Where the Truth Lies E-Book

Julia Hobsbawm

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The relationship between the serious news media and the truth is under scrutiny as never before. In recent years the BBC and the New York Times have been knocked sideways by scandals alleging exaggeration and distortion. At the same time, the influence of the PR industry continues to expand, so that no organisation that is serious about communicating its message can be without a PR strategy. In a series of wide-ranging essays about public relations and journalism, Where the Truth Lies tackles head-on issues as diverse as the public role of PR, the reportage of crises and the role of 'new' media. It also includes Julia Hobsbawm's four point plan to remake the relationship between PR and journalism. Contributors include John Lloyd, Simon Jenkins, Peter Oborne, Mark Borkowski and Janine di Giovanni.

Leseprobe

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

Julia Hobsbawm has spent twenty-five years working in communications, in PR, journalism, publishing and broadcasting. In 2006 she founded Editorial Intelligence, the media, analysis and networking company described as ‘intellectual viagra’ by the FT. She is visiting Professor of Public Relations at the London College of Communications, a Strategic Advisor to Edelman and an independent commentator and coach.

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd; this revised edition published in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

‘Introduction’ © Julia Hobsbawm, 2010.

‘Fact-Mongering Online’ © Emily Bell, 2006; ‘A Make-Believe World’ © Sarah Benton, 2006; ‘Is Honesty the Best Policy?’ © Mark Borkowski, 2006; ‘Living in Spin’ © Colin Byrne, 2010; ‘News from Number Ten’ © Michael Cockerell, 2006; ‘Poached Gamekeeper’ © Leonard Doyle, 2006; ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ © Kim Fletcher, 2006; ‘Wolfowitz’s Comb: Trouble in the Information Society’ © Nick Fraser, 2006; ‘Writing from Israel’ © Janine di Giovanni, 2006; ‘The Truth and the Whole Truth?’ © Anne Gregory, 2006; ‘Where the Truth Lies in Entertainment PR’ © Julian Henry, 2006; ‘PR and the Press: Two Big Guns’ © Simon Jenkins, 2006; “Consider Not the Beam, Focus on the Mote” © John Lloyd, 2006; ‘Trust’ © Deborah Mattinson, 2006; ‘Where the Truth Lies, There Lie I’ © Baroness Julia Neuberger, 2006; ‘Servants of the Truth’ © Peter Oborne, 2006; ‘Citizen Truth and Civic Principles: The Reformation of Public Relations’ © Robert Phillips, 2010; ‘PR in Developing Countries’ © Anya Schiffrin, 2006; ‘Nano-Truths and the Story’ © Jean Seaton, 2006; ‘A Place Called Hope: On Inauthentic PR’ © Alice Sherwood, 2006; ‘Crises and Their Discontents’ © Andrew St George, 2006; ‘A Long Way from Watergate’ © Simon Walker, 2006; ‘The New Media and Trust’ © Derek Wyatt MP, 2006.

The moral right of the above to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 84354 135 1 eISBN 9781782397335

Printed in Great Britain by { }

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

To the memory of Esther Kaposi, PR and Kate Carr, journalist: gone, but not forgotten.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Julia Hobsbawm • Introduction

Emily Bell • Fact-Mongering Online

Sarah Benton • A Make-Believe World

Mark Borkowski • Is Honesty the Best Policy?

Colin Byrne • Living in Spin

Michael Cockerell • News from Number Ten

Leonard Doyle • Poached Gamekeeper

Kim Fletcher • Sympathy for the Devil

Nick Fraser • Wolfowitz’s Comb: Trouble in the Information Society

Janine di Giovanni • Writing from Israel

Anne Gregory • The Truth and the Whole Truth?

