JOURNALISM REVIEW: Fantasy and the Future of Journalism - November 17, 2009
Last month, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reported the president and publisher of Variety group, Neil Stiles, as having said, "I'm not optimistic about this habit called journalism."
Coming from one of the globe's most widely circulated entertainment-trade publications, this is not a good sign.
Stiles' creed is that service and customer are the way of the future. This can be read as: we will tailor our reportage and content to what the public wants to hear. But even then, will the projected extra traffic bring back the ol’ rivers of gold? Likely not. Internet advertising revenue isn’t what it used to be either.
Meanwhile, “customers” are finding it hard to take issue with a domain selling them exactly what they want to hear, truth be damned.
Those with any interest in hard news will know that even the most major news reporters are caving in and calling populism the answer. Within Australia, the nation’s highest circulation broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, plasters inconsequential celeb stories across its homepage almost every day.
The difference between reliable journalism, marketing and opinion writing is increasingly spurious. Apparently when evaluating where to downsize, newspapers have turned straight to reporters, who have been identified as the most expendable staff members. The justification? No one is interested in reading hard news content anymore. We have always had to keep an eye on the media, but to this extent? Who, now, is going to fulfill the thankless task of attempting objective reporting?
Many of us have turned to bloggers in search of news content with integrity, upon recognising the mainstream media’s blundering amid economic plight. But is this an answer?
It seems that consumers online are still choosing fantasy over reality, celebrity gossip stories over hard news coverage. Unfortunately Waxman's Hollyblog is no match in net traffic for the likes of trash-gossip peddler Perez Hilton. Similarly, even within the Hollyblogosphere, many are choosing the unreliable flash journalism of Nikki Finke over more reliable sources.
Finke excels in the goodies-and-baddies model of journalism, where each story reads like a pantomime and the truth can be distorted at will, reported without cross-reference; even publication dates are edited without notice to the reader. The blog is attractive because its simplistic and adversarial reporting reminds us of Hollywood artifice. But unfortunately the truth is never as neat as a Pixar screenplay.
The biggest problem here is that bloggers - myself included - don't seem to be entirely liable for the misinformation they publish.
However, many have pointed to the fact that we have never been able to lay our complete faith in the mainstream media either.
I have devoted a gobsmacking amount of time since the publication of my last post on Australian asylum seekers to dismantling lies perpetuated by the Australian press. Here is one example: a ninemsn report (UPDATE Nov 19) on the cost of Australia's relatively meagre refugee intake. It has been slammed by both the national broadcaster's Media Watch and by its own statistical source, Centrelink, who have denied any truth in the figures the story is based on.
Yet those who follow the ninemsn link above will discover the story remains online! How is this possible?
People still read the story, and still quote it as fact. It seems like anyone interested in uncovering the truth has to do a lot more work to get to it.
Unfortunately work is a turn-off to a consumer repeatedly told that their entertainment is more important than locating the truth and the challenges it brings. Studies show that the internet fosters not only shorter attention spans but a "compassion fatigue". It is also within the interests of many high income earners to keep us engaged in fantasy, so that we are too distracted and befuddled to even consider holding them to their accounts.
Our fantasies exist because there is some inclination in us to desire them as reality. Sadly, they can be indulged by us, by market profiteers and by the media, so it is important to hold people up on charges of outrageous fantasy before they leak into real life. How else can we explain Arnold Swartzeneger's Californian election victory? How else do we explain the spike in army enrollments after the release of major war films? How else do we let Nic Cage get away with owning more than a dozen houses and two Bahamian islands, while half the world lives in poverty? When I tell my peers about Cage’s reported finance concerns, the irritated response is often: “don’t say that about Nic Cage, I like Nic Cage.”
If we are choosing these fantasies over reality, it’s a pretty sad indictment on the social pressures of our everyday lives. We must be getting something wrong if so many are so frightened of reality that they would choose to board it up with framed posters of wealth-hording cultural icons.
What do we do about this? It seems like the world relies on a minority of people who value truth enough to engage in the "habit" of real journalism. But when the rivers of gold dry up, and our traditional providers of hard news can't earn what they used to off internet advertising, and their front pages spill with celeb gossip stories, all competing for a few remaining dollars on the same dogged populist and fantasist grounds, what do we do?
Do the largely unregulated blogs hold an answer? Are they making any money, if newspapers aren't, or are they destined to be a community service too, just as the arts are increasingly being reassessed as (free music, free movies anyone)?
Waxman ends her article by saying, "we'll continue to do journalism, even if Variety chooses not to." Now consumers just have to choose journalism as well, even if that means locating its whereabouts.