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May 19, 2011
Annabel Crabb in her Finding a coin for the journalistic juke box at The Drum refers to the ongoing decline of quality journalism from falling sales of metropolitan newspapers and advertising revenue.
The standard corporate response has been cost cutting and restructuring to cover the media corporation's costs of production. The inference is that there simply will be less journalism created by professional journalists and the slide of much of contemporary journalism into banality will continue.
Crabb says that:
The internet has corroded so many of the structural basics of the journalistic transaction. Our monopoly over basic source information is significantly undermined, seeing as anyone can now watch parliament, or press conferences, or go through company reports online or tinker around with the websites of government departments. Our monopoly over the dissemination of information is damaged too, seeing as anyone can now set up a cheap publishing platform.
She adds that a journalist's main professional advantage over a blogger, increasingly, is that they have the luxury of being paid for what they do, and the privilege of some years' experience of this pleasant arrangement.
It's only the former difference that counts here, since many bloggers also have had several years of experience and they also have intellectual property rights.
What she doesn't say is what Tim Dunlop highlights: that politics cannot be understood separately from the way in which it is reported and that journalists don’t like criticism. On the latter point:
From day one, bloggers were attacked and caricatured, dismissed as ne’er do wells who talk nonsense and who had nothing to teach the seasoned professionals of the mainstream. And each new technological development - comments sections, Facebook, Twitter, whatever - has been similarly dismissed as worthy of little more than contempt.
Dunlop says---and this is the core argument of his article--- that what journalists have not done is to engage with the criticisms of how the Canberra Press Gallery practice political journalism. He adds:
It is hard to think of an industry more entrapped by what it considers the untouchable verities of its craft, or one that thinks it can so blithely ignore complaints from its customers. In fact, there is a sense that journalists see criticism as an indication that they are doing something right, not something wrong, and it produces a bunker mentality that makes them all the more determined to continue on the same course.
The bunker mentality basically says that the decline of journalism is not the journalists fault. Roy Greenslade concurs. The bunker mentality is 'we are the victims.'
Now the criticisms of political journalism are substantive --it is now less about enlightening democratic citizens about debates around policy issues that matter to the public, and more trivia and spin, gotcha politics and partisan deception.
There are, as Jonathan Holmes points out in The ten commandments of journalism?, journalists who win Gold Walkeys for expose those in power who are trying to change our world for the worse. They sustain the tradition of independent, serious-minded journalism, especially investigative journalism and their work is the first draft of history.
However, they are a small minority, compared to those whose work consists of trivia and spin, gotcha politics and partisan deception. This is why we can say that decline of journalism is the journalists’ fault. We can add that journalists need to take responsibility for the infortainment trash they write.
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Sorry, which journalists are these that dismiss Facebook and Twitter? All the political journalists I know are all over it and don't stop going on about it, almost to the point of wanting them to shut up about f&^%$ing Twitter.
Journalists (including bloggers) are not all the same. There are good ones and bad ones. There are bunker mentalists and visionaries.
This old media vs new media argument is tired, petty, and so flawed with generalisations and caricatures that throwing another bit of fuel on the fire is just a waste of readers' time.