Julian Henry • Where the Truth Lies in Entertainment PR

Simon Jenkins • PR and the Press: Two Big Guns

John Lloyd • ‘Consider Not the Beam, Focus on the Mote’

Deborah Mattinson • Trust

Baroness Julia Neuberger • Where the Truth Lies, There Lie I

Robert Phillips • Citizen Truths and Civic Principles: The Reformation of Public Relations

Peter Oborne • Servants of the Truth

Anya Schiffrin • PR in Developing Countries

Jean Seaton • Nano-Truths and the Story

Alice Sherwood • A Place Called Hope: On Inauthentic PR

Andrew St George • Crises and Their Discontents

Simon Walker • A Long Way from Watergate

Derek Wyatt • The New Media and Trust

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the contributors for being so very generous with their thoughts. This is a rich collection of ideas as a direct result of them. I have also consulted a number of invaluable sounding boards for this book, and especially want to thank Charlie Burgess; Jessica Morris; Robert Phillips; Nina Planck, Sophie Radice; Alex Sandberg; and Saskia Sissons. For this second edition, I updated my Introduction in the company of my father Eric. His observations, coming as they did from an old pro on the eve of his ninety-third birthday, were as sharp as ever.

My children always tell me the truth, even if it is that I have stayed at the computer way too long for their liking. My husband Alaric always gives sage advice that I trust. Toby Mundy and his team at Atlantic are, as ever, terrific.

Finally, this book is dedicated to those who are as interested in moral philosophy as they are in technology in relation to media and all of its intersecting parts, notably public relations and journalism.

London July 2010.

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

Introduction

Julia Hobsbawm

Truth matters. The Independent reveals the truth behind the news, without fear or favour … the truth can sometimes get lost.

Independent ‘Truth’ campaign to mark the general election and its new ownership, April 2010

Trust and transparency are as important to corporate reputation as the quality of products and services.

Edelman Trust Barometer, January 2010

When this collection of essays was first published, back in 2006, an age before the dominance of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, public relations and journalism only really had to worry about each other. Journalism’s scorn for public relations was ill disguised and matched only by its dependency on it for stories. By the early part of this century all public relations, whether it was providing strategic counsel for oil-spilling multinationals or media relations for bird sanctuaries was commonly dismissed by one word: spin.

This antipathy, voiced initially in the first edition, reached a tipping point later in 2008 when Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News was published. It explored in detail how journalism’s economic model meant that receiving pre-packaged information was critical to its survival. Flat Earth News coined the immortal phrase ‘churnalism’ to describe the increasing indivisibility between manufactured news and real reporting.

But already PR and journalism had a new, joint worry: not each other, with their inseparability finally made public, but the general public, who were straying from their joint reach.

The public, who are informed/entertained/sold to, had economic power but they were largely as dependent as babies on the kind of information they received. So we – the journalists, the PR people, the communicators – fed them. How their hunger was sated was in our control and we used it. Public power via the media was in its infancy: no answering back.

As the first decade of the new century closed the ‘citizen journalist’ was born, a grown-up reader, viewer, listener, with the power to make and shape the news and views landscape directly, unmediated by the vested interests of media ‘parents’.

How fast children grow. The business of media and communication and its principal players of journalists and PR advocates have had to come to terms with a new reality in which what they each say is true can be challenged or even superseded by others very fast indeed.

The old adage about a week being a long time in politics is now hyper-true. In the news media the veracity of content is dominated by the speed at which the content is created and put out to the public, with perceptions forming, changing and reforming in a matter of hours, minutes and even seconds.

And where speed is important, dimension is too. Response and rebuttal, which used to take place behind closed doors, are now an integral part of the media. The TV phone-ins of yester-year have become entire entertainment schedules dominated by programmes involving text and telephone voting; newspapers have online comments stretching quickly into hundreds and in some cases thousands of responses. The public has become a producer of message, and a promoter of it, not just a consumer.

Pretty much everyone can have media access now (Facebook’s rise to half a billion members in six years owes its success in large part to falling hardware prices that have removed the barrier for internet models which faced radio and television in their infancy.) The shockwaves for corporate society and its media networks alike are huge.

When this book first came out, TV news was the fastest way to communicate to mass audiences. Newspapers did not have online editions, with the exception of www.guardian.co.uk. No one knew what a ‘trending topic’ on Twitter meant. Mobile communications meant phone calls, not permanent links to the internet and social networks. Media channels haven’t just proliferated, they have accelerated.

According to Twitter’s own blog: ‘Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day – that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.’

