Steve Buttry, information content conductor at Gazette communications, shares the thoughts of a panel discussing journalism’s future for a First Amendment Day programme.
The panel, introduced by Dr Michael Bugeja, asked:
“Does journalism have a future? Can there be freedom of the press without a press? Can there be a free press if we give away the press for free? Ah, there’s the rub. If information has no value, then what will become of our news values, from fact to follow-up, from prominence to proximity, from usefulness to timeliness?”
NB: Steve Buttry’s contribution to the panel can be found at this link.
It is a mind-bending question. But can we really say that the press in recent years has been doing a vital service in terms of ‘speaking power to authority’. I was at a talk with Kate Adie from the BBC and she was saying what a great job they did – in I though a smug way – and how the world would be safe for dictators, etc, if it wasn’t for the BBC and its foreign reporters. But half of those people just work for the intelligence services anyway. And they didn’t do such a great job of on the biggest story of the last century (biggest story of our times) which was the the Iraq war and the wholesale swallowing of the official line on WMD. Much could also be said of the credit crunch with every broadcast news operation and every newspaper falling overthemselves to hype the commerical culture, popular capitalism, property speculation and what have you. The fact isthat we have not had a brave or campaigning popular press for thirty years, so this is not really a new problem. Or am I wrong?