Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Conspiracy to keep us in the dark
‘Stumbling about in the dark is the essence of proper journalism, a constant groping around for the truth’
The movie Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s probe into child abuse in the Roman Catholic church, is a superb film which deservedly won Best Picture in last year’s smoother-running Oscar ceremony.
It tells how the Globe’s investigations unit, called Spotlight, spends months probing the church and its attempts to conceal the activities of paedophile priests.
Naturally, it meets resistance and hostility at every turn – not just from the church itself, but also from politicians and the wider Boston society which sought to protect the reputation of the city.
There is a wonderful line in the film when the Globe’s workaholic editor Marty Baron, played by Liev Schrieber, praises the Spotlight team for their tenacity, saying: “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around the dark.”
Stumbling about in the dark is the essence of proper journalism, a constant groping around for the truth, often when it feels as if the powers that be are conspiring against you.
For a week, our newsdesk tried to discover the fate of the urgent care centre (UCC) at the Kent and Canterbury. The level of evasion, delay and failure to answer routine questions on the part of the East Kent Hospitals trust was staggering.
Our inquiries were based on the numerous messages we received from informed sources that the trust is firmly making plans to close the UCC, that meetings have been held to discuss what might happen to staff and that some workers had already switched to other sites.
What became obvious was that the staff coming to us were themselves stumbling about in the dark. They have no clear idea about what is going to happen and they believe that management is deliberately concealing its intentions from them.
In that sense they sought us out to do the job the trust should have been doing all along.
The determination of the trust not to adequately communicate is a dereliction of its duty to people who are anxious about their futures and violates a fundamental principle of being a good employer.
Last year the trust offered £100,000 a year of your money to pay someone to oversee its “communications” output. When I wrote about this 13 months ago, I cut the trust some slack. I argued that if it was committed to the principle of honest and straightforward communication which works in the public’s interest, then this was not an unreasonable amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
Last week proved that my optimism was misplaced as the trust reverted to the culture of public sector PR in which the “honesty, openness and plain English” are the last things on its mind.
When the question of the UCC’S future was put to the trust, it produced a typical example of the way the state speaks to its citizens: “The trust routinely prepares possible ‘business continuity’ responses should an issue arise that could affect our ability to provide services, for example ensuring we have sufficient workforce, so we can address any emerging issues.”
The language is deliberately imprecise, avoids the clarity or certainty of yes or no and ignores the concept of time. It essentially robs words of their very ability to represent anything, thereby creating an alternative universe in which language stands for nothing but itself.
The French cubist Georges Braque (1882-1963) once said that if the purpose of science is to reassure people, then the purpose of art is to disturb them. A similar contrast could be drawn between the public relations industry and journalism.
And it is a telling fact of our times that the number of journalists is constantly decreasing while the number of people working in PR – or what is laughably called sometimes communications – is ever rising.
Newspapers, from hyperlocals serving small towns to big beasts like The Independent, are closing down while the PR industry grows ever fatter. The number of journalists working in Kent is dwarfed by the number of PR bods.
PR is growing for a good reason. It is easier to manage the public perception of a problem – say the crisis engulfing the NHS – than tackling the actual problem. This logic informs such actions as the Home Office’s move in the early 2000s to make it a primary function of the police to combat the fear of crime, which is easier to do than fight real crime.
Thus, almost overnight, local journalists were deprived of information about crime in the neighbourhoods they covered.
Public sector PR also enables the state to represent the world according to a series of compliant illusions while truth is recast as an enemy to be defeated.
Words are selected for their ability to have no grounding in actuality and to be as remote as possible from the way people speak and think.
In the face of crises and insurmountable problems, the state uses PR to anaesthetise the minds of its targets. Everything, we are told, is all right. Everything is under control. Don’t worry, the future’s bright.
Reading the responses to Kentonline’s story about the UCC, it is painfully obvious that no one trusts the hospital’s words, no one has any faith in their reality.
And in turn health chiefs have absolutely no interest in revealing the reality of their predicament. They simply don’t trust their own staff or the wider public with it.
Thank God there are assorted truth seekers who will never relent from their mission to stumble about in the dark.