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The meaning of news and getting it right

To ask “what is news” might seem like a silly question. After all, vaguely, we all know what is news. We read it in newspapers, hear it on radio and television and some of us often end up making news ourselves, even if for all the wrong reasons. The COED (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) defines it as “newly received or noteworthy information about recent events,” and there are excellent books on the subject by some of the world’s best practitioners of the trade.

Yet the question pops up frequently. It is asked, especially, after every new case of media “excess” such as a sting operation gone too far; or an exposé turned ugly. And then there are related questions: Is news simply about disseminating “noteworthy” information or is it also about putting that information in context by highlighting, for example, the factors of which the news may be only a symptom? And at what point does news descend into titillation dressed up as analysis or investigation?

Take the controversy in Britain over the media reporting of a cluster of suicides by young people in the Bridgend area of South Wales. Over the past year, 17 youngsters have killed themselves for no apparent reason, sparking speculation that the deaths might be linked to social networking sites that often glorify suicide. The media interest, however, began after three deaths were reported within the space of a few days last month in what appeared “copycat” suicides.

By any journalistic yardstick, it was big news and, not surprisingly, the national media descended on Bridgend in full strength. For days, the story dominated the headlines and, as often happens on such occasions, some of the coverage went over the top with facts (few as they were) giving way to speculation and gossip. Tabloids led the pack with hysterical headlines and lurid details.

Soon, there was a backlash with residents accusing the media of “preying” on a tragedy, and of a lack of sensitivity in reporting the story. Anne Parry, head of a charity called Papyrus, which works with young people with suicidal tendencies, warned that the media coverage could encourage copycat suicides.

The local MP, Madeleine Moon, said the media were out of control. “Absolutely everything I’ve seen, from the description of Bridgend as a ‘suicide town’ to talking about ‘suicide cults’ is absolutely disgraceful and has actually created additional risk for young people. I’ve no problem with the media reporting something. What I have problem with is the breaching of all the guidelines,” she told the BBC.

Parents of one victim made a public appeal to the media for restraint. “We have lost a son, and media coverage made a difficult time unbearable. We feel the media coverage could trigger other people who are already feeling low to take their own lives,” said Vincent and Sharon Pritchard, parents of 15-year-old Nathaniel Pritchard, who killed himself.

The Press Complaints Commission weighed in with the warning that the media could be in breach of their code, which says that when journalists report suicides they should avoid “excessive detail about the method used;” and that enquiries should be handled with discretion, without being intrusive. PCC chairman Christopher Meyer rounded on “media scrums” gathering outside people’s homes and intruding into their privacy.

So, who is right? The critics? Or the media which insist that it was an important story not only in terms of its news value (17 suicides in one place over a short period are not an everyday occurrence) but also as a sociological study of why so many people of a particular age group in one region should have killed themselves without any obvious cause? The fact that some newspapers might have overstepped the mark does not make the story any less significant, media commentators argue.

Brian Cathcart, professor of journalism at Kingston University, pointed out that by and large the reporting conformed to the PCC code and said it was wrong to blame the media for highlighting the suicides as there was “alarm in Bridgend long before the national press became involved.”

“This was not just something made up by the media,” Professor Cathcart wrote in New Statesman rejecting the argument that because of fears of “copycat deaths” the story should have been swept under the carpet. Single or isolated deaths were one thing but the “cluster of seven, or nine, or possibly many more” was something on an altogether “different scale.”

“We need to be told about it, and not just in generalities,” he argued.

The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor Siobhain Butterworth defended her newspaper’s coverage, describing it as “relatively restrained.” “There have been only two complaints about it: an objection to placing the focus on the town of Bridgend rather than the county, and a comment about the previous lack of interest in the high number of suicides in the area … When I asked Guardian journalists for their views about the coverage a few expressed reservations about the use of photographs … but most did not take issue with the content of specific reports,” she wrote.

The debate over the Bridgend coverage is not that the suicides should not have been reported, though some among the affected families have so argued, but whether they should have been reported the way they were. And it is apparent that outside the cosy media fraternity the overwhelming sense is that much of the coverage, especially in the regional press and the tabloids, was insensitively sensational — based more on pub gossip than hard facts.

As a journalist I must admit that we, in the media, are not always on the same wavelength as our readers. Although the media might strive to give readers what they want, the fact is that frequently they get it wrong. A major problem, according to British readers, is the level of media intrusion into privacy. Particularly distasteful is the sight of television crews camped outside people’s homes with complete disregard for public decency or sensitivities of those they may be targeting at a given point — a grieving family, a controversial public figure, a celebrity whose picture they must have because there is money to be made from it.

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of complaints about the media’s intrusive behaviour. Last year alone, the Press Complaints Commission received 4,000-plus complaints — a 30 per cent increase over the previous year — mostly relating to breaches of privacy. Although celebrity magazines and regional newspapers were among the worst culprits, the national press too had its share of brickbats. Commentators said the PCC’s figures were simply the “tip of the iceberg” as many cases went unreported.

Magnus Linklater, columnist of The Times, called the PCC’s findings “depressing.” He conceded that unearthing inconvenient facts was not easy, but argued that while dealing with innocent citizens journalists must remember that the “measure of an intrusive inquiry should not just be the depth of tomorrow’s headline, but the human being on the receiving end of it.”

Meanwhile, a new book Flat Earth News by Guardian’s award-winning journalist Nick Davies raises some fundamental issues about modern approach to news, the commercial and political pressures on newspapers and broadcasters, and the increasing trend of cost-cutting even in major media outlets which, he says, has reduced reporters to “cutting and pasting” wire stories, or peddling “PR material.” (Researchers from the journalism department of Cardiff University, commissioned by him, reported that a “massive 60 per cent” of stories in Britain’s four quality newspapers — The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent — and the mass-circulation Daily Mail consisted “wholly or mainly of wire-copy and/or PR material.”)

The book, whose title refers to the trend of recycling a story simply because it is “widely accepted as true … even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda,” is a scathing attack on British journalistic practices and will be an eye-opener to British media’s starry-eyed admirers in the Third World. It portrays a picture of journalism in which “any meaningful independent journalistic activity by the press is the exception rather than the rule.”

Mr. Davies raises questions such as: Is there a moral dimension to news? Is there such a thing as completely “objective” news? Who decides what’s news and to what extent the decision is influenced by commercial and political considerations?

Although he discusses these issues specifically in the context of the British media, they will resonate wherever there is a functioning press. India, with its bourgeoning media and a “look-West” tendency, must beware of the “flat earth news” syndrome.

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