Hacking book: what's the point of journalistic ethics if newspapers go out of business?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/mar/23/phone-hacking-leveson-inquiry

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<em>Today's extract from <strong>The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial</strong>* is from a chapter by <strong>Tim Luckhurst</strong> in which he argues that hacking is not the major problem facing British journalism.

Instead, in the face of declining revenue (and print sales) for newspapers, the challenge is to fund ethical journalism in future.

Talking about ethics in a world with too few profitable, professional, independent news providers would be largely futile, he writes...</em>

Professional journalism's survival is threatened by the economic impact of digital technologies. The plurality and diversity of voice upon which representative democracy depends is in jeopardy.

Needed urgently is debate about how well-resourced, professional news-gathering can be sustained. Instead, tired concerns about the ethics and ownership of popular newspapers are diverting attention from critical 21st century realities.

The hacking of Milly Dowler's mobile telephone generated a moral panic that was seized upon by a curious alliance of elite establishment and left-progressive opinion.

At the same time it diverted attention from a crucial debate. That discussion, about whether professionally edited, fact-based journalism can continue to play the role of an estate in the multimedia age, will remain important after those responsible for phone hacking have been punished.

There is a crisis in journalism that has nothing to do with hacking and relates directly to the conduct of public affairs.

It started with recognition that the internet has weakened the authority of large-scale professional media organisations and progressed to predictions that it will destroy it.

Many thinkers in the field of journalism and media studies believe this and find it irresistible. They cherish the possibility that the power of big-media may be shattered by what laymen call blogging and they grace with the oxymoronic title 'citizen journalism'.

The essential difference between the two is that much blogging is an amateur activity carried out by people with no understanding of journalism's social purpose who operate with scant regard for facts...

Liberated by broadband from a free market in which their ideas have no traction because too few find them interesting, they bleat – and tweet – wild rumours, half-truths and conspiracies.

That such freedom of expression is welcomed by people no editor would pay to provide copy is neither surprising nor objectionable. That it might replace professional journalism is troubling.

As the news cycle accelerates, propelled by digital technology, the need for expert journalism that can distinguish fact from fiction and privilege objectivity over ideology grows too.

Partnership with audiences is essential: they now possess the digital, mobile technology to send words, images and opinions to newsrooms at lightning speed. But they need professional journalists to sift and curate that information...

Audiences have learned to follow this path from amateur information sharing to professional news reporting. They understand that professionally edited mass media has the authority and power to inform and enlighten.

They appreciate that there can be a symbiotic relationship between social recommendation and fact-based, professional journalism.

Regrettably, they do not yet understand that the expansion of online and social media is undermining the economic foundations upon which professional news-gathering rests.

News has never been more accessible or less well funded. A large chunk of blame lies with newspaper proprietors.

When the internet was new they chose to offer free access online to editorial content for which they had always charged in their printed editions.

Readers saw no compelling reason to pay for content they could read free on their computer screens. Circulations began to decline and they have not stopped.

Audit Bureau of Circulations figures (2011) show that in September 2011 the 232,566 daily purchasers of The Guardian (down from 424,132 in October 2001 and from 278,129 in September 2010) were subsidising the reading habits of 2,613,405 daily unique users (2011) of Guardian Unlimited, that newspaper's free website.

The Guardian demonstrated its editorial vigour by pursuing and breaking the telephone hacking story, but it may not survive to produce more such journalism...

The Guardian's losses have reached peaks of £100,000 a day, but while its plight is desperate it is not unique.

The Independent produces journalism consumed by 13,513,040 monthly unique users online from revenues generated mainly by 176,983 daily sales of its printed edition.

It needs the generosity of Alexander Lebedev, its proprietor, as much as The Times (429,554 daily sales in September 2011, 678, 498 in October 2001) is kept alive by Rupert Murdoch's deep pockets and his commitment to news printed with ink on paper.

The link from newspapers teetering on the brink of insolvency to hacking is real. Tabloid circulations have been hammered too...

When circulation wars are intense, journalists often break rules to win market share. That is the context in which hacking occurred...

Speculative hacking is deplorable, but only marginally more so than the glee with which it has been seized upon by politicians, elite liberal newspapers and several broadcasters.

Their attitude is informed by ideology and self-interest and, sometimes, intensified by jealousy. Some members of both houses of parliament despise journalists for revealing the details of their expense accounts...

Into their toxic embrace walked the late, lamented News of the World, plaything of Rupert Murdoch, the man the left loves to loathe...

The revelation that News Corporation hirelings tapped Milly Dowler's telephone appalled ethical journalists, MPs and ideologically hostile journalists [who] barely tried to conceal their joy.

Celebrities with grudges to bear and secrets to conceal did not try. For Hugh Grant, ill-chosen celebrity front man for the Hacked Off campaign, the disgrace of the Screws is manna.

He is liberated from any obligation to distinguish between illegal conduct and reporting liable to embarrass him. So are Max Mosley and other C-listers who imagine the discomfort they have suffered at the hands of the red-tops is a constitutional issue.

Robust discussion about whether hacking might ever be in the public interest would be interesting. The answer is plain... there are circumstances in which a reporter gaining access to private telephone messages can be morally and ethically justified.

If it exposes crime or serious impropriety; if it protects public health and safety; if it prevents the public from being misled by an action or statement made by a powerful individual or organisation, then editors should be allowed to sanction it.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 – which first made phone hacking a criminal offence – should be amended to permit such action in the public interest.

But such reform would not reverse closures of newspapers or redundancies among journalists. It could not secure the future health of the vibrant, commercial press that held Eden to account over Suez, revealed the truth about Thalidomide and brought down John Profumo.

It could not keep The Guardian fit and free to expose 'the scandal of tax-dodgers with private jets pretending to live in Monaco, but still working four days a week in a London office'...

It would not fund the meticulous investigation through which The Guardian exposed hacking...

We can have excellent coverage of breaking news and live events. We can have deep specialist analysis and expert curation. These services can be supplied ethically to issues of significance at home as well as abroad.

But how such work is to be funded if profitable, popular journalism cannot be deployed to subsidise it remains a mystery.

Professional journalists can benefit from a clear set of ethical guidelines, but they already know how to provide excellent service to the public sphere. Their work this year has demonstrated that.

The question facing British policymakers is not how to prevent the hacking of telephones – or even how to limit the political influence of an octogenarian media magnate who has already lost the confidence of several major shareholders. It is how to finance an ethical future.

<em>On Monday:</em> <strong>John Mair</strong> argues that in newspapers, as in the world, The Only Way is Ethics (TOWIE)

*<em>The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial</em>, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair, is published by Abramis