Journalists have such an important role in society, it would be easy to imagine it’s one of the most respected professions ever. Of course, the reality is that society in general holds them in a degree of contempt floating around the same level as politicians.
It’s not entirely fair nor entirely unfair. As in every field, there are those who do their job well and those who don’t and any range of people in between.
Those doing their job well help to maintain our democracies and ensure our freedoms remain protected. They hold those in power to account and highlight their failings and hypocrisy.
The potential good that those journalists can do is offset by others who believe that they’re more important than their audience. The number of people reading and sharing their stories is the most important thing and even something as fundamental as the truth is ignored if it’s going to get in the way of a good story.
And so to the birth of fake news1 as different media channels spout off the kind of stories they know their audience want to hear and ignore everything else, adding to the stories to make them even more attractive to their audience, even though the stories are no longer true. That’s how we end up with incidents like Fox News being fined a rich man’s fortune for repeatedly claiming that rigged voting machines stole the 2020 election.
When the same claims are repeated over and over without evidence, they start to become truth for the majority who don’t want to think for themselves.
We’d hope that the fine Fox suffered would be a deterrent for them and others from pushing fake news in the future, but I wonder if that’s really the case.
Since 2021, Fox News has made annual profits of around $5 billion, sometimes a little less and sometimes a little more.2 A large part of those profits will come from advertising and to sell advertising, you need an audience.
Fake news serves the simple purpose of growing and keeping an audience. The part of your audience that already has the views and opinions that the fake news supports will consume more fake news because it supports their beliefs and reassures them. Repeating fake news convinces others that the news is actually true and then they’ll become part of the audience that views more content because it aligns with their newly found beliefs. A little later, we’ll see how this effect even works on journalists who we’d imagine would understand the mechanism and would be immune to it. Nope, even they fall for it.
So fake news equals audience and audience equals advertising profits. Guess that explains the growth of fake news, but there’s another angle to this. Consider a meeting between someone at Fox News selling an advertiser slots on their channel.
“So why should we advertise on the Fox News channel?” asks the advertiser.
“We’re the biggest cable news channel in the country and the only one that averages over 1 million viewers daily. But there’s something even more important than the numbers that you need to know. Our audience is a bunch of dumbasses. Seriously, if we reported that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary, they’d all go ‘really, that’s amazing, I never knew that, you don’t get that kind of hard-hitting journalism on CNN.’ We can tell them anything and they’ll believe it. They all sucked up our claims that Dominion voting machines were used to rig the 2020 Presidential election even though we knew there was totes no evidence to back up that fairy tale. You can claim that your skin cream will make them look 30 years younger, this pair of springs with handles will give them the strength to arm-wrestle grizzly bears or that this politician will keep all his promises when elected and they’ll lap it up like puppies at the milk bowl. You want some of that, don’t cha?”
“Where do I sign?” replies the advertiser.
If an audience is gullible enough to believe fake news, they’re gullible enough to believe outlandish advertising claims. Fake news effectively qualifies an audience as super gullible and perfect targets for advertising. I’m not saying that is the reason why some media channels push inaccurate stories to their audience, but the logic behind it is sound, isn’t it?
Anyway, I picked Fox News to illustrate this problem because they stand out as a result of their huge fine for pushing the Dominion voting machines fake news, but editorial bias affecting news output is the norm in the industry. Most media channels and publications lean to the right or the left to some degree. And similarly, to varying degrees, they’re viewing their audience as dumbasses.
Where Fox News went big on lies about voting machines, NPR went big on pushing the story of Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign up until the Mueller report didn’t find the smoking gun and then NPR went small on reporting that.3 And so it was they ignored the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.
While it’s different to reporting obvious lies, choosing what news to report and what to ignore has a similar effect to fake news and indicates a similar level of contempt for the audience.
In The Public Interest Vs Of Interest To The Public
So whose fault is it that much of the media regulates what stories they share with us and also how much bias they infuse it with?
It would be easy to put all the blame on the media and the journalists, but might we also be a teensy-weensy bit responsible?
