Whats wrong with the corporate media?

One man’s view.
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Media:http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/nick-davies-churnalism-has-taken-the-place-of-what-we-should-be-doing-telling-the-truth-40117/

….see link…..And this is where the second kind of evidence comes in. I raised some money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to the journalism department at Cardiff University and asked them to research our national news coverage. In a long report, they came up with three groups of statistics which – I think – tell the tale of the decline and fall of Fleet Street.

First, they analysed the origins of every single home news story which was carried by the four quality papers (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) as well as the Daily Mail during two randomly chosen weeks last year. They ended up looking at more than 2,000 stories.

With the help of The Guardian newsdesk, they then attempted to capture all of the incoming material which had been passed on to reporters during those two weeks. Where there was still any doubt about the origin of stories, they interviewed reporters from the different newspapers and then tracked backwards to find their source material. What they found was that these stories were composed overwhelmingly of second-hand material.

Fifty four per cent of the stories contained clear signs of PR input – and bear in mind that is a conservative figure. It excludes the tabloids, which carry far more celebrity stories dominated by PR material. It excludes the Financial Times and the quality finance pages, where City reporting is flooded with PR. It excludes the quality feature pages, which are heavily influenced by PR from film companies, theatres, broadcasters and publishers; and the sports pages, where access to teams and stars is run by PR.

In addition, the Cardiff researchers found that 70 per cent of these quality news stories were wholly or partly recycled from agency copy, usually the Press Association.

Now, if you merge the two figures – for PR and PA – and ask how much of Fleet Street quality news is, in fact, the work of Fleet Street’s own reporters, the answer from the Cardiff research is: 80 per cent of it is wholly, mainly or partially made up of second-hand material from PR and PA; eight per cent of

it was impossible to trace; and only 12 per cent of it was provably based on material generated by Fleet Street reporters.

The point here is not simply that we are recycling a mass of second-hand material, much of it specifically designed to serve somebody’s commercial or political interests. As a second area of research, the Cardiff specialists went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact – and found that only 12 per cent of these stories showed any evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.

Just pause and consider what those figures are suggesting: that only 12 per cent of the news stories in our most prestigious outlets are actually based entirely on material produced by the reporters who wrote them; and that only 12 per cent of the facts in those stories show evidence of having been properly checked. Of course, we run stories that aren’t true!

As the Cardiff researchers concluded: ‘Taken together, these data portray a picture of journalism in which any meaningful independent journalistic activity by the press is the exception rather than the rule. We are not talking about investigative journalism here, but the everyday practices of news judgement, fact-checking, balance, criticising and interrogating sources et cetera, that are, in theory, central to routine, day-to-day journalism.”

And then there is the third key statistic. I asked the Cardiff researchers to find all the information they could on two key points: the amount of space which Fleet Street papers have been filling with editorial copy; and the number of staff who have been hired to do so. They gathered this data for each of the past 20 years….see link

• This topic was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by wv.