#14 M100 Youth Media Workshop 2008

Today, tomorrow

Having spent four days in Potsdam I would like to note down some thoughts about the challenges of journalism, today and tomorrow.

Let me start with a quotation from an American late-night show “The Colbert Report”: “The real great news is media has gone from an old boy’s club to an echo chamber. If you need people’s attention, you don’t need to be right – you just need to shout”. The old boy’s club was dull but informative. The echo chamber is visually attractive but not quite enlightening.

News-anchors and pundits often deal not with the facts, but with their impressions. They comment instead of delivering the truth. They invite experts and shout at them when the latter don’t share their opinion.  They are spreading exaggerated information designed to induce fear. Fear mongering switches off the mind. Terrified viewers are prone to unintentional manipulation. They don’t think, they only digest a slanted world picture served by the media.

The term “echo chamber” refers to a situation in which information or ideas are reinforced by transmission inside an enclosed space. We can observe it in media discourse. One TV station makes a claim, others repeat it without double-checking the facts, frequently in a distorted sensational form. Joseph Goebbels said that “a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth”. This has become the ultimate rule of contemporary media culture.

Today people are exposed to millions of news reports mixed up with opinions. At the end of the day they assume that all they have read or heard is true. Paradoxically, it is not. Young educated people in the USA point to satirical fake-news shows when asked about their main source of information. Only there they find an alternative to the media noise offered by the four leading news-stations.

The best example here is a huge debate in the American media if Barack Obama has been getting too much media attention after his visit to Europe leaving McCain behind. A ridiculous thing was that during the discussions about this “problem”, pictures of the Democratic presidential nominee were being constantly run on the one half of the screen.

The media have got caught in their own trap. Our culture developed a duty of being well-informed. As a result, the 24/7 news channels are booming all over the world. The problem is that there is hardly more news than 30 years ago. To fill the time, news reports are being done on issues that 30 years ago would never have been labelled as news. The inflation of “breaking news” allows a report about Carla Bruni’s new CD release to be followed by a report about victims of famine in Darfur. Presented in the same format, with the same concern.

When watching news channels one may notice the inequality in the coverage of incidents of the same range happening in different parts of the globe. A recent example from a Polish news-channel TVN24 – a plane crash in Madrid with a death toll of 150 people had uninterrupted 4 hour coverage. On every full hour other news was presented, among them an explosion in Afghanistan which killed 50 people. It took exactly 3 seconds to say it.

I’m not an enthusiast of globalization, because I perceive it as an unequal distribution of information. Firstly, the western developed world has much bigger access to different sources of information than developing countries. Secondly, the gradation of news is being done by people from western countries. The reports from the developing countries are aired only if they influence the USA or the EU. One of the Polish politicians even coined a term “Eurolization” to describe the egoistic perspective of the world events shown in the European media.  We report from Beijing, because all our belongings are “made in China”. Who cares about Zimbabwe?

On Good Friday 1930 at 6:30pm the BBC broadcast audience waited as usual for their daily portion of news. But this time they were informed: “There is no news today”. Later they heard fifteen minutes of piano music. No, the journalists weren’t lazy. They did their job, and came to their conclusion – that on this particular day there was really nothing important to announce. They paid respect to their listeners. Imagine Wolf Blitzer telling his viewers: “Folks, no news today. Let’s hear some classical music.” He would rather discuss with talking heads on four screens if Obama’s middle name can cost him loosing the race to the Oval Office.

I think the future journalists, no matter how the technology develops, should follow this advice, which Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., gave to the graduates of Stanford University in the commencement address of 2005. He said famously: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish”.  We shall never be satisfied with our current knowledge. We shall never stop asking seemingly naïve questions. We may lose our laptops, but we shall never lose our curiosity. We may report from the Moon, but shall never compromise our integrity. The journalist of the future is just a technical-savvy journalist of the past. Nothing less, but nothing more.

By: Anna Przybyll (Poland)

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