Public debate at DIT Kevin Street on Ethics and Society: Journalism and the Internet
Good afternoon everyone, and welcome.
Firstly, I’d like to thank the organisers for the invitation and for the particular focus in this evening’s debate on ethics in journalism.
My diverse roles as Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources often have me commenting on different aspects of the dynamic relationship between technology and business in the media and related sectors; one day I might be extolling the virtues and opportunities of the digital economy, the next explaining the challenges for traditional media, or for post offices.
Obviously, technological change is always difficult and fundamental or disruptive transitions like the one we’re going through right now are even more so. Legacy industries hang on, they adapt, and some even survive the transition – this is true regardless of the industry or the period.
In the case of journalism and the new media, the standard version is familiar to us all, I’m sure: traditional outlets losing advertising revenue hand over fist to a new media sector that is both global and fleet of foot, agglomerating content, scraping with abandon, and streaming advertising revenues into the coffers of a small number of global firms. Journalism – at least according to this version of events – suffers, with the work of seasoned professionals being devalued as content becomes a readily transferable commodity, while emerging media chase page impressions and click-throughs with endless stories about social media starlets – news as entertainment, and vice versa. In this world view, journalistic ethics are not just in trouble, they are merely the anachronistic preserve of a noble but aged elite.
Now, while there is or has been an element of truth to the above, I don’t buy it. This isn’t because I’ve suddenly become beset with naivety – if anything, the opposite is the case.
Firstly, though, the objectively verifiable. There is no doubt but that newspapers in particular have seen a massive fall in advertising revenues, posing existential questions for individual outlets and for the industry as a whole. Television too has suffered from globalisation – or at least regionalisation – in advertising. Similarly, there is no avoiding the fact the value chain for online advertising is different from that which has gone before. Revenues flow to a smaller group of companies and do not circulate in the domestic economy to the same extent.
Also, and this is critical on a human level, the type and quality of employment available for journalists, right now at least, is not comparable to that which has gone before. There are precious few permanent, pensionable jobs being created in journalism.
Moreover, technological change generally has a scalar aspect to it. For a small country this can be even more challenging as the basis for an entire type or class of business operation can evaporate as functions are allowed to concentrate in higher order centres. And then, to add to all of this, we have the institutional hangover of the boom, leaving many media organisations – like so many other companies in the State – burdened with debt, and potentially even more vulnerable.
Given the economic scale and importance of media in Ireland, print, film, television, radio – not to mention the advertising ecosystem that feeds off them – these would be difficult issues. But given the critical, and I mean that in both senses of the word, role media plays for democracy and society, this process is genuinely challenging, for companies, for journalists and for us all.
It is clear that preserving pluralism, both in absolute terms and in terms of a diverse and plural media focussed specifically on Ireland, is going to be a challenge. The revised Media Mergers provisions now in train through the Oireachtas will help with this, but they can do little to deal with the pressing commercial issues that arise.
In this context, you might ask, how could journalistic ethics be anything but severely threatened? How can individuals ever take risks, or publish critical analyses of the rich or the powerful?
The counter argument is simple. While we consistently rank in the top 20 of the World Press Freedom Index, and can point to a well-established tradition of Irish writers who speak their truth freely, challenging established norms, holding a mirror up to society and its occasionally harsh realities, there is a more ordinary aspect to traditional media in Ireland also.
This has always been a small country. This means that there has always been room for a relatively small number of national outlets, and they have often been in the sway of the powerful. In turn, this implies that there has always been room for a relatively limited number of commentators, and little tradition of movement in many cases. Senior journalists could be in place for decades, far longer than any Minister, or the vast majority of opposition spokespersons, or even faceless officials.
In turn, senior journalists and commentators themselves are part of ‘the real story’: they identify key themes, they reflect cadence and tone, they shape the media dialectic far more than most. And yes, from time to time, the cynical recital of an easy bias or a comfortable meme that fits like an old shoe can pass for analysis, or a scathing ad hominem attack can pass for comment.
Or at least it did. There are no sacred cows any more. A poorly thought out or researched piece published of a morning can be thoroughly discredited by lunchtime, by social media or by other journalists who don’t need access to a national newspaper to get published. Like it or not, this is progress. Media is plural now in a way that was entirely impossible as recently as a decade ago. Everyone can engage, for good or for ill. The internet didn’t build our media edifices, but it will tear down and reshape them. It will happen. The survival of titles, of companies, depends not on how they resist this, but on how they adapt.
This is not a costless or easy transition, nor is it complete. Our legal system, like that in every country, has yet to fully adjust concepts of privacy, or defamation or even freedom of speech to suit. There are profound financial implications for people and for companies.
Of course, while citizen journalism and user generated comment can certainly supplement traditional forms, it cannot replace them. However, I don’t think that it will have to. This is a process rather than an event and I am sure that, when the dust settles, we will retain a vibrant indigenous media sector and that it will be more transparent, more democratic, and more accountable to its readers, viewers and listeners.
People will continue to pay for quality journalism – the recent joint award of the Pulitzer Prize to the Guardian and the Washington Post for the Wikileaks stories was coupled with a much heralded return to growth for the Guardian which saw a 29% increase in digital revenue last year. I’m sure few present would argue that either paper showed any ethical lapses in publishing what they did, in the way they did.
Ethical journalism, questioning, searching valuable journalism, needs a supportive and engaged community, and it needs the cynical too. Clarity and truth – the core functions of the journalist – are not, and indeed never have been, the exclusive preserve of any single media type. But to survive, to prosper, they need to be subject to challenge. We have all of these things in this country. The economics of media concern all of us I’m sure, but they will work out, not painlessly, but they will.
Government too, will need to be flexible, supportive and adaptive, in all of the manifest ways we engage with media. But our media will survive, and ethics in media, both as behaviour and as character, will survive too, and on current evidence, prosper too.