Monday 2 July 2012

How much is the truth worth?

I was not trained to be a journalist. I have hardly ever had to pound the pavement, sneak incriminating questions into interviews or go undercover for groundbreaking scoop.

I am a food writer. I write about food, the stories, people and culture behind that food, and maybe the odd 'newsy' story on organics or food prices, but I've never done anything as amazing as warzone reporting or as important as business or political commentary.

But the reporting the truth in media matters to me, just like, I think, it would matter to any other regular human being, or to modern society. Even if it's as trivial as whether the food at a particular restaurant was fresh, well-cooked and good value. (Perhaps that is too much to assume, in which case we are doomed and the world might as well end this year).

What is the point of reporting if it were not reported as seen?

The media model as we know it is rife with conflicts of interest. Between the financial reports on TV are advertisements of companies listed on the stock exchange, and between cartoons are junk food ads. You may have other examples, but the media business as it stands today seems the most incestuous of all industries. For a long time, media practitioners stood by ethical guidelines that meant that they would provide what is essentially the public service of reporting, and for the eyeballs interested in those reports, advertisers would pay. Note that they are just paying for the eyeballs, not the pens.

But times have changed. There are obvious things like advertorials, but they are usually ethically labelled "sponsored" or the like, but as media companies have grown, the importance of the business component of publications have too. And business involves financial transactions - both immediate and potential. It's the potential exchanges of money that is changing things. The networking, the ass-kissing, the handshaking. It's not like someone has paid you to advertise something now, but you'd better write about their businesses in a favourable light, else they won't come to you for advertising space.

Money is important in our world. I don't want to be all naive and flowerchild about it and say it's not. Even organisations originally set up do public good, such as reporting, have costs, and someone, somehow needs to cover them. Advertising has been our source since the day one, but like I said, the system is disgustingly flawed.


It's not helped by the fact that there is simply too great a supply of media in the world nowadays. Most blame the internet - stabbing bloggers is still the thing to do, seriously let's get over it - but to be honest, who invented this technology? Us, humans. Do writers Google things? Do they read blogs by "citizen journalists" or "amateurs"? You bet we do. So why are we blaming what we now rely on and take for granted? It's not going away any time soon, so we need to work out how to embrace this "new" world (that has been new for so long that it's now old to say it's new).

It's time to rethink the media model. Remember, proper reporting is a skill and a talent, just like being a carpenter or a chef - and there are differences in quality that correlate directly to the skills and talent of the person/people producing the media. But the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it? Only a fool would buy a newspaper if they could read an identical piece of news for free on the internet, but what if it was a much more informative report? Perhaps much better written? Or with a core promise to serve the reader and not the advertiser? 


How many of you are interested in "old fashioned", honest, unbiased, deep reporting, and how much are you willing to pay for it? 


If we continue down this path of ass-kissing reporting, in the end, it's the readers who lose. Never again will you have good, clean information. Never again will your stock purchase be the result of your analysis of good data, because data with integrity can no longer be reported to you.


I'm going to propose a radical idea. Pay for good reporting and ditch the sh*tty versions. In a capitalist society (thank goodness we still have one in Hong Kong), consumer demand dictates everything. If you keep reading dumb news, that's what you'll get. We all suffer from information overload nowadays, but how much of that is rubbish?

Publishers rely on your eyeballs for income. Sure, the paper price, or cable TV subscription, but your eyeballs also secure good advertising dollars, which funds good reporting. When you read rubbish instead of the good stuff, the good stuff loses eyeballs, readership lowers, advertisers pay less. The good stuff gets hidden behind paywalls because that's how publishers think they need to recoup revenue. And so you resort to reading more rubbish. Bad cycle.

My solutions:
1. Read/watch/listen only to quality media.
2. Treat media with the same respect you do art.

Point 2 might sound a bit scary, but like artists, writers and perhaps whole publications, need patrons. People who believe in the skills, talent and craft of the media makers and are willing to fund them just for that, in order to provide the world with all the news and commentary that is worthy and fit to print.

I don't think we need to live in an ideal world for that to happen, but then again, maybe I'm being idealistic.