In defence of journalism

Journalism has become a rather precarious profession. The statistics for journalists killed, imprisoned and tortured make depressing reading. Then there is that casual contempt for the craft revealed by Cherie Blair signing the Hutton report for a party fund raiser, not to mention the slipping ratings for trust in the opinion polls. And all of that is before you get to the challenge to professional journalism from a combination of Google, bloggers and “citizen journalists”.

 Google News is ready willing and able to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Powerful stuff. But it begs a question about judgment. What information? How reliable is it? Can we trust you? As long as a Google search is based on how many seek it out there will be a question mark. Which is where journalism comes back into the frame. And the job it can do of offering some kind of order and analysis. Sorting the wheat from the chaff, verifying whether what is apparently real is actually so.

That requires eye witnesses – journalists be they professional or “citizen”. But it also requires experts whose role is to provide what Mark Thomson, the BBC’s Director General, has  called “critical realism”. People who accept that information comes in complex narratives and that sophisticated analysis is needed to make sense of them but who “believe it is still possible to get to the facts and form as objective and accurate a view of the world as possible.”

In a world where the pressure is on to declare whose side are you on, there is still a value in giving readers, listener, viewers, consumers and citizens the tools they need to make sense of what is going on to make their own informed choices. What Thompson called “the common ground in which different perspectives and different value systems can debate with each other and can be independently scrutinized and assessed”. Journalism – accurate, effective, impartial and reflective journalism – is essential to that.