The voice of the people

Journalism must push back against mindless social-media-type Vox Pops, writes Declan Lynch

Recently, I received a phone call from a researcher on a radio programme, wondering if I’d be available to speak on a subject about which I had some knowledge — or at least they thought I had some knowledge. I consulted my diary and was able to confirm that yes, indeed, I could take that call. They were happy to hear this.

A few hours later, they got back to me. But not to put me on air.

The researcher told me in somewhat sheepish tones that they wouldn’t be needing me after all, that they were going at this a different way — which I assumed to be his way of telling me nicely that they’d found somebody better than me, if such a thing is possible.

But no, that was not the reason for their change of heart. In fact, they had somehow found somebody worse than me — quite a few people actually.

He explained that it was nothing personal, but they’d be looking for members of the general public to talk about it instead. In their own version of this, they were cancelling the person who had some broad knowledge of the subject, and taking their chances with folks who might or might not have that knowledge.

The advantage they had over me was that they were real people. And whether they could turn this into something that would be of interest to the wider community, was clearly unknown — but clearly also of no importance to the programme-makers.

And while we all know in a generalised sense that that’s how things are going, it was still strange to have a personal encounter with it — and a reminder of how the media has largely given up, how it has settled for a culture in which the microphone is passed from one random individual to another, until enough of them are saying one thing, and enough of them are saying the opposite, at the end of which you supposedly have a thing called ‘journalism’.

But you do not have a thing called journalism — you have whatever is the opposite of journalism. And that, in turn, is the opposite of what you need, at a time when social media is already enabling every voice in the known universe to be heard, at all times.

Indeed, from this vignette, we can see that the ‘straight’ media is trying to be more like social media, when in fact they should be seizing every possible opportunity to be less like it — to push back against the spurious elevation of the Voice of the People, our old friend the Vox Pop, to a position above that of mere ‘experts’.

Why, the arch-Brexiteer Michael Gove declared that people had had enough of experts, which invites the question as to how much worse the experts might have done on that whole Brexit thing, than ‘the people’ did, in their wisdom.

But it is not just the obvious wrong-headedness of the Gover that is concerning us here, it is the Great Lie at the heart of this proposition — the Great Lie that the media is somehow serving the people better, by broadcasting their views, rather than the views of those who seem to know what they are talking about.

Because, in truth, the broadcasters are only fooling the people, abandoning their own responsibility to provide some form of intelligent guidance on complex issues which are actually understood by at least some of these experts — basically because they have nothing else to do all day.

The ‘people’, by contrast, have loads of things to be doing, better things perhaps than working out their latest position on the backstop. But the journalist or other expert ideally leads a life that is otherwise empty, and which thus affords them the time and the space to look into these complex matters in some detail, while actual people are out there enjoying themselves.

This is how journalism and the media in general should work — people who have better things to be doing, are kept abreast of developments by various unhappy individuals whose lives are consumed with unpicking and unpacking the various controversies of the day.

In fact this is not just how journalism and the media should work, it is near enough to being the basic definition of these allied trades. You enlist the services of these types who will devote themselves to matters of national politics and international relations, so that normal people don’t have to — and as a result, when people switch on the radio, they should be informed and perhaps even entertained, they should be hearing something that is the result of at least some consideration and reflection and that contains some level of factual accuracy. They should not be hearing someone like themselves, blathering, just because the producer can’t be arsed making a proper programme any more.

This is the nature of the con job of which we speak — a massive failure of leadership, a culture of ass-covering dressed up as ‘access’. And this strange tendency of the Voice of the People to coincide with the interests of totalitarian madmen.

We have seen it on a grand scale in recent times with the apparent determination of the UK media to interview every Brexiteer in the beer-gardens of England — instead of explaining to them that it’s all a load of cobblers, and anyway they’re too stupid to be on television.

There is a time and a place for the Voice of the People to be heard and that time is 1.45pm every weekday, and the place is Liveline — it provides a vital public service, and there should always be at least one such programme in a position of national prominence.

But with so much of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ already available on the internet, we don’t need the proverbial

Liveline to be permanently open.

And since we are also discovering that crowds are not in fact wise, but most unwise, we must approach this as a matter of urgency.