The Unloveable Press

The Financial Times talks about both the British press and the American one in an excellent and pithy article, here.

One does not have to be a hyperventilating tabloid columnist to expect better behaviour than that which has been revealed.

Revealed, we should remember, by the unlovable press. Michael Schudson, among the best of the academic writers on the media, has seen in the raucousness and hype of newspapers a pearl beyond price: the instinct to create trouble for the establishment, the panjandrums – them. In this collection of essays, the central one – which shares the book’s title – lays out four elements of necessary unlovability. These are: a love of the unplanned and the disruptive; an even greater love of conflict and dissent; a scepticism about the claims of politics; and a willingness to name names and connect the names with crimes and misdemeanours.

Schudson writes: “That is what serves democracy: the irresistible drive of journalists to focus on events, including those that powerful forces cannot anticipate and often cannot manage.” Thus when Matt Drudge began his subsequently richly rewarded career by showing, from his bedroom laptop, that President Bill Clinton was an adulterer; or when bloggers uncovered a speech made in 2002 by Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, which pointed to racist views; or, more recently, when Paul Staines, a British blogger operating under the incendiary nom de guerre of Guido Fawkes, uncovered a sleazy plan on the part of prime ministerial aides to tar leading Conservatives with sex scandals – in all of these cases, the people glorying in their ill-gotten power and tearing down the powerful did well by us.

They fulfilled one of the necessary prerequisites of the free press: that it is free. In the words of Walter Meers,a veteran AP reporter quoted in another of Schudson’s essays: “There are too many excursions into trivia,too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who’s ahead and who’s behind. There’s a reason. That is what people want to know.”

But here is the rub. Schudson is writing of American newspapers.

Read the whole thing.

My one quibble is the absurd belief that American Newspapers are willing to take down politicians - sadly this "free press" is still too enthralled with its own navel to do its job as stated above.

Still here's to hoping.