Contemporary journalism needs rescuing from the gutter

If one man’s dishonesty never much mattered in the past, when – or, indeed, why – would it begin to matter in the future?

The narrative of Boris Johnson’s rise and… well, let’s not say “fall” since there’s no evidence yet to suggest that there will be an imminent decline. So, perhaps “float” offers us a new and better cliché to run around. Johnson’s rise and ability to float is a hard lesson in what Peter Oborne recently described as the “narcissism that mocked the style of straightforward, sober, serious, self-effacing politics of the post-war era.” People bought into the Johnsonian fantasy and there is little to suggest that the fiction is growing any less attractive. The Tories maintain a lead in polls, the vaccine rollout produced not so much a bounce as sustained levitation, and people continue to love any tall tale that panders to their prejudices. Let’s all dress in luminous jackets and throw rugby balls whilst talking about going down the pub. What isn’t there to love?

Except the death of journalism…

Because whatever is left of British journalism is currently trapped somewhere inside all that, taking hits from all sides: not subjective enough for some, far too personal for others. Perceived bias is routinely confused with real bias and real bias is often mistaken for the objective truth. Throw in some provocatively intended bias and you’ll be lucky to believe your own name in the morning.

It is why I find it hard at the moment not to constantly think of Peter Oborne’s book, The Assault on Truth, which came out in February and should now be on any reading list for would-be journalists. It is a stubborn, truculent, angry, and brilliantly succinct answer to a difficult question. What do you do when politics is so corrupted by lies that everything descends into fiction? The answer, as far as Oborne is concerned, is to present the facts, which he does in the form of a heavily annotated compendium – although abbreviated – of Johnson’s lies. The rest of the evidence he provides through an online resource. The result reads like George Orwell crossed with Alexander Pope; part The Lion and the Unicorn, part Dunciad, a big picture argument rooted in detail. Above all, it is utterly refreshing to read facts unadorned by spin.

Yet the book also makes it hard too not to think about Oborne, who still styled himself a conservative long after the Conservative Party scuttled off to chase right-wing populism down one particularly dark and twisty hole. He’s the former Telegraph and Daily Mail stalwart who now plies his trade at The Byline Times and The Middle East Eye. In many senses, he’s the outcast who found himself cast out by simply standing still. He is not the only one. Recent years have seen journalism itself riven by factionalism, with many journalists (and not a few politicians) choosing to leap before they were pushed. It’s hard to be an independent thinker when independence is crudely lampooned as muddy and ill-defined “centrism”, suddenly the most modish of slurs.

“I think I’m much truer to what conservatism is really about than people who are establishment conservative,” Oborne said in an interview in 2016. “The conservatives, if you look at it historically, believe in civil society, they’re sceptical of the state, they don’t like foreign engagements, they are sceptical of big ideas, and they are very, very sceptical of the whole creation of the great states of the 20th Century.”

Yet where Oborne writes “conservative”, you could easily substitute “journalist”, especially in terms of that scepticism. Journalism was meant to be about civil discourse; an ever-valiant watch on the powerful and the state. Journalism is meant to ask questions that the powerful would prefer not to be asked. But that, of course, is an old way of thinking about journalism. We are very much in the thrall of a new journalism, or, one is tempted to say, a “new” New Journalism.

The old New Journalism was a reaction to the journalism of men like Walter Kronkite who came out with hackneyed phrases such as “journalism is what we need to make democracy work”. Journalism was dour and firmly rooted in maintaining the status quo. By the sixties, personal experiences were all the rage. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson had different takes on journalism, which he described as “a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk”. He called his brand of journalism “gonzo”, where the writer was as much the story as the reality they were meant to describe.

As Oborne sees it, Johnson saw in the historic Euroscepticism of the British a vehicle for a gonzo of his own. Johnson isn’t just a man of his time but the man who contributed to making his time. His was a journalism that eventually reshaped the world, produced a reality defined by its fictions. It is the New Journalism of the 1960s given a postmodern spin, where the glorification of the subjective mutated into a gross malaise of the self. Stories swap truth for the cheap satisfaction of the reader. It is everywhere and examples are profligate.

Just this past week, The Daily Mail published an article that quickly dominated America’s right-wing news. “How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH, cost $3.5K a year per person in taxes, force you to spend $55K on an electric car and ‘crush’ American jobs” read the headline to the story by Emily Crane. It does not make for edifying reading, especially if you enjoy paragraphs longer than a clause. This is that faddish fetishism for the “factoid”:

“Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut their consumption of other animal based foods in half. 

Gradually making those changes by 2030 could see diet-related greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 50 percent, according to a study by Michigan University’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

To do that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day.   

It equates to consuming roughly one average sized burger per month.”

It sounds plausible except none of it is real. It relies too heavily on modal verbs. “May”. “Could”. “Would.”

Biden might have some extreme plans, but he has said nothing about imposing limits on how much red meat Americans can eat. It merely tickles the populist conceit that the eco lot obsess over farting cows. Yet this reductive story was swiftly distilled and turned into an “infographic” that appeared on Fox News. Suddenly, there weren’t enough red meat jokes to go around. Larry Kudlow complained that there would be “No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue”. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Biden “The Hamburglar”. Even the Trump family got in on it. “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That’s going to be a hard NO from me,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr.

Journalism generates the reality it wants to report.

Should it matter?

It depends entirely on how you view politics and journalism. Does it matter what Biden did or didn’t say about beef? Does it matter if the British Prime Minister said he would rather see “bodies pile high” than introduce another lockdown? Does any of this matter so long as you think the “right side” is winning?

I think it does matter. I also think everybody should go read Peter Oborne’s book. Perhaps it’s time for a new Old Journalism and that seems like a very good place to start.