This interesting blog found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/05/the_story_is_dead.html is a review of a book called “Can we trust the Media” by Professor Adrian Monck of London’s City University. The blog is part of a blog by BBC editors on the BBC website. It is by Kevin Marsh, a respected editor at the BBC College of Journalism. He has worked as a journalist and news editor on various BBC and ITV radio and television news programmes including; The World at One, News at Ten, Today and PM. He has a number of exclusives to his credit including the world exclusive interview with Salman Rushdie following Ayatollah Khomeni’s fatwa on the author, and he brought James Naughtie to the BBC.
In the blog Kevin discusses trust and journalism which is the subject of the book reviewed. He criticises the author for stating that it doesn’t matter if journalists are trusted as long as they report the facts. Kevin then discusses the main idea of the book; that journalism is not the problem but it is journalism’s fetish with the story and that it is a good thing that the story is dead. Kevin explains that in the past the story was the only way that journalism could happen as it was the only way that complex information could be presented to the public in a way that they could understand. He states that the problem with using story is that sometimes this meant doing so without all the facts and thus things were made up to present a complete story.
Kevin agrees with Professor Monck that it is good that the story is dead because today with media outlets like the BBC news website the public can search ou the facts themselves. In the past the journalists selected the facts to present to the public but today the public can select their own facts.
I enjoyed this article because it gave me a deeper understanding of journalism and the differences before and post the internet. Effectively before the internet, journalists censored news because of the limited ways to present it to the public, but today there are facts and there is speculation and opinion and it is easy to see the facts from a story. The BBC are learning these lessons and although they get critcised (see the readers comments attached to the blog on the BBC website) the fact that they print the criticism openly next to the articles being criticised is a sign of how far journalism has come.
I will never be a journalist but if I was interested in pusuing it I would definitely read the book reviewed.