But how much of the tsunami of information that goes out on Twitter is true? There is no editing, no time to edit. Re-tweeting – passing on wholesale what others have tweeted – is widespread. So is putting up links of interesting clips, articles, thoughts, with no means to verify them before they’ve gone. Information truly is viral now. Instead of the ‘rolling news’ culture of 24/7 which marked the first edition of this book, we are now firmly in a 24-nanosecond culture.

Editors check articles before publication for punctuation, accuracy, tone and balance, conscious always of the public interest. And if they also drive fellow journalists to great feats of hyperbole, it is on the basis that if the public is interested, it’s in the public interest.

Peter McKay, British Journalism Review, 2005

In this new era truth and trust have become highly valued commodities. They are almost traded as such: prove you are more trustworthy than your opponents or competitors, and your stock will rise, either literally or by brand and reputational value.

Yet it is hard to tell these days exactly where the truth lies. Rumour and urban myth, dumbed-down falsehoods and leaked spin all thrive in today’s expanding, instantaneous, downloaded media world. The public are quick to punish when they feel misled or lied to. Increasingly they mind about the gap between truth and reality: perception.

Great feats of hyperbole often happen in an attempt to hold attention or drive opinion one way or another. News blurs with opinion and the heavy edit known as ‘context’ can transform perceptions of what is true at all: give too little attention to something and a truth may never be told; give too much, out of context, and it is magnified to the point of distortion.

There is no such thing as absolute truth in the media; there are only versions of it. A story is endlessly regurgitated and updated, on air, online and of course in print. They used to say of bad publicity: ‘Oh, don’t worry, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips’, but today’s words live online, literally for ever.

Although hyperbole is also associated with the more trivial end of media and PR, the celebrity kiss-and-tell ‘stories’ pro-moted by agents to the highest media bidder, anxiety about hype is reaching into more serious areas around public policy and those charged with moving great mountains of public opinion are finding out that to stray by accident or design into hype can backfire horribly, such is the appetite to be told ‘clean’ stories.

The dossier used by the British government under Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq is an obvious example. As the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which could reach our shores in ‘forty-five minutes’ failed to materialize, the Government was accused, by the BBC and its flagship morning current affairs radio programme the Today programme no less, of ‘sexing up’ the dossier and, with it, the case for war.

In a domino-effect of PR disaster and public disbelief, the resulting furore led directly to the resignations of the Chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, and its Director General, Greg Dyke, the resignation of former Downing Street Communications Chief Alastair Campbell, and eventually of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, himself.

This episode drew the public into a direct debate about where the truth lies. The reputations of both the Government and the BBC became hugely tarnished. The BBC even had to restate its basic journalism values by retraining its own journalists.

Similarly the reputation of the climate change campaigners, enjoying a huge success in mobilizing global action and attention around carbon emissions, faced a sudden crisis of confidence in 2009 when the so-called ‘climate change deniers’ scored a number of PR hits against the movement by producing evidence of some allegedly doctored academic information from no less an authoritative source than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Truth is at the heart of the debate about climate change, as it was about WMD. It was former US Vice President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth which ‘has been credited with raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergizing the environmental movement’ according to Wikipedia.

By mid 2009, climate change had become a defining, central and fashionable issue with virtually no dissenting voices.

But in this speeded-up world counter-claim soon thrives. The apparently unassailable coalition of scientists and media-friendly green companies and political champions was ambushed by the charge of hyperbole over how bad the problem really is.

The charge of hype blew a hole in public confidence larger than the one in the ozone layer, and focusing the public’s minds on the issue once again remains one of the defining communications challenges.

In satire truthiness is a ‘truth; that a person claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Wikipedia definition of ‘Truthiness’

The Unbelievable Truth: The game show in which panellists compete to see how many nuggets of truth they are able to hide amongst their lies.

Web copy, BBC Radio 4 comedy section

One way to judge the rise in value of truth and the quest for a moral framework for communication is to see how prevalent it has become in popular culture. Satire in particular has taken up truth’s cause with a vengeance.

