Murdoch

Journalism is about telling stories that are current and relevant to people’s life. Such information also is at the core of recording history… On politics, journalism is supposed to be objective, but it never is. NEVER. Show me a journalist who claims political objectivity and I will show you a liar... 

Journalists differ from historians recording of current events. Journalists rarely investigate the historical contexts nor the manipulations from the sources of their information. Historians have to dig below the events and see the greater picture of information influences. 

The main disparity between journalists and other journalists comes from the political bend of their masters — the employer of their services. Here comes Mr Rupert Murdoch, the master of political manipulations. His journalists are not bent to his will, but they are employed because of their own tendencies. The main political bends in Australia are Liberal (full-blown CONservatives) and Labor (middle of the road conservatives). 

The knives are being sharpened at all media headquarters in preparation to the next australian federal elections. From the ivory tower attached to our Old People’s Home, we can see that about 75 per cent of the media favours the ultra-CONservatives because of fallacies about security, money policies, stability and other traditional mantras, while the rest is lukewarm about a change of government towards the “socialists”, who are presented as no more than the middle of the road cuddly kangaroos.

Under these conditions, the truth is elusive… The voters sense they need to change their underwear. The independents (on both sides of politics) offer a protest vote against the mega-parties, but they also could signal instability of policy making. 

Here, the journalists can only report on the present minister doing photo ops and kissing babies, while the leader opposition does the same, with a different voice and different glasses. This is pretty boring. May as well send a drone to do the recording.

Then comes the opinionators, the journalists who have made their choice of candidate with arguments (true, false and slanted) to influence your choice. And journalists are going to bitch about each others for the choice they’ve made and about issues such as global warming, the “special op" in Ukraine or the price of fish reaching the stratosphere.

So, here is a view on the subject of news-telling… :

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Journalism cannot solve journalism’s problems

From Örnebring, Henrik

There is no doubt that journalism – both as an institution and as a profession – is currently facing unprecedented challenges. Audiences are fragmenting and at risk from disinformation often virtually indistinguishable from ‘real news’. Entire areas outside the metropolitan centers of the media world lack any news coverage at all; creating ‘news deserts’ (Ferrier et al., 2016), where there is no or very little independent reporting about local events and politics. News organizations grapple with dwindling resources. Journalism jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate, at least in some countries (notably the United States). Yet, I would propose that a far more serious challenge underlying all these troubling trends – a meta-challenge, if you will – is that journalism itself (understood as the collective of organizations, groups, and individuals making up journalism as a social institution) can do very little about the root causes of many of these challenges.

This is not to say that that the problems currently facing journalism are inevitable or the cause of unstoppable social forces, rather the opposite. There is nothing necessary about these root causes, and they could be addressed through human collective action. However, for all its influence over our common culture and shared frames of reference, journalism itself has very little power to address the underlying challenges I am referring to.

Let us start with the challenge of disinformation. I will not go into detail into the phenomenon itself (instead, I refer readers to the other excellent texts on the topic in this volume) except to say that while we still know very little about the actual impact of so-called ‘fake news’, it is clear that regardless of the extent to which such false information circulates, its impact will be conversely related to the education and cognitive resources of the audience (the higher the education, the lower the impact, generally speaking). Thus, those with less cognitive resources will (potentially) be affected the most.

In other words, the challenge of disinformation is as much a media literacy challenge as it is a media challenge. News organizations have created numerous initiatives to combat disinformation and improve media literacy, for example, fact-checking features, collaborative quality controls, increased transparency, and so on. Even the much-maligned social media platforms seen as responsible for much of the spread of disinformation are becoming more aware of the issue and are attempting to combat it in various ways, including by attempting to increase audience awareness.

Research, however, would lead us to be pessimistic about the success of such media-led media literacy initiatives. The knowledge gap (i.e. socio-political knowledge being unequally distributed in the population mainly along socioeconomic lines) and the Matthew effect1 that accompanies it has been well documented by research since the 1970s (Hwang and Jeong, 2009; Tichenor et al., 1970). That is to say, most efforts to lessen the knowledge gap by providing more information resources and training to disadvantaged groups will benefit groups that are already advantaged even more, thus maintaining or even widening the knowledge gap (Neuman and Celano, 2006; Walberg and Tsai, 1983).

Furthermore, other societal institutions, notably education, matter more for media literacy than the media themselves do. No matter what journalism itself does to address the problem of disinformation, whatever is done (or not done) in schools will matter more. And journalism has very little direct influence over school policy.

The same principle applies to other audience-related challenges facing journalism as well, for example, audience fragmentation and polarization. In a high-choice media environment, it is easier both to select consuming more news if you are interested, as well as to de-select consuming news entirely, creating a gap between ‘news seekers’ and ‘news avoiders’ (Ksiazek et al., 2010). Content preferences seem in turn to be at least partially dependent on income and education (i.e. socioeconomic status): ‘News-seekers tend to be older, have more education, and greater income than Avoiders’ (Ksiazek et al., 2010: 557).

