What's the Point of News?: A Study in Ethical Journalism

By Tony Harcup

This book questions whether the news we get is as useful for citizens as it could, or should, be. This international study of news is based on re-thinking and re-conceptualising the news values that underpin understandings of journalism. It goes beyond empirical descriptions of what journalism is to explore normative ideas of what it might become if practised alongside commitments to ethical listening, active citizenship and social justice. It draws lessons from both alternative and mainstream media output; from both journalists and scholars; from both practice and theory. It challenges dominant news values by drawing on insights from feminism, peace journalism and other forms of critical thinking that are usually found on the margins of journalism studies. This original and engaging contribution to knowledge proposes an alternative set of contemporary news values that have significant implications for the news industry, for journalism education and for democracy itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030399474

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

T. HarcupWhat's the Point of News? https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39947-4_1

1. What Is the Point of News?

Tony Harcup¹  

(1)

Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Tony Harcup

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Crisis of journalismDemocracyNewsNews valuesSelectionTrust

News is the very essence of journalism: its heartbeat. A free flow of news is widely regarded as being essential for society, certainly for those societies that claim to be democracies. Yet news is in crisis, and not for the first time (Harcup 2007: 14). There are recurring claims that journalism is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990: 285) and equally persistent predictions of its dire future, as Professor Barbie Zelizer (2017: 241) has pointed out. The journalism academic, commentator, and blogger Jay Rosen (2016) has warned journalists that winter is coming, and news itself has been declared broken by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (2018: ix). He was not talking only about the economic models under which journalism has traditionally been produced, but also about evidence of catastrophically low levels of trust in the veracity or value of journalists’ key output: news.

It is not just a question of trust in news, it is also a question of access to it. Polly Curtis (2019) has written of a growing population of unnewsed people who no longer have the habit of accessing professionally produced news, adding that such people tend to be poorer, younger, and to have received fewer years of formal education than those who do tend to access news. Such a situation has damaging implications for democracy, she argues, because the unnewsed are in reality still likely to be receiving some degree of information and comment via social media, albeit in undifferentiated and unsourced forms lacking the rigour and standards of traditional journalism. Then there are those who deliberately avoid the output of the news industry. An international survey in 2019 found almost a third of people (32%) say they actively avoid the news because it is too depressing, too negative or because they feel there is no point given that there is nothing they can do to influence the events covered. However, there were large variations between countries, with more than half the respondents in Croatia, Turkey, and Greece avoiding the news compared with fewer than a fifth of those in Japan, Denmark, and Finland (Newman et al. 2019: 25).

In this context, it is perhaps little wonder that a group of journalism scholars were recently moved to write a Dear Journalism mock letter of resignation, bemoaning the news industry’s tendency to turn a reporter from an autonomous and creative professional into a cleverly disguised vacuum salesperson, and concluding that journalism is not what it can, nor what it should be (Witschge et al. 2019: 1). Yet, at the same time as criticisms of the industry are seemingly becoming ever louder, there is a creative struggle going on within grassroots communities to create their own public spheres and public voices, as Kidd and Barker-Plummer (2009: 489) put it. And there are lessons to be learned from such struggles about the nature—and value—of news. In addition to producing their own forms of alternative media, marginalised groups have developed ways of talking back to news media (Dreher 2010: 146), for example by monitoring, campaigning and critiquing, and such contributions might help embolden those critical voices that do exist within the news industry’s own structures.

There are question marks over news when it comes to access, autonomy, trust and democracy, and these questions are as much to do with ethics as with economics. As leading journalism studies scholar Professor Linda Steiner (2018: 1854) puts it in her discussion of the post-truth crisis now said to be confronting the world, twenty-first century journalists are suffering a credibility gap. In a similar vein, Professor Rodney Benson (quoted in Benavidez 2014) has described the news business as being dangerously close to a tipping point after which it may no longer be of much service to citizens in a democracy. However, not one of Rosen, Benson, Steiner, or Rusbridger—nor this author—consider such a stark diagnosis to be a reason to give up all hope.

Benson, for example, argues that, although journalism has long been a crucial part of a vibrant public sphere, there are other civil society actors beyond those professionally employed as journalists who also have roles to play in such a sphere. He urges us to recognise the continuing importance of a journalistic function even as specific business models for news face disruption and, in some instances, elimination. Because the need for such a function will remain: As a democracy, we need to think strategically about the kinds of voices and vehicles best equipped to provide the information, critique, and deliberation we need. In many instances, it won’t be journalists who provide this—yet journalists, broadly defined, will still be crucial as the ones who translate, package, and circulate ideas and information to non-specialist publics (Benson, quoted in Benavidez 2014). And journalists, broadly defined, may include some who ply their trade in what are termed alternative media, part of a tradition of critiquing the output of corporate media long before the latter recognised itself to be in an existential crisis or approaching any kind of tipping point or crossroads.

