DANNAGAL G. YOUNG | The return of the gatekeepers | “Walter Lippmann was right. There is no substitute for experts in a field, parsing information and serving as the arbiters of truth, and reifying our faith in a shared reality, a shared body of facts.”
The voice of the people is indeed important, but so is the voice of the trained and experienced journalists, those who are dedicated to plying and honing their craft for years. However, citizen journalism and professional journalism are bordered by narrow, fragile walls, and especially with the continuous rise of social media, cuts to employment in leading organisations and the accessibility of publishing on the internet, it is a wonder that the wall hasn’t cracked and crumbled. As Dannagal G. Young says, “The result is a giant power vacuum that’s being filled with noise, flattery, and disinformation.”
But where does the balance lie, between encouraging the public voice to chant its own mantra and retaining the significance of qualified journalism? Does expertise or first-hand experience matter more when covering a major topic of interest? Ultimately, whose opinion is more important, that of the military weapons specialist with a PhD or the online blogger interested in strategic conflict with a few thousand followers? We can argue black and blue that both have equal rights for attention and awareness, but in my opinion there’s no question about who deserves the bold byline.
The spread of “fake news” doesn’t seem to help either – the adaptability and manipulation of clickbait continues to gain revenue, purely because of its populist nature, and it is arguably causing the decline of long-form articles – the dissemination of information, particularly that which should shape our public agenda rather than corrode it, is getting lost in a blizzard of monotonous superficiality.
We need the experts in journalism, and those in relative research fields, to be upheld in positions of authority and respect if we are to retain and increase the intellectual capacity of our society.
HILLARY FREY | Forests need to burn to regrow | “The drive for scale has made so many places way, way too big. And there just aren’t enough good jobs to keep everyone working, satisfied, succeeding.”
The media landscape remains as diversified, active and informed as its participants, yet faced with the ever-increasing need to rapidly churn out articles to satisfy an ever-consuming public readership, the worth of an organisation can truly become diminished by the age-old proverb ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. There seems to be a cold war between the CEOs in an eager hunt for the next brazen headline and a score of journalists working beyond their capabilities to meet the demand; where neither side is willing to admit that the drive to publish is pushing journalists away rather than challenging them within suitable limits.
Frey’s prediction has purportedly come true for many members of the Australian media – in 2017 alone, Fairfax made divisive editorial cuts that resulted in 25 per cent of its remaining journalist staff at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald – equal to 125 full-time jobs – being made redundant, and accordingly moving to public relations agencies that could support news in a myriad of multimedia forms that the 24-hour news cycle fails to generate and harness meaning and value for.
The media has become a machine that digests news at an alarming rate, yet it is dubious to consider how thousands of viewers can be so blindsided by the impact of the article they read on its creators, and in turn an industry that has “ceased to value their contributions, or give them a runway to success”.
Photo credit: Crystal on Flickr