The American satirist Stephen Colbert first coined the phrase ‘truthiness’ on his Comedy Central show in 2005 and it so caught the mood that it went on to become ‘Word of the Year’ in the American Dialect Society in 2006. The British writer Armando Iannucci’s political sitcom The Thick of It has come to define twenty-first century political spin in much the same way that Absolutely Fabulous defined 1980s consumer branding PR. In The Thick of It, the ominously funny Downing Street spin doctor Malcolm Tucker says: ‘I like to know whether I’m lying to save the skin of a tosser or a moron.’1 Lying, truly, is the baddest thing a politician can do. (And ‘Malcolm Tucker’s election briefing’ appeared regularly in the Guardian during the 2010 general election campaign.)

In a piercing shriek she declared: ‘For the record, press, you are on notice of the truth as of now. No more lies!’ Sweet-natured loser? Or swivel-eyed fruitcake?

Andrew Pierce in the Daily Mail on a losing Conservative Party candidate’s speech, May 2010

And if satire doesn’t work, transparent contempt does. Professor Steven Barnett of Westminster University defines this as the media ‘Age of Contempt’, arrived at via ‘Deference’ in the 1950s and ‘Disdain’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.2 Roy Greenslade remembers, in his history of the British press, how the tabloid baron Lord Cudlipp found himself damning the monster he had himself nurtured when in 1988, at the age of seventy-five, he lamented ‘intrusive journalism for the prurient’.3

Certainly, modern journalism reflects the public’s contempt but also its desire to see the truth reflected back to itself. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s dying days as Labour leader in May 2010 were defined by the charge that, as Anthony Seldon, Brown’s biographer and a prominent analyst of trust issues, put it in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Like Lear, he demeans himself, and fails to see the truth, a truth evident to those all around him.’

Niccolò Machiavelli observed, five centuries ago, that ‘among the many considerations that show what a man is, none is more important than seeing either how easily he swallows what he is told or how carefully he invents what he wants to convince others of.’4 Machiavelli would have loved the Blackberry, the iPad, the television and the newspaper. The very tools which liberate the public with information, can enslave it with misinformation, what the twentieth century pioneer of modern public relations, Edward Bernays, memorably called ‘Impropaganda’. Bernays himself memorably set up photostunts to promote ideas and products-as-news, including the ‘Torches for Freedom’ march down 5th Avenue for Lucky Strike in 1929, with women unwittingly equating, thanks to his manipulations, smoking with liberation. Of course, Bernays may have believed this to be the case at the time, but he constructed a message which was designed to feel real and identifiable to the market: women began to believe that smoking was liberating, so they began to smoke in huge numbers.

Tell all the truth if you can, and as much of it as you can if you cannot.

Institute of Public Relations paper, 1970.5

As the American academics Robert Jackall and Janice Hirota point out, ‘public relations and journalism are joined at the hip… Both occupations are storytellers engaged in fashioning moral discourse within certain frameworks.’6

What is clear is that those stories are becoming less easy to verify just when veracity matters a lot to audiences. So it is down to individuals within all of the media to set and keep standards of honesty and transparency.

The answer doesn’t lie so much in regulation as in self-regulation. The most we can hope to instil is an ‘honesty box’ principle of transparency, because the rewards are greater in terms of trust. Media brands require trust: the TV networks suffered appalling reputational and market losses when it turned out that almost all of them had at one time or another rigged the voting in phone-ins. Even great global newspaper brands like the New York Times have been brought low by false reporting; the Daily Telegraph’s former editor, Will Lewis, upon first seeing the evidence which became the six-week scoop about MPs’ expenses worried that it was a hoax which would finish off the newspaper’s reputation rather than that of Parliament.

Not everyone feels idealistic about the media, although I remain nostalgic about Marshall McLuhan’s seminal predictive study Understanding Media, first published in 1964. McLuhan might not have been able to imagine the internet but he could imagine the ethical significance of the new transforming era when he wrote: ‘Might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?’7 Putting truth at the heart of storytelling should not be that difficult. You don’t have to reveal sources to label the kind of content going into a story, in much the same way as food is labelled; you can use the internet for academic citations – there is no shortage of space for references such as ‘this quote came from an anonymous briefing’ or ‘that fact is a quote from an annual report which has since been corrected’.