Today, journalism is ever more frequently being described as being at just such a crossroads, with doubts over its ability to continue to fulfil what Gurevitch and Blumler (1990: 270) refer to as the democratic expectations placed upon it. Expectations such as that journalism can inform society about itself and act as a watchdog on behalf of citizens, even if it is the breed of watchdog that has sometimes been found to be rather more tame or sleepy than its owners would have us believe. However, the alarmist tone of many such warnings about the future of journalism may be seen as an example of the western bias prevalent in too much journalism studies, according to Thomas Hanitzsch (2019: 216), who argues that lamentation about the crisis of journalism is primarily a concern of the global North—the US in particular—that may not necessarily be applicable in other contexts.

Perhaps crises might be a better description than crisis, given that threats come in different forms in different places and at different times. James Curran (2019: 190) has identified three major issues confronting journalism globally as being widespread government censorship … elite sourcing … [and] economic decline. Yet, as Tumber and Zelizer (2019: 6) have observed, many of the challenges and provocations facing journalism today are actually age-old problems, including: questions over the occupational and professional identity and autonomy of journalists; doubts over the legitimacy and trustworthiness of journalism in the eyes of other citizens; threats to journalists’ safety; the political economy of the media; and questions over journalism’s representativeness—geographic, thematic and topical. Such issues pre-date the recent crisis talk and were identified by many critics—including alternative journalists on alternative media outlets—even when mainstream newsrooms were comparatively heavily staffed and well resourced.

The Purpose of This Study

Whether there is cause for widespread alarm or not, and whether such issues really are old or new—or even if they can be both at the same time—is perhaps of less ultimate significance than the fact that we recognise that how and why journalism is done has to be open to question, scrutiny, even scepticism (although preferably not cynicism). If journalism really is approaching a crossroads, and that remains an if because there is not just one journalism, then that implies a choice of routes that may be taken. Crossroads or roundabout, the purpose of this study is to explore some of the alternative routes that some journalists and journalistic organisations may choose to take in the service of ethical journalism, notwithstanding the limitations on autonomy under which many journalists work. More specifically, this study will focus on possible choices when it comes to that most fundamental output of journalism: news.

Unless we are hermits, we might get news from family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, and others; but there is another news that is the product of the news industry, or industries. Of course, not everyone subscribes to, or formally consumes, such news output—and, as we have seen, some actively seek to avoid it—but in an age of ambient journalism (Hermida 2010), some news still gets through, still circulates on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Weibo, as well as by word of mouth, and therefore still has the potential to influence our attitudes and our actions. Some of what circulates on social media is news that emanates from the news industry, meaning that choices made by people working as journalists may impact upon members of the population who never knowingly or actively decide to consume a traditional news product.

Even in this new climate, therefore, decisions made within news organisations must retain some social significance; some sense of what Jackie Harrison (2019) refers to as the civil power of the news. So it should be a matter of concern if the news does not give us the information we need to be fully functioning citizens; and that is precisely what some of the more critical scholars have found to be the case, at least from Galtung and Ruge (1965) onwards. Typically, studies have found the dominant news values within mainstream media to privilege the actions and perspectives of the powerful and famous, along with the dramatic, the extreme and the novel, being concerned more with the latest symptom than with the underlying issue, more with personalities than with social structures. According to an international survey in 2019, citizens said they found the news industry to be better at telling them what had happened than with helping them understand it (Newman et al. 2019: 26), and this echoes long-standing criticisms of journalism as being a form of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other product. There appears to be scope here for some re-thinking, by journalists, scholars and citizens alike.

In his reflections on his own journalistic journey, the aforementioned Alan Rusbridger (2018: 219, 367) has written of the need for journalism to be re-made and re-imagined for a world in which old and new media are part of a continuum of information in which traditional definitions of news overlap and blur. But, interestingly, his own re-imagining of journalism seems primarily focused on the possibilities of open online collaboration and delivery, involving interaction with the people formerly known as the audience as Rosen (2006) famously put it, rather than on re-imagining news itself or the news values that underpin selection decisions. Indeed, news often seems to be almost taken for granted in Rusbridger’s otherwise illuminating memoir of four decades at the journalistic typeface. When it is mentioned at all in his account, general news seems to be largely unquestioned as the non-premium everyday material that any news organisation can provide, and which therefore does nothing to build a reputation or brand identity. Yet, if news is the heartbeat of journalism, does it not need to be re-thought too?