Thus, the knowledge gap between news seekers and news avoiders is also a socioeconomic one, and consequently a problem that is very hard for journalism to address. Journalism cannot solve the problem of increasing socioeconomic inequality both on the global level and within nations (that socioeconomic inequality is rising globally is an indisputable empirical fact, Dorling (2014)). No matter how much journalism would work to change their coverage or to make efforts to address groups who do not see themselves as being addressed by the news, such efforts would still more likely to have an overall negative effect on the knowledge gap, and would thus do nothing to meet the challenges of disinformation, fragmentation, and polarization. The underlying challenge, the problem of social inequality, would still remain.

In a similar fashion, journalism cannot do very much about geographic information inequalities either. Rapidly increasing global urbanization is another indisputable empirical fact (Grimm et al., 2008), and as rural areas depopulate, fewer and fewer local and regional markets will be able to sustain commercial news organizations. The only solutions here would be either state subsidies or some form of public service media alternative, but alas, such solutions today seem politically impossible even in countries with historically strong public service media. What can journalism do about global urbanization? Not much.

This assessment is a rather pessimistic one, but unfortunately well supported by decades of research. Journalism studies scholars, like many scholars, are subject-centric in our assessments of problems in our object of study, that is, we tend to think that if there are problems with journalism, then it is within journalism’s power to address them.

Journalism could meet its challenges by just being ‘better’ (e.g. more responsive to audiences, more transparent, higher quality content, either in some specific way or across the board). But I have a hard time seeing that any amount of fact-checking or temporarily dropping paywalls would in any way affect social inequality and increasing urbanization – and make no mistake, these are the underlying root causes of the most important challenges facing journalism today.

However, as all authors in this volume, I have also been tasked with suggesting solutions. So, here is my solution to how journalism can meet these challenges, and it is as inevitable as it is unrealistic: journalism – meaning, as I said at the outset, the collective of organizations, groups, and individuals making up journalism as a social institution – needs to actively start campaigning for socioeconomic equality, both on the national and the global level.

It would not suffice that individual news outlets or even individual journalists do this (as some already do), but it would need to be an institution-wide, global change. Journalism needs to turn its considerable symbolic resources to addressing the problem of inequality and making this the focal issue of all reporting.

Unfortunately, as I have studied journalism for most of my adult life, I know that there are formidable obstacles to making such a thorough change to journalism. But I also believe – no, know – that the only way to address a challenge is to address the underlying cause. Everything else would just be cosmetics or polishing the deck chairs of the Titanic.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1.‘Matthew effect’ from the Gospel of Matthew, 13:12: ‘Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them’ (New International Version).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884918808690

About Örnebring, Henrik

My current research is focused on three areas: the history of the Black press in the US; threats to and harassment of journalists; and the restructuring of journalistic labor and changing journalistic working conditions in the face of technological and economic transformation.

Previously I have conducted research on comparative European journalism; media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe; local news ecology; comparative media history; and transmedia entertainment from a historical perspective.

My most recent book is Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (with Michael Karlsson; University of Missouri Press, forthcoming 2022), a history of the notion of journalistic "independence" and its meaning. I am the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020).

I also have a three-year grant from FORTE (together with Elizabeth Van Couvering and Robert MacKenzie) for the project "Labor market intermediary platforms and mediatization in the Swedish gig economy (SWEGIG)" (2019-21), which studies how new apps and web pages which advertise short-term jobs are changing the employment relationship through new demands of mediated self presentation and self promotion.

TEACHING

Henrik Örnebring mainly teaches Media Theory, Organizational Communication, and supervises bachelor's theses. He is currently the main supervisor of two PhD students (Fredrik Edin and Carina Tenor).

COLLABORATION

Henrik Örnebring is Advisory Board Member of the Worlds of Journalism Survey (www.worldsofjournalism.org) led by Professor Thomas Hanitzsch of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany; Advisory Committee Member of the project Journalistic Role Performance Across the Globe (http://www.journalisticperformance.org/) led by Dr Claudia Mellado of the University of Santiago, Chile; was a member of the Swedish Research Council Review Panel on Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, and Peace and Conflict Research, 2015-17; Chair of the Swedish Media Research Association (FSMK) 2016-18; and Vice-Chair/Chair of the ICA Journalism Studies Division 2015-18.

PUBLICATIONS

• Book Review - The Crisis of the Institutional Press

Henrik Örnebring, 2021

• Journalism and the Politics of Mobility

Henrik Örnebring, Amy Schmitz Weiss, 2021

• The Media Day, Revisited - Rhythm, Place and Hyperlocal Information Environments

Henrik Örnebring, Erika Hellekant Rowe, 2021

WE, Gus Leonisky and Co on YD, HAVE TACKLED NEWS SINCE 2005:

https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/964

and in many other articles...

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