We established a long time ago that we prefer being told we’re right rather than being told the truth. Of course, the mainstream media are going to tell us what we want to hear. If they don’t, we’ll just up and off to find someone else who will tell us that the truth of the world is exactly what we want it to be. They’re in this for the money, not the Pulitzers. For clarity, the publishers and channel owners are in it for the money, not the journalists. People who want to get rich go and work for investment banks and hedge funds, not newspapers.
Anyway, do you value your privacy? I know it seems natural for many people to share much of their lives online, but even if that’s you, do you believe you ultimately have the right to decide what others know about you and what you want to keep private?
That doesn’t sound unreasonable. Should everyone have a total right to privacy or do people become fair game if they’re famous?
Imagine a politician campaigning for election on a policy of family values and the importance and sanctity of marriage. If a journalist discovers evidence that they’ve been cheating on their spouse with a hot 20-year-old, do they have a right to privacy?
Alternatively, a member of a successful sports team who rarely engages with the media or makes any public comments beyond the game just played is discovered by the same journalist having an affair with a staff member despite being with their partner for a couple of years. Do they have a right to privacy?
This is the question as to whether something is in the public interest or if it’s just of interest to the public.
A politician claiming to be a defender of traditional marriage and families would clearly be a hypocrite if they were cheating on their spouse. If they can’t be trusted to act as they claim in this way, can they be trusted to act as they claim they will in other matters? It’s absolutely likely that some people would choose not to vote for such a politician as this would suggest to some that they can’t be trusted. The voters need to be able to trust politicians so it’s easy to argue that revealing their affair is in the public interest.
A sports star isn’t expected to be an example of living a virtuous life and particularly if they don’t push their opinions into the public domain, it’s difficult to say they don’t deserve their privacy. If you or I were having an affair, it wouldn’t be reported because the public wouldn’t care. The public may care to know about a famous sports star having an affair, but just because it’s of interest to us doesn’t mean it should be reported. Sure, cheating on their partner is a lousy thing to do, but it’s not really news.
It’s gossip, but we love gossip and so we tell the media that we want to know these stories and so the media go out of their way to give us these stories.
Imagine another scenario, this time an actress living in a democratic country where same-sex marriage is legal is given 27 hours to comment on a story due to be published reporting her relationship with another woman.
How is someone’s sexuality news in any civilised country? Apparently in Australia, as distasteful as such a scenario would be, the media are free to act like that without any fear of meaningful punishment.
In 2022, when the Sydney Morning Herald’s gossip columnist Andrew Hornery gave Rebel Wilson a deadline to comment on his story about her sexuality, the actress responded by outing herself first.4 The journalist even had the nerve to then complain publicly about how she’d ruined his scoop.
Try to imagine yourself being targeted like that. How would you feel if someone took a deeply personal secret from your life and tried to share it with the world? That was a private and personal story that no-one but Wilson had any right to share. It was simply a bully exerting their power over someone else to make themself feel better. And as most children know it’s better to keep quiet and laugh at the awkward kid the playground bully picks on, most readers treated it as a news story when it was simply gossip. That’s why the media act as they do because they know what we want.
Anyway, not every country has privacy laws that are so weak. Such a thing couldn’t happen in the UK.
For example, suppose a respected TV celebrity in the UK was found by a newspaper to have paid tens of thousands of pounds to a young adult for sexually explicit photos. I’m sure that would feel like a very hot story from the journalists’ point of view, but while it may feel a bit seedy, if it’s legal then it’s none of their business. So they would of course respect the privacy of all parties involved and move on.
Except this isn’t a hypothetical situation either. The Sun newspaper discovered that BBC newsreader Huw Edwards had paid a young person for photos, but knowing they couldn’t name him because no crime had been committed, they reported the story anyway without naming those involved.5 This led to several days of speculation over the identity of the person and abuse targeted at other BBC employees, before the the man’s wife identified him some five days later.
As with the Australian incident, there was concern over the way The Sun handled their reporting of the story, but ultimately despite the young person disputing the reporting of the story and police finding no evidence of criminal activity,6 the newspaper got the story out without breaching any privacy laws while, in my own opinion and you may feel differently, clearly breaching the newsreader’s right to privacy.
It may have been seedy to some, but despite some other allegations, no criminality has been proven and so while the story was interesting to the public, revealing the story was not in the public interest.