Journalism has begun to admit both its failings and its limitations. But it remains a defining quality and characteristic of a democracy. It is better to have bad journalism than muffled journalism. But it is better, surely, to have responsible journalism.

And in public relations the Achilles heel is not so much spin as transparency. In lobbying and public affairs, any doubt about transparency degrades faith in promoter and cause alike.

Emphasis is also shifting daily away from the long-cherished ‘taxi rank’ principle of promoting anyone and anything who will pay, to taking on clients with something to say and an ability to listen back, to build trust as well as sales.

The growing cultural obsession with truth in journalism, matching an equal despair with and distrust of its suppliers in public relations, has reached what the American journalist Malcolm Gladwell defined as a ‘tipping point’, a cultural or commercial moment when everything is tuned to the same channel, so to speak.8 We are now in an era that is plainly dominated by global markets and global conflicts and global warming, but equally plainly dominated by conflicts about information and its sibling, interpretation.

Who owns this information, and debates it, or provides, proves or disproves it to a restless, hungry and cynical public, is at the centre of our political as well as cultural future and for those of us in media communications our commercial future too. I do hope this collection helps to crystallize your thoughts and opinions.

Fact-Mongering Online

Emily Bell

When it became obvious to the whole world that the internet was neither a passing fad nor likely to remain a network used only by programmers and academics – probably sometime around 1996 – a curious thing happened.

The ‘real world’ of mainstream media began to gravitate around the most logical and probably the least defensible position it could: that the internet was a conduit for the perverted, the distorted and the untrustworthy. This network of limitless connectivity which might, with the most limited imagining, be the single most empowering publishing technology since Gutenberg invented the printing press, was instead vilified as a home of the con artist and the paedophile. Fuelled by an investment profile akin to that of tulips in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, flaky and over-valued, the popular image of the internet could hardly have been worse. It not only attracted pornographers and rapists, but it also apparently made smug and not necessarily very talented young people exceedingly rich; it bailed out the advertising industry and made rock stars out of computer nerds and venture capitalists – just how wrong could one technology be?

At the heart of this collective suspicion seemed to be a belief that anyone who used the internet for almost any purpose at all was almost certainly up to no good. In 2001 the Selby train crash was a marker of just how embedded this idea had become. The man who caused the accident which killed ten, Gary Hart, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his Land Rover and driven off the road, down an embankment on to a railway line causing the fatality. He received a penal sentence of five years, with the judge stressing that his failure to sleep before his journey was the equivalent of drunk driving. But the aspect of Hart’s sleep deprivation most avidly dwelt on was what had caused it: ‘Hours of internet chat led to Selby’ read the headline in Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle, another report in the Scotsman described Hart as inhabiting ‘the shadowy world of the internet’, as though this was in itself an illegal act. His cavalier use of the internet, it seemed, was a signifier of his character.

So this haven of the shifty and dubious was for a long time treated by many in the media as a byword for the untrustworthy. I recently found a piece written in 1997 from, of all places CNet, the online technology news site, entitled ‘Truth, lies, and the internet’, which highlighted an internet spoof, where a speech which was allegedly made by the author Kurt Vonnegut to the University of Chicago was in fact a column from the Chicago Tribune. ‘The fact that a message can circulate from its point of origin or a circle of people to all corners of the worldwide network is the Net’s greatest and most garish feature.’

Certainly in determining what the internet would do to the currency of news or ‘truth’, if one accepts that there is such a concept, this is what worried most commentators. Inauthenticity of information or testimony it was agreed would prove to be an enormous problem when the distribution bottleneck for news content was abruptly severed by the rise of the internet. But the idea that false ‘facts’, or deliberately malicious lies would run amok tampering with our perceptions and undermining the democratic process was the kind of thinking which belongs more to the old media than to the new media.

