Eilis O'Hanlon: We can't run scared of freedom
There is no guarantee that greater regulation of the internet would work, so we must come to terms with the future, says Eilis O'Hanlon
THOSE who work in the media like to think that they are more rational and informed than the great unwashed who pay their wages. In fact, they're prone to exactly the same outbursts of irrational panic and groupthink as the rest.
A case in point being last week's conference in Dublin on media diversity, organised by Labour MEP Nessa Childers. There were plenty of measured and informed contributions on the future of the media in Ireland, but the sense that leaked out from the conference was that the end was nigh; the portals of respectable journalism were being breached on one side by uber-wealthy proprietors strangling diversity and, on the other, by the uncouth and ignorant on the internet who dared to think that they could pick up a pen -- well, a mouse anyway -- without going through the long apprenticeships in the newsroom that more traditional journalists tend to regard with something akin to awe.
Listen to these Jeremiahs too long and you'd be forgiven for thinking that civilisation itself was crumbling, a feeling best summed up by Alan Crosbie, chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings Ltd -- the Cork- based media group whose umbrella covers such newspapers as the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post, as well a plethora of local newspapers and radio stations -- who grabbed the headlines by claiming there was "a threat to humanity posed by the tsunami of unverifiable data, opinion, libel and vulgar abuse in the new media", which had "a capacity to destroy civil society".
Start stockpiling those tins now. Armageddon outta here!
Crosbie's main problem with the so-called new media is that it didn't have adequate quality controls built in. As he put it: "The newspaper stuff has been gathered by trained, professional reporters, filtered by trained, professional editors, considered in some cases by lawyers, sub-edited and double-checked before it arrives with the reader." Whereas anyone with broadband and a keyboard can now say anything they like instantly on the internet, whether it's true or not, fair or not, even whether it makes grammatical sense or not.
Crosbie asked a pertinent question: "If it was food, would you eat it?"
It was a good analogy. You probably wouldn't want a lot of this stuff passing your lips. But I'm still glad it's on the shelf. The internet is a bit like the Wild West. You're liable to get caught in the crossfire of 1,000 verbal shoot-outs. But that's what makes it exciting. More to the point, that's what freedom looks like. No one said it had to be pretty. Many of these people may be nutters; the moderators on mainstream media sites are kept permanently busy editing and deleting the more extreme ones to avoid a trip to the High Court. But most of the people blogging and tweeting aren't lunatics. They're just engaged with the debate. That's healthy. It's invigorating. More to the point, it's normal. It was the old system of media, where everything was locked away behind forbidding gates and you felt you had to pass some sort of test before being allowed inside, which was abnormal. That was the one that stifled diversity.
"Professional" journalism has always been dominated by a narrow range of people who all went to the same third-level institutions and who overwhelmingly share the same, comfortable, complacent, leftist liberal prejudices. Just look at the results of the survey conducted to coincide with last week's conference in Dublin, which found that 61.3 per cent of journalists want "regulation" to protect media diversity. Ah, the old "pass some new rules and the problem will instantly be solved" fallacy. If only it were that simple.
There's a touch of hysteria in the air right now about the future of the media. Part of that is fuelled by the News International hacking scandal, which started out as genuine concern but has quickly turned into self-indulgent browbeating. Enough already. A lot of people behaved badly, but the world remains intact. Move on.
A bigger factor is the recession itself. Journalists are as worried for their jobs as the next man, and the internet is scary because it gives away for free what throughout history had a price and could be sold. The value of content accordingly goes down, so we're all looking at a future where we get paid less for working harder.
But there's no point running from the future because it's scary. Especially when you've got no choice anyway. The internet is smarter and quicker than the rest of us. We can try to slow it down to our pace, or try to keep up. Some people will fall behind, but there's no alternative. It's happening to everyone. Musicians have their songs routinely stolen online; movies are downloaded for free. Artists are having to find other ways to make a living. Maybe journalism needs to seek more innovative ways to generate income, too.
The problem is how to continue making a quality product that pays its own way. The current business model of print media is clearly under threat -- Alan Crosbie is right to be concerned about that -- but there's no guarantee that greater regulation would work, because once a story is out in the public domain, it's out. It's not like an escaped leopard which can be downed with a tranquilliser dart and returned behind bars; and even if it could, there are plenty of other leopards to see online, not to mention a myriad of lions, tigers and bears, oh my. There are no easy answers, but there are some wrong ones.
Crosbie even suggested that, just as the licence fee funds public service broadcasting, there could be some kind of funding for newspapers to reduce the "dangerous dependence" on advertising revenue. It was a nice idea, but the ordinary taxpayer is not exactly delighted right now to be paying Ryan Tubridy and Marian Finucane's generous wages, they're hardly likely to want to add hundreds of other print journalists to the public payroll as well. And who gets to choose who qualifies for funding anyway?
It's a recipe for more centralised state control, or at best a sort of glorified Aosdana, with jobs for the boys and girls who play by the rules. The new media might resemble an asylum at times, but the answer isn't for the rest of us to retreat into a care home. Either we get out there fighting, or we might as well give up now.
Originally published in