The public has the power to hold the powerful, like media organisations, to account by not spending money with them, but the media know the public is weak and will lap up stories like this. No doubt there will have been many people up and down the UK tut-tutting about the behaviour while secretly indulging in their own private lives on apps like Tinder, Grindr and Onlyfans. I’d have thought all the more reason for people to send a clear message about respecting privacy.
Concerns over the invasion of privacy by the media in the UK came to a head when it become public knowledge that journalists at several newspapers had used illegal methods, including phone hacking, to get information for stories.
Journalists were paying people to access the answer phone messages of the personal phone numbers of numerous famous people just so they could share details of their private lives with the public. Things going on in their lives that while of interest to the public were not in the public interest. Commonly, stories sourced through this illegal method would be described as coming from an anonymous close friend. When it came to the public notice that phone hacking had been used by multiple newspapers, a repeated theme from those who had been hacked was the feeling that they couldn’t trust anyone, even family or closest friends.
How would you feel if personal information of yours was shared just because it would help someone else to make some money?
It was a nasty practice carried out by nasty people, but could it ever be argued that it’s a legitimate practice?
How about if a known and previously convicted criminal was suspected of planning or being involved in a crime, would it be acceptable for a journalist to use illegal methods to gain information about them?
To me that feels rather more like journalism at its best as they try to get to truth that is not only in the public interest, but may also help to protect the public. But if we defend that, where do we draw the line? Is it only acceptable if the individual has a previous conviction or do we think it’s fine to invade the privacy of a “known criminal”? How do we define a known criminal?
Some time back I shared the story of being threatened in a pub toilet by a really crap gangster and how I was also threatened with arrest by an off-duty police officer in the same pub. I said at the time that the officer couldn’t prove what he believed I was guilty of, but in his mind, I was a known criminal. The reason he failed to prove I was dealing illegal drugs was because I wasn’t dealing illegal drugs. He’d been told, almost certainly by the fella dealing most of the illegal drugs in that part of town, that I was the man to look into, leaving him with a bit more freedom to go about his business. There might have been another reason too, but I really can’t recall now which came first, him trying to stitch me up or me sleeping with his girlfriend.
Anyway, the point is that trying to draw a clear line that specifies who doesn’t deserve to have personal privacy and who does probably isn’t a clear and easy decision. There can’t be any hard and fast rules, with decisions being taken on a case-by-case basis.
One case we could consider is the abduction and murder of 13-year-old Millie Dowler.7 It was a high-profile case that had significant police resources behind it, so it’s easy to wonder why the News of the World felt the need to get involved at the level they did. Specifically, they hacked into the voicemails of the teenager’s phone looking for information for their stories on the missing school girl. They even went so far as to delete messages from the full voicemail box, messages that could potentially have been evidence, to free space for new messages.
An unintended result of their illegal behaviour was to make her family believe she was still alive because surely no-one else would be accessing her voicemails, would they?
This was very much a case of journalists putting themselves above the law in order to try and get a story that would sell newspapers. It wasn’t only them putting themselves above the law, apparently the police became aware of the phone hacking early on, yet took no action against the journalists.
I guess the claim of one law for them and one law for us doesn’t just apply to the rich, it seems journalists can get a free ride too.
- While “fake news” most obviously describes news that simply isn’t true, I’m also using it to describe news that is reported with a degree of bias that hasn’t been subject to a reasonable level of editing to attempt a neutral stance. ↩︎
- https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FOX/fox/gross-profit ↩︎
- https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-61807511 ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66081060 ↩︎
- I said in the introduction I wouldn’t update things to reflect changes that occurred after I finished writing this book, but I think I need to add a footnote as I read this during proofing. This week Huw Edwards has pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent pictures of children. These offences were not part of the original story The Sun reported and were the result of a separate police investigation, though one that resulted from the story. It doesn’t change the fact that what The Sun did was questionable at the time. They would surely say the recent events vindicate them, but if their interest had been securing justice, they could have just passed all of their information to the the police and pushed them to investigate. That said, the end result is that at least one person guilty of a very nasty crime has been caught and that is good news. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/ex-bbc-news-presenter-huw-edwards-indicates-guilty-pleas-indecent-child-pictures-2024-07-31/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Milly_Dowler#Voicemail_tampering_investigation ↩︎