Is the internet an institution?
Went to the annual Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary last night, with Andrew Marr talking on the subject of ‘History and Journalism’. Was an entertaining hour, if not illuminating, except it was great to hear first hand that ‘If anyone tells you the government did not bully the BBC over the Hutton Enquiry, they are wrong, because I was on the end of the phone’. Marr spoke…
…Marr spoke mainly about the different roles of the historian and journalist, coming down quite often on the side the of the historian for providing a truer picture of events. He also said that ‘the longer one practices, the more one realises that the successes, and failures, we have, are far more to do with the institutions in which we practice than our own skills or energies’. For Marr, good institutions (the BBC, Queen Mary University) provided peer review and protocols to maintain high standards. These institutions are within larger categories: the press; academia. Marr’s one problem (other than the government) was the internet: a danger, because the benefits of the institution, particularly for the veracity of facts, was being whittled away by a lack of institutional pressure on online writers, bloggers, etc.
I disagree. Firstly, because those same institutions that Marr was talking about, both journalistic and academic, are colonizing online. Roy Greenslade took a look last week in the Media Guardian at how The Times, Telegraph and FT are migrating online (’the days of separate print and web teams will soon be gone’). Saw a good letter to the Guardian about why Roy didn’t interview any of the journalists, and only the management (i.e. the journalists aren’t happy) but unfortunately the letters don’t go online. After listening to my friend D, online politics editor for a major newspaper, of the struggle she has to be seen on the same level as her print colleagues, there’s still a long way to go for the merger between print and digital to deal with the concerns. (The NUJ said this in their recent report; Andy Dickinson has commented on it). And Susan Bassnett was writing in this week’s THS that academic publishing will be conducted more online than in the presses in the future; people are buying less academic books, and so it will move online.
Secondly, because having worked for alternative media publishers such as www.oneworld.net and followed the work of IndyMedia, I know both individuals and the alternative, online, publishers, are using the techniques of journalism to report fairly, accurately and truthfully, based on fact, and that the institution of society and the social justice movement, are often far improved as institutions that the ones in which Marr has worked for most of his life.
Thirdly, new laws arriving in April (under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) to counter misleading practice (libellous comments or fake reviews, e.g. Amazon reviews from publishers on their own books that appear as if from members of the public) are just the tip of the iceberg of what will come for the policing of online as the media migrate and adspend aggregates online. Law remains the overarching institution under which others are enacted. Anything touched by the law falls within institutional boundaries, as it institutes a code of practice that can be upheld.
And finally, I disagree with Andrew because the socialisation of online means that, while false stories can spread, it is often much easier and faster to prove that it is false, and spread a correction.
There are real issues of course, particularly around anonymity, for the general reader, rather than the journalist. But for teaching journalism, an important thing to get across to students is that the internet is not a ’source’. It’s a means for accessing sources, and the individual voice, publisher or media publication is the source they must attribute. And like with all good sources, they should be investigated and cross-checked.
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