Early last century, industrial technology allowed business interests to produce mass media at a cost that outclassed the capacity of non-corporate media to compete. As a result, radical publishers were marginalised and media diversity rapidly narrowed.
To counter claims that society was being, in effect, brainwashed by this media monopoly, corporate publishers promoted the idea of “professional journalism“. For the first time, reporters would be trained in special “schools of journalism” to master the arts of objective, balanced reporting. Big business moguls would be in control but, as good democrats, they would see to it that their journalists were scrupulously fair.
In reality, powerful biases were built into this new media “professionalism” - key among them a presumption about who should be the primary source of news.
American media analyst Robert McChesney explains that the new, professional press, “regarded anything done by official sources, for example, government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news”. (McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson ed., Into The Buzzsaw, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)
This reliance on official sources naturally “gave those in political office (and to a lesser extent, business) considerable power to set the news agenda by what they spoke about and what they kept quiet about”.
Thus the Telegraph’s environment editor, Charles Clover, wrote to a Media Lens reader:
“I am a reporter. Reporters report what other people say. Generally we report important, influential people, but only when they say something new, because what important people say is of most interest to others, and they are the ones who shape our world.” (Email forwarded to Media Lens, September 8, 2005)
In the Times, the then ITV News (now BBC) political editor, Nick Robinson, wrote of the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
"It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters." (Robinson, '"Remember the last time you shouted like that?" I asked the spin doctor', The Times, July 16, 2004)
To the extent that a media system accepts that its ‘professional’ role is to report a news agenda set by officialdom, it must largely renounce the task of challenging that agenda. If the government, for example, rejects as hopelessly flawed a report on civilian casualties in Iraq - if it decides to ‘move on’, say, from the November 2004 Lancet report - who are professional news journalists to disagree?
For a news journalist to continue promoting the credibility of the officially rejected report - or the rejected role of oil in motivating foreign policy, or the rejected possibility of Tony Blair’s prosecution for war crimes - is to challenge the accepted right of officialdom to set the agenda for the professional press. It is in fact an attempt to set a competing agenda. This is to lay oneself open to attack as a ‘biased’, ‘committed’ and ‘crusading’ journalist - something professional news reporters are not supposed to be.
If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this response from Ed Pilkington, foreign editor of the Guardian:
“We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports." (Pilkington to Media Lens, November 15, 2002)
In translation, this means: ‘We don’t express personal opinions in our news reports.’
After all, if professional news reporting is about covering the thoughts and actions of officials - the “important, influential people“ - then advancing our own thoughts as journalists is, by definition, ‘unprofessional’. Just consider how seriously this is taken.
When we asked the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, if he thought George Bush hoped to create a genuine democracy in Iraq, he replied:
“I cannot get into a direct argument about his policies myself! Sorry.” (Email to Media Lens, September 5, 2005)
Reynolds explained to one of our readers:
“You are asking for my opinion about the war in Iraq yet BBC correspondents are not allowed to have opinions!” (Forwarded to Media Lens, October 22, 2005)
The point being that if journalists are not even supposed to express personal opinion in reporting officialdom, then they are certainly not supposed to express personal opinion by promoting a news agenda against the wishes of officialdom. [...]
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