The Wardman Wire

The central premise of “Can You Trust the Media” is that the supposed sacred bond of trust between journalists and the public is little more than a red herring, masking the real truth that reporters are storytellers all in competition with each other to grab our attention, and nothing more. In this book Monck examines the nature of the relationship between the media and its audience and asks whether we can trust the media and, more pertinently, whether we can trust ourselves.

Monck traces the history of the trust narrative in the media to late 1950s America, where the new television networks entered into a battle for advertising with the then established mainstream media: the newspapers. As the newspaper industry began to lose out in terms of audience to the TV news, they sought to reassure the ad-men that they were “trusted” by their consumers and this conferred legitimacy upon the products and wares advertised within their pages. The broadcast media followed suit and agreed that it was it was the special trust between the newscaster and the viewer which made the relationship unique.

Similarly in Britain, with the explosion of the news channels, the BBC could no longer claim to be “authoritative” - an adjective it had proudly borne in more innocent times - so decided to leap upon the trust bandwagon as well and replaced the grand-sounding Board of Governors with the BBC Trustees. However, a rose by any other name can still get the same blight (as some bird on a balcony once nearly said) and Monck provides a dry and occasionally hilarious canter through the various outings of the Beeb’s self-flagellation equipment following occasions where Auntie didn’t quite live up to the expectations of the re-naming ceremony. Notable amongst these, of course, was Eammon Holmes-gate where the genial presenter managed to be on both “Saturday Kitchen” hosting a “live” phone poll and Radio 5 Live simultaneously. Good skills.

Monck’s point in drawing attention to the various outbreaks of hair-shirting that go on when scandals such as Eammon’s spot of bother emerge is that it highlights that the media still see “trust” as the cornerstone of their relationship with the public. But, Monck argues, whether or not the public perceive their news sources as trustworthy is somewhat irrelevant to question as to whether they actually are. Trust is an emotional rather than a reasoned response based on impressions, not facts. And the fact is, contends Monck, that journalists are just there to cobble together the most attention-grabbing story in the shortest period of time to distract our gaze away from the offerings of competitors, rather than those who hold the key to the gate of Truth. The public may say they trust the media, but the media itself is not inherently trustworthy.

And this is where it gets interesting. Monck reckons that we need to get over our obsession with trust and - somewhat vaguely - that it all comes back to public information. Open up areas of public life that only the privileged media have access to at the moment and, “at the very least we can make public ignorance a tougher choice,” combined with a recognition of the limitations of the media in terms of providing us with important information is the starting point, according to Monck.

Good luck with that one, mate, is this wizened old hack’s somewhat cynical response. We’ve seen this debate raging in politics for years: politicians agonise that as a breed they aren’t trusted, so what’s the solution? Open up the decision making processes to scrutiny so that - even if they are not trusted afterwards - their motivations and reasoning are understood. So we now have FOI, transparency, stricter rules on employing family members, and the Electoral Commission. Combined with this there’s been a mass stampede to get down wiv da voterz in often cruel and unusual ways involving forays into YouTube and the inevitable baby-kissing as well as an explosion in the trend towards surgeries and public meetings in order to let the public have the opportunity to make up their own mind as to their elected representative’s merits rather than merely allowing the perception to be formed through the prism of the media. And what’s happened? The All Politicians Are Lying Scumbags narrative is stronger than ever before.

Well, maybe they are. Maybe this is the logical conclusion that is consequent upon a reasoned, Socratic review of all the facts. I don’t happen to think this is the case, by the way - of either the comrades or politicians of different political colours. Obviously Parliament has its collection of perverts, lazy bastards, and the comically inept … but what major organisation doesn’t? Opening up politicians to scrutiny has revealed that most of them are on the level, and yet we still - apparently - refuse to believe it.

Perhaps it’s because the public simply cannot be bothered to engage in what Monck calls the “good, positive” type of scepticism and has taken refuge in the easy cynicism of established discourse. But his solution to open up Government and corporate data to scrutiny is - whilst a laudable aim - an experiment that has not exactly yielded brilliant results in the political sphere largely because it’s easier to shrug and mutter “disengenous wastrels” than actually find out for yourself what’s going on. Not that it shouldn’t be done, you understand, just that someone - traditional or new media - is still going to have to repackage and present the information, and tremendous as the blogosphere is, it can hardly be likened to a voice of sweet reason and impartiality. This, as a potential consequence of the democratisation of information, isn’t something that’s fully explored in this book. In fact, Monck dismisses blogging as “not the future of journalism” on the basis of one case study.

Whilst we’re on the subject of the case studies, the other minor criticism I’d make is that, whilst they are in general entertaining and informative, at times Monck’s argument has a tendency to sag under the sheer weight of them. For media insiders who are familiar with the topic this probably isn’t a problem, but for a lay reader it can be a little difficult to hang on to the narrative at times.

On the whole though it’s well worth a read: it’s wittily written (the details surrounding the Sun’s annual outing of the Shark Attack In Blighty story made me laugh out loud) and presents a well refreshing counter-argument to the periodic hysteria that emerges every time those two blokes from Newcastle who used to be in Biker Grove drop a clanger. The rather bleak conclusion appears to be that no, we shouldn’t trust the media but then neither should trust ourselves: it is our propensity to seek distraction and cliche rather than knowledge, and formulate our views on the basis of emotion rather than reason that has ensured that we’ve largely got the media we deserve.