present statements as hard fact without so much as a “said” or “claimed” to indicate that this is unsubstantiated information and not yet verified.

It is a trend that must that must delight politicians, business and the now largely commercialised world of scientific endeavour.

The trend is especially evident in headline writing: even in so-called quality media, headlines frequently appear that are not supported by the small print. A headline will shout “fact” when the story says only that a claim has been made.

Attributions have been on the outer for some time. A few years back, I heard a layout sub-editor utter words to the effect that “attributions make headings look ugly, and so do quotes in headlines - so don’t use them”.

Last year, on radio, I heard that President Vladimir Putin’s security troops had killed Russia’s “most wanted man”. No ifs or buts - this unnamed most wanted man was dead. The item, based entirely on the utterances of Putin’s spin machine, offered no evidence that this was the truth. The implication of the item was that we had to believe this was true because Putin’s spokesman had said so.

Not surprisingly, Putin’s alleged coup in destroying this Chechnya “terrorist” was on the eve of Russia’s hosting of the G-8 meeting. And, equally unsurprisingly, this “most wanted man” had been planning an attack on the G-8 talkfest. I still don’t know if the story was ever verified, but I continue to be uncomfortably aware that, almost as if with magic wand, national leaders are increasingly pulling rabbits out of hats at times most convenient to them.

Deceitful media massage has become much more common in recent years - especially since September 11, 2001. It turns up at times when governments want to draw attention to how clever they have been in thwarting some crisis (even those planned by hapless “illegals” in leaky boats) that would damage national security; or corporations want to draw our focus away from events that are damaging to their reputations? Spin is king and the media either intentionally promotes it or, for the sake of a good story, doesn’t bother to expose the deceit in it.

The red herring has become a useful device of political leaders, especially when they are in electoral trouble. After his disastrous first year as PM, when he performed like a buffoon, John Howard twigged that the way to remain secure in office is to con the public all of the time and to make a virtue of deception delivered with statesmanlike dignity. Few draw red herrings with greater skill than Howard. And even though several in recent months have tended to backfire on him, he’s still likely to dish them out by the shoal in the election campaign.

Siev X, children in the water, weapons of mass destruction, terrorist bomb attacks that “could happen”: these Howard Government red herrings come quickly to mind without resort to files to track down other untruths, including Howard’s 1983 assurance, as Malcolm Fraser’s treasurer, that there was no deficit (as I recall, Bob Hawke found a deficit of about $4 billion, a huge sum by those days’ standards). All of these deceits came to us as largely unquestioned fact.

Why should we, the listening and viewing public, have to put up with such meekly accepting reporting? Has it anything to do with our loss of the sense of a need for truth or accuracy? Is it because our leaders know we are innately gullible? Or that they know anything will distract a public that has an ever-diminishing attention span.

An example of how the media has lost touch with objectivity was the submissive way in which it accepted Bush’s declaration of “war on terror”, and totally failed to comprehend that even the concept of a war on terror is a nonsense. A “campaign” against terror perhaps; even a “battle” against terror in the sense of a person fighting an illness (one never hears of someone dying after a long war on cancer).

Promotion of a war on terror - at first accepted, almost without exception by prominent, widely read commentators and “statesmen” who should have known better - was a ploy by a propaganda machine that had the dubious job of promoting the image of a man who, if he was not the leader of the world’s only superpower, would be regarded as being a lot of cents short of a dollar. Even if it were possible to have a “war on terror”, it would be a war without end, because terror, as it always has been, will always be with us, inside and outside the law.

This is not a blanket condemnation of modern journalism. In more than half a century in the game, I have seen a continual improvement in the quality of investigative journalism. And, more and more, journalists worldwide are risking life and limb to get to the truth. Yet when their reliably documented reports exposing calumnies by government and business are served up to the public, almost nothing happens. More likely, the response is a shrugged “So what!” Only occasionally is the public response forceful enough to make a political miscreant (usually a minion) bite the dust. And even when the buck does happen to stop at the top, and causes a big head to be lopped, the scum frequently floats back to the surface, sometimes in as little as a couple of years.

This is an old sub-editor writing, so my next point might well be taken as seriously sour grapes. In the past 15 years or so, economic rationalist managements - and their new brand of editors - have, it seems, done their best to marginalise sub-editors by shifting them out of “journalism” and into “production”.

A few years back, a young staff member asked me what I did.

“I am a sub-editor. What do you do?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“We’re all journalists,” I said gently, indicating that my interest was in knowing exactly what role this “journalist” had.

My message was not getting across.

So I mentioned that I had been a reporter and writer for many years.

Brightly came the dawning: “Oh, so you were a journalist.”

Loss of objectivity certainly has something to do with the lack of experience on sub-editorial desks today. On my first newspaper in England, the average age of the subs’ desk was well into the 50s (one sub, the font of all wisdom to us youngsters, was in his mid-70s).

As mid-20th century cadet journalists, we all knew that, one day, we might be competent enough to be a political or foreign correspondent, a feature writer, even an editor. But we were not sure if we would ever be experienced and skilled enough to earn a permanent seat on a sub-editors’ desk, the place where newspapers are finally sculpted for public consumption.

Few cadet journalists now aspire to a seat on the subs’ desk - or even think about the possibility of ending up in this last line of defence against authors’ inadequacies.

All too often today, management is prepared to employ as sub-editors people with little or no journalistic experience; or people with only a handful of years on the reporting beat, people who have still not come to terms with the nuances of expression, the dangers hidden in loose writing, the legal pitfalls, the need to simultaneously maintain a publication’s style yet preserve an author’s unique touch - and the need to ensure that a headline says what the story says.

Perhaps it’s not journalism’s fault that, as its practitioners, we are so sloppy in our delivery; that we recklessly accept almost any rubbish as “truth”.

Perhaps it is because the public no longer give a damn whether anything they read or hear is true.

Perhaps it is because the public have become inured to fork-tongued, piously delivered utterances of politicians, bureaucrats and executives; brutality by despotic, military-backed tyrants; self-righteous faith-based certainty by the religious; obscenities perpetrated by terrorists and governments alike; near inviolable white-collar crime; and to news of “miracle” drugs and “cures” from a world of science now largely owned and controlled by corporates rather than operating unfettered in independent research institutions and universities.

Whatever it is, in this information era, far too much unauthenticated, undocumented crap is being peddled as news - and being passed on as such to the public.

And the politicians and business czars love it: as long as we, the hoi polloi, struggle to cope with information overload (sometimes feeling that we are drowning in a deluge of data), it’s all too easy for them to keep pulling the wool over our eyes.