We are not as dumbed down as Sir Robin Day thinks
Published 12 February 1999
Media
As a generation or two of politicians will recall with some clarity, the spectacle of Sir Robin Day demanding his moment to interpose a question is not lightly dismissed. Thus it was when a group of "concerned journalists" met the other day to discuss the "dumbing down" and sundry other deformations of the media through which they seek to express themselves.
Sir Robin's point was simple enough. Brandishing a copy of the Times like someone trying to hail a cab on a rainy night in the Charing Cross Road when the West End shows have just ended, he contemptuously pointed out that the offending edition failed to carry a report of the previous day's important debate on the reform of the House of Lords. Sir Robin knew the debate had merited extensive coverage, because he had watched it on his cable TV channel.
When I told him that he could also have read it on electronic Hansard on the Internet, he scowled and said that was not the point. Sir Robin doesn't use the Internet and doesn't count cable TV, but he does read the Times. And so far as he is concerned, the Times is now so dumb that it doesn't serve the informed reader's needs.
Sir Robin's argument is not, in truth, that the whole media have dumbed down, but that the broadsheet papers have - a proposition incontestable in the sense that these journals now contain a species of nonsense and trivia which in better times a gentleman would have only discerned by rummaging through the drawers of his valet. And we all know very well why the broadsheets have become less serious: they have done so because the daily newspaper market for the well-informed, serious reader interested primarily in public affairs is shrinking, along with the market for all daily newspapers. When there are fewer customers, the techniques used to attract those who remain inevitably become less dignified.
The underlying reasons for this change are more complex and in a sense paradoxical, given the growth of mass higher education. They have more to do with the century of Freud and feminism than with the century of Rupert Murdoch. Not that that makes it any less unsettling for members of the Garrick Club, even those who are in one way or another members of what Lord Nolan reassured "concerned journalists" is "the world's most influential profession".
Happily, the Times does not constitute the whole media (nor do even the whole collected works of Rupert Murdoch), so any credible judgement on whether "the media" are dumbing down demands inquiry more searching than Sir Robin with his coffee spoon. It is not just a question of the newfangled Internet, but if "the media" are becoming trivial, we need to explain at the same time why the number of books published in Britain has doubled in the past ten years and trebled in the past 20.
Even some specific evidence about particular media confounds the Sir Robins. Surveys conducted for the broadcasting pressure group Voice of the Listener and Viewer suggest that the proportion of news about politics and foreign affairs on television has been going up, not down. Even the editor of the Times can make the case that his newspaper does not carry any less news of public affairs than it used to, but that, in a fatter newspaper, the reader must work harder to find it.
The problem for Garrick Club Man at the close of the century is that the boundaries of the familiar lie shattered and even the new establishment appears not to care. The Prime Minister informs you that in future he will be appearing not on Newsnight or Radio Einstein, but on This Morning and TFI Friday. Sir Alastair Campbell (I know I'm ahead of the pack here, but it sounds so appropriate) thinks that the words of his master should pass "free and unedited" into the ear of the nation because the dumbed-down, cynical newspapers no longer offer safe passage. Downing Street, too, it appears, longs for a media golden age that never existed - just wait until some entertainer gets the Prime Minister to do something even sillier than singing "My Darling Clementine" on Irish TV during a sensitive moment in Anglo-Irish relations.
The point is that there are more media than any of us know what to do with. Those who believe that the newspapers and TV channels with which we are most familiar have, in the words of Melanie Phillips, substituted the objective of making people feel for the objective of making people think, must find other shops to patronise; they will also have to persuade the rest of us to pay for outlets the market economy won't provide, like Radio Einstein or indeed the BBC. Those of us who care about high-strength journalism, based upon accurate, incisive reporting and rigorous analytical bite, must also be prepared to put money and effort into unglamorous causes like tougher self-regulation and training.
But we shall make fools of ourselves if we behave as if we have either the might or the right to police standards across the whole chaotic cosmos of the new media. Not even Sir Alastair Campbell can do that.
The author is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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