Perils of Journalism
Journalism was once described as the first rough draft of history. Today, much of it resembles the first rough draft of an advertisement—written hurriedly, interrupted frequently and approved by someone from the revenue department.
Disruptive technologies and rapidly changing human behaviour have transformed journalism across the world. The old business model of public news media is collapsing, but its replacement remains uncertain whether it wants to inform citizens, entertain consumers, influence voters, protect advertisers or simply keep everyone sufficiently agitated until the next commercial break.
In the earlier model, newspapers sold information to readers and advertising space to businesses. The relationship was not perfect, but at least the transaction was visible. Today, news is often offered free while the reader’s attention, anxieties, preferences and outrage are quietly packaged for sale.
The reader no longer merely consumes the product. The reader has become the product.
And like all good products, the reader must be emotionally activated, carefully segmented and delivered to the advertiser in usable condition.
The Outrage Creating Industry
Modern journalism faces an inconvenient commercial reality: serious reporting is expensive, while outrage can be produced at industrial scale.
Investigating corruption may require months of research, legal review, travel, documents, whistle-blowers and courageous editors. Producing a prime-time television debate requires a studio, a dramatic soundtrack, six quarrelsome guests and an anchor with the vocal endurance of an auctioneer trapped inside a pressure cooker.
One uncovers facts. The other uncovers ratings.
Television news has perfected the art of creating urgency where none exists and certainty where none is possible. A disagreement becomes a crisis. A comment becomes an attack. A procedural delay becomes a constitutional earthquake. A celebrity’s silence becomes a “stunning response”.
Everything is breaking news, including news that broke yesterday and has since been repaired.
The anchor enters the programme not as a moderator but as a prosecuting attorney, national therapist, traffic policeman and self-appointed custodian of civilisation. Guests are invited not to explain their positions but to be interrupted while attempting to do so.
The programme is called a debate, although the format has more in common with a family argument conducted during a power failure.
Questions are rarely asked to obtain answers. They are asked to create clips.
“Are you saying the nation is wrong?”
“Why are you afraid to answer?”
“Will you apologise tonight?”
The guest may have been invited to discuss agricultural policy, but within minutes he is being asked to prove his patriotism before the weather report.
The visual design is equally thoughtful. Flames, countdown clocks, red banners, exploding graphics and words such as EXCLUSIVE, SHOCKING and NATION DEMANDS appear across the screen. The nation, incidentally, may be eating dinner and demanding only that someone lower the volume.
Solutions Before Understanding
One of journalism’s greatest responsibilities is to explain a world confronting political, economic, social and ecological crises. These problems are complex, interconnected and often resistant to simple solutions.
Unfortunately, modern media formats regard complexity as a technical defect.
A television panel cannot conclude, “The evidence is incomplete, and several outcomes remain possible.” That would leave viewers dangerously calm. The preferred conclusion is that someone has failed, someone else has betrayed the public, and a decisive answer will be revealed immediately after an advertisement for insurance.
Politicians, spokespersons, consultants and professional opinion-givers offer instant solutions to problems that may not yet be properly understood. Human beings dislike uncertainty. We would often rather receive a confident wrong answer than live with an honest unanswered question.
Business behaves similarly.
When sales decline, management assumes the company needs a new app.
When employees become disengaged, the organisation launches a “culture transformation initiative”.
When customers complain, a chatbot is installed to prevent them from reaching a human being.
When leadership has no idea what is happening, it commissions a dashboard.
Nothing comforts a confused organisation quite like a colourful dashboard. The business may still be travelling in the wrong direction, but management can now observe the disaster through twenty-three performance indicators.
Journalism participates in the same illusion. It identifies the failure of political and economic systems and then invites five familiar panelists to design civilisation’s replacement before 10 p.m.
The Algorithm Is the New Editor
In traditional journalism, editors decided which stories deserved attention. They were imperfect, biased and occasionally wrong, but at least they were human beings who could be questioned.
Today, much of that authority has passed to algorithms.
The