The Sun sets but no new dawn has risen

Journalists celebrating Prince Harry’s victory over The Sun need to look further to see why the media is not trusted

‘Trust me I’m a journalist’, are words you don’t hear that often, if ever. Indeed probably less following the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, in a legal case brought by Prince Harry who accused the paper of illicitly spying on him and unwarranted intrusion on his private life.

It should be stressed that redress for even the most extreme abuse by media outlets is simply not open to everyone. Only the seriously rich like Prince Harry can afford the costs and risks involved in suing these companies.

In this instance other well known and wealthy individuals with claims similar to that of the Prince opted for lesser settlements over concerns that they had insufficient resources to continue. Prince Harry however saw himself as being on something of a crusade and was fortunate enough to have the means to pursue it.

The settlement has been greeted by an outbreak of schadenfreude in other parts of the media and out there in in the wild west of social media. But can it be said that most of these folks are morally superior to the Murdoch media empire?

Obviously I am not setting out to justify the worst excesses of Sun journalism, no one in their right mind can be doing so, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we seem to be seeing a bout of the unspeakable in pursuit of the unreliable here.

Having worked at the so called ‘respectable’ end of British newspapers I know the depths that were plumbed during my days at The Observer when, under the ownership of the raffish (aka dodgy) Tiny Rowland we published reams of distinctly dubious material about Tiny’s enemies (first among whom was the inexorable Mohammed Fayad but Tiny’s beef with him had nothing to do with his revolting treatment of female employees) counterposed by puff pieces about Tiny’s friends and indeed the Great Swashbuckler himself.

We were not alone in being tainted. Over at the Sunday Times (another Murdoch vehicle but infinitely posher than The Sun) they were willingly conned into buying the almost laughably fake Hitler Diaries.

However, in the same way that it would be absurd to claim that all priests are pedophiles, all journalists cannot be blamed for the misdemeanors of some of their number.

Let me, very unfashionably, go further and say that the Murdoch newspaper empire also has much to be proud of, not least when it comes to the Old Man’s commitment to the printed word and the fact that many of his outlets enjoy a solid history of fine journalism.

But there are a whole host of reasons why journalists are doing themselves no favours these days, creating skepticism where none is required.

Why on earth, for example, do today’s journalists insist that they are part of a profession when there is no such thing as a professional qualification for this line of work? The proliferation of university journalism courses generally provide a decent academic education but they emphatically do not train journalists.

Journalism is a craft or trade learned and honed by experience. Aside from some small mechanical attributes, such as shorthand (now rarely used), speed typing and the more daunting task of acquiring a basic understanding of the laws of defamation, there is not that much that can usefully be learned without experience.

Anyway, what’s wrong with being practitioners of a craft? It certainly never bothered me. Nor do I understand what is meant by the commonly used term of ‘investigative journalist’, surely the elementary basis of the job is to investigate, anyone not doing that probably belongs in an advertising agency.

Then, and this really applies to the audio-visual media, there is the whole business of fostering illusions. For example, political reporters are forever broadcasting from outside Number 10 Downing Street, as if their very presence on this sacred ground implies inside knowledge of what is going on behind the door. Ditto, standing outside a factory to deliver some form of economic news.

And what about those endless vox pops where ‘ordinary’ hapless citizens are asked to pronounce on the questions of the day. The aim here is to achieve balance, so we get a neat little package of one for and one against whatever it is. This is ritual not reporting because evenly balanced opinion rarely exists and the public are given no credit for understanding nuance.

Despite all this good journalism still exists. For all the talk of the rise of the new media, most of the real news is still generated by the old media and regurgitated by excitable people jumping up and down giving their version of stories that not only they have not reported but have no idea of how to report.

Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, I better admit that I was a bit pleased that The Sun got its comeuppance. It is indeed a shit newspaper, ask more or less anyone from Liverpool if that sounds harsh.