Bad faith, bad information, from bad places

Declan Lynch’s Diary

NOW that parts of the democratic governments of the USA and the UK are no longer functioning in any meaningful sense, it is clear that much of the respectable media has been unaware for some time of the true nature of what has been happening.

Or maybe they have been aware, but they have ploughed on anyway, ignoring the voices of those who are indeed aware of what has been happening, unable to imagine that there is any other way of engaging in their ancient craft.

In this Diary we have been resolutely against the culture of “balance” in journalism, of “impartiality”.

We have always known these to be Big Lies, in the normal run of events — but it is only when they have been truly tested by the forces of “populism” in Britain and America in the last few years, that they have finally been exposed in all their uselessness and their dishonesty.

It wouldn’t be right to say that hackery has brought us to this, but it has certainly been there or thereabouts. Time after time you’d be watching a Brexiteer being interviewed by some supposedly crack BBC interrogator, and they would reach that point which usually comes whereby the Brexiteer is clearly speaking in bad faith, using bad information derived from bad people in bad places.

And instead of nailing that charlatan to the hallowed floorboards of the BBC, the interviewer will say something like: “And what will be Theresa May’s message to the 1922 Committee?”

That’s our old friends there, “balance” and “impartiality”, though in truth it’s our old friend fear. It is the institutional fear of the BBC that they might be going against “the will of the people” and their bad decision in the referendum — a decision that was reached after listening to Brexiteers speaking in bad faith, using bad information derived from bad people in bad places.

So it is revealed that under pressure, balance and impartiality — the great mythical pillars of “good journalism” — amount to little more than surrender to the forces of darkness. And the “good journalist” becomes a mere conduit for the propaganda of the far right.

And the far right knows it too, they have been pushing incessantly at these points of weakness. Trump knows it, he knows the terrible need of the political hacks to be inside the tent, their craving for “access”.

So the White House correspondents still have not withdrawn from the “briefings” of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demonstrating again this basic failure to understand the nature of what is happening there — a failure to realise that the working practices of the political hack are poor enough in a fully functioning democracy, but have been irredeemably exposed by the aggression of the demagogues.

Some would like to “send the interns” to listen to Sanders, as was suggested by the writer Jay Rosen, but there was also an excellent contribution last week by Melissa Chan, who argues that reporters should now be covering the White House the way that a foreign correspondent in China would cover the outpourings of the regime in Beijing.

“A big part of American media has failed,” she wrote. “Many journalists cannot bring themselves to realise that their country has changed.”

The foreign correspondent based in Beijing or some other authoritarian setting, would regard the overwhelming majority of the information coming from the Government as garbage, not to be reported unless labelled as such — you do not “objectively” broadcast the statements of an obviously delinquent administration, and call it journalism. No truth is to be found there.

Oddly enough when I was a boy journalist with Hot Press, this is roughly how we regarded most aspects of Irish government and society, and personally I have always been comfortable with this model — and you have to say, it’s looking better all the time.

But they are afraid in America too, afraid that by defining the Trump regime correctly, they will be accused of the dreaded “bias”. Afraid to acknowledge that some “experts” do actually know what they are talking about, and others don’t, and it is the job of journalists to be able to tell the difference. Not just to stand in the middle moving a microphone from one side to the other.

So this vision of Melissa Chan’s of a kind of People’s Republic of America, in which journalists have to “realise that the country has changed”, is not just some flight of fancy, but can be seen as a precise analogy.

It is the only way to go.

‘The “good journalist” becomes a conduit for the propaganda of the far right...’