In the old media the malleable issue of what constitutes the truth is in the hands of proprietors and editors. If the ‘truth’ is that Britain should not be in favour of a European constitution then one might expect a paper’s coverage to bleed with this perception – stories of Eurocrats straightening our bananas and flooding us with unwanted immigrant labour come to the fore. Subtler issues of governance in a pan-national world are suppressed. The old way would be to publish facts through a branded conduit, let’s for instance say the Daily Mail, and then these facts might have a limited lifespan being debated between individuals or very occasionally through other media, but barring accident or libel action, this version of the truth would sit on cuttings files, in libraries and even electronically searchable archives. What this world feared was the unlicensed fact monger spreading incorrect information indiscriminately and this too passing into some vast archive of fact and counterfact.

But what has happened is quite different. To illustrate how the internet has helped to promote truth every bit as much as, if not more than, it has threatened to distort it, I can draw on a painful and personal example. In 2003 following the invasion of Iraq, I was in charge of the Guardian’s website when we ran what might be politely termed an erroneous story. Without going into the hows and whys, an editor had picked up on an article from a German paper which had carried a speech given by Paul Wolfowitz the then deputy defence secretary for the US in the Far East. It was not a conference that had been widely covered and it had somehow slipped under the radar of most of the Western press. The translation suggested that Wolfowitz had said something he had not – that the invasion of Iraq was underpinned by a desire to control the oil resource. He had mentioned oil extraction and Iraq but not in the way it was reported in our story.

I had not been in the office, but within about four hours of the story being published, I was aware that all might not have been right, as emails began to trickle in with the subject field ‘Wolfowitz’. This was late evening and by the early morning, when America had had a chance to read the story and kick it around, the trickle was a deluge. We had taken the story down and ran a very prominent retraction being clear about our error. If we were operating in the old world where media was distributed not electronically and instantly but within a much narrower circulation, the error would have been just as grave, but would have certainly survived longer while it reached the parts of the world – such as the Pentagon – where those who knew most about its accuracy could immediately challenge its veracity.

It was the case in the very early days of news websites that one could rely on the ‘not wrong for long’ motto to keep you out of trouble – make an error, take it down quickly and your relatively small audience would be none the wiser. But as the web has expanded, as search tools such as Google have proliferated and when experts can call in all stories they are interested in to their own news wires via RSS readers (Really Simple Syndication), the transparency and the challengeability of your reporting becomes ever more open.

For newspapers in particular this development is highly unsettling. Think of the national daily newspapers in the UK – eleven titles selling somewhere over 12 million copies a day all told, each with its particular angle on the news. Each community around that newspaper might ‘trust’ the paper’s brand – for instance the Daily Mail has a strong community and a large readership which trusts the paper implicitly. But if stories are regularly qualified or knocked down by other sources, denied and re-edited by those perhaps who are even involved in the stories then at some point the level at which a newspaper is trusted begins to falter. Once the context into which you publish your stories alters from the ‘safe’ environment of your regular readership to the whole world, when your headlines appear on Google News alongside other contradictory stories, then it is far harder to defend the ‘truth’ of your reporting.

The New York Times’ experience with the rogue reporter Jayson Blair, who filed copy which was fabricated or plagiarized, demonstrates that in the world of high-pressure competitive news, the temptation to believe and run stories rather than interrogate their authenticity is overwhelming even for the most austere newspapers.

So the inevitable rise of the web has not led to quite such a proliferation of falsehood as was originally expected; instead it has facilitated a more open examination of facts and journalistic presentation than was previously the case. The American technology journalist Dan Gillmor, whose book We the Media predicted the erosion of the hierarchy of news provision as citizen journalists and bloggers rose in number, has a nifty phrase which is handy for journalists to remember: ‘There is always someone closer to the story than you.’ And with publishing technologies so readily available anyone can tell that story or question other versions of the truth. Distressingly for the mainstream media what the new-media thinker Clay Shirky describes as the ‘fame versus fortune’ model is in the ascendant now that anyone can distribute their content. In other words there is a generation of bloggers or citizen journalists who will make their thoughts, accounts and pictures free on the web – they may enjoy the fame that goes with the exposure but essentially they are hobbyists, not motivated by money and status, often with full-time jobs elsewhere.