That, in essence, is the purpose of this monograph. Its starting point is that news selection is a series of choices. The aim is to ask deep questions about such choices and the nature of news, and to do so by taking a step back from both the adrenalin rush of news reporting and the lamentation over the latest crisis to gain a sense of perspective, to apply a critical reading of news stories, of relevant scholarship and of prevailing news values. It is probably worth mentioning at this early stage that this monograph is not going to engage in detail with the phenomenon known as fake news which attracted a lot of attention in the UK and US in the wake of the 2016 European Union referendum and presidential election respectively. Fake news is an extremely slippery term used in so many different ways that it has largely lost whatever meaning it may have once had, and it is not the subject of this study. Nor are funding models or technological development. But news is, and news values are.

News values are integral to every facet of journalistic decision making, argues Perry Parks (2018: 2), who adds that such values are constructed in the context of what Michel Foucault called ‘epistemes,’ or the aggregated schema of knowledge of a given period. In other words, they are contingent rather than absolute, and are in no way a natural phenomenon. There is a need, therefore, for news values to be problematised.

Academic analysis of the news seeks to examine and problematise the dominant practices of journalism by standing back from the immediate and attempting to look more systematically at, among many other things, whether news selection plays an ideological role in society; whether the news plays an agenda setting role; whether the news tends to exclude certain people and viewpoints from representation in the media or public sphere; whether mainstream news judgements help to define and police the borders of what is regarded as societal common sense; and the extent to which the very act of news selection means that journalists are (still) operating as de facto gatekeepers of information. Within this context of scholarly inquiry, the very concept of news values has been questioned, with Curran and Seaton (2003: 336) describing it as a device allowing journalists to translate untidy reality into neat stories with beginnings, middles, and denouements, in the process of which they tend in effect to reinforce conventional opinions and established authority.

But journalists, for their part, are often critical—or dismissive—of such academic studies, which can sometimes come across as abstracted from newsroom realities. This tension between scholarly and practitioner concepts of news—between theory and practice—is unlikely to be resolved by declaring that one side has a monopoly on wisdom or insight. This monograph will deliberately engage with both practitioner and academic perspectives in its exploration of the values within news.

The question in the title of this study is, at first glance, a simple one: What is the point of news? Simple answers immediately suggest themselves, such as: To tell us new things that we need to know. But even such relatively straightforward constructions suggest further questions: What sort of things? What counts as new? What is meant by need? How much do we really know of such things? And who exactly is this we?

To complicate matters further, the monograph is sub-titled a study in ethical journalism, specifically to draw attention to the wider role/s that can be played—for good or ill—by journalism. Ethical journalism might be defined as: Journalistic activity conducted in accordance with both the letter and the spirit of relevant ethical guidelines and codes of conduct, and which is informed more by a commitment to ethics and to the public interest than to commercial or careerist considerations (Harcup 2014: 95). What that means in practice will differ according to circumstances and over time. A commitment to ethical journalism underpins codes of acceptable journalistic conduct around the world. But a concern for ethics is also something that goes far beyond journalists’ own codes and/or the codes of media regulatory bodies, where such exist. Also worth considering when exploring ethics and journalism are wider and deeper concepts such as empathy, the feminist ethics of care, the ethics of active listening , and ethical approaches to representation and self-representation.

Despite its apparently amorphous and contingent nature, ethical journalism as a concept can have its practical as well as theoretical uses. If we find ourselves enveloped in a bewildering fog of news, it is a concept that might be likened to a compass point that can help us see where we are; not just where we have come from, but also the direction/s in which we could be heading. Maybe even whether or not we are standing on solid ground. It is perhaps when journalists have no such ethical compass, or reference point, that journalism is most at risk of inflicting harm, whether that be intruding on people’s privacy or grief with no public interest justification, or misrepresenting an issue or section of the community via stereotyped or hurtful coverage.

Research Questions and Methodology

It is, then, within a contested context that this study has been conducted: the existential crisis confronting and diminishing much of the commercial journalism industry, set against continuing examples of the social benefit that may be provided by ethical journalism. Such is the background against which this study’s two over-arching research questions have been framed. They are:

RQ1

To what extent does the news live up to claims made for its role in informing citizens?

RQ2

Are there news values that might better meet the needs of citizens?

These research questions will be explored by analysing relevant scholarship alongside news reporting practices and outputs, from both mainstream and alternative news organisations. Informed by such critical scholarship of news, and by evidence of things sometimes being done differently in practice, this monograph will explore what sort of news values should inform selection decisions if journalism is to live up to its oft-proclaimed role of informing us about the world in which we live. This re-thinking of news values will be informed primarily by the application of insights drawn from feminist studies and scholarship around active citizenship, peace journalism and alternative