There are several oft quoted examples of the power of the blog versus the traditional media construct. Maybe the most notorious case to date was that of the CBS news story aired in the US on 8 September 2004 – where Dan Rather introduced an item which cast doubt on President Bush’s military record. The story relied on four memos, but bloggers, including one known as ‘Buckhead’, questioned the authenticity of the memos based on what they knew of typesetting in the early seventies (the fonts and spacing on the CBS memos looked like word-processed documents). A maelstrom of criticism and pressure which followed ultimately saw Rather step down from his post.

The bloggers of the Republican right claimed victory. But this might prove the power of the blog or it might prove that blogs are as capable of misleading as the mainstream press in its worst mode. A highly considered article published in 2005 in the Columbia Journalism Review by Corey Pein pointed out that the supposed findings by the bloggers had been followed by an avalanche of mainstream coverage which converted rumour and speculation into fact and failed to make a proper examination of all aspects of the story – the speed and ferocity with which such a counter-claim moved was enough to end Rather’s career and weaken CBS’s reputation before the official inquiry into the affair had even concluded.

At the last count there were 27 million blogs worldwide with tens of thousands a day being added to that number. Although trying to quantify the blogosphere is all but impossible there are estimates at the time of writing that 275,000 entries are added to blogs on a daily basis and the readership of blogs across the world is somewhere around the 50 million mark. Within this modern day Babel one could argue that it is even harder to decide what might be truthful and what might be exaggerated. So won’t the ‘trusted’ distributors of fact thrive in this environment?

Well perhaps. But as we know, in an increasingly transparent world, trust is difficult to build and easy to squander. One of the targets of politically motivated bloggers is the mainstream media’s scepticism about their chosen cause. In fact what we see from bloggers is not a substitute for the mainstream press but often a replica of its best and worst attributes. High-profile bloggers tend to be white, male and middle class, they tend to divide into those who are keen to share knowledge and those who are anxious to make their view prevail. According to which category they sit in, their contributions are either enlightening and enriching or prone to selectivity and distortion – in other words pretty much a mirror to the mainstream media.

The faltering of public trust in mainstream media which is an inevitable consequence of a highly competitive and commoditized news market, has allowed organizations to use the new digital tools available to them to tell their story without mediation. In the UK’s 2005 election campaign New Labour dramatically scaled back its engagement with the ‘press pack’, conducting choreographed photocalls and launching a series of email and blog services to keep the electorate ‘informed’. But because of course it lacked any of the openness associated with the internet – no free commenting on the blogs for instance – it felt like a sorry pass at telling it like it is, it made the party feel more opaque rather than less so and it made the role of the traditional media inquisitors seem therefore more valuable.

Finding the truth can, to some, be an overrated concept. But there does seem to be in general a human instinct to uncover the truth rather than to live in blissful ignorance. Take for example the most famous example of a community-built archive – Wikipedia – an online evolving encyclopedia which anyone can add to or edit. It is not the last word in resources – again some sections are rich and balanced and others are a little lopsided, according to the enthusiasms and knowledge of those who amend the site. But on the whole it is remarkably accurate, given the overwhelming mess it could be – even small errors are diligently corrected. In online communities where recommendations are rated – the Amazon book review system is probably one of the most widely known – there will always be elements who seek to distort the system for their own gain, who lodge a good or bad review based on something other than honest opinion, but when there is a weight of opinion within these communities they can produce a more balanced picture.

The emergence of new technologies was greeted with high anxiety that they would distort and bury the truth. It is not clear that the evolution of the internet necessarily brings us any closer to knowing what the real truth is or enables us as journalists to report it, but it has created the tools whereby everyone can contribute to what the truth might be. I say everyone, but of course this is still a divided society in terms of the information haves and have-nots, there are barriers of literacy and wealth. But these are infinitely lower than the barriers to traditional publishing.

For corporations, journalists, academics, citizens and politicians, the new information hierarchies will take some time to adjust to. The sheer volume now of available source material makes it likely that errors or false reports will circulate, but the open-ended nature of the discourse means that the power to correct those reports is greater than it ever has been. My view then is essentially that of an optimist – that we are entering a new age of enlightenment for mass communication. The concerns that all change is for the worst have already been confounded, and the era of a society atomized by mass communication rather than united by it is over. And there is no reason why truth should be the casualty of this particular revolution.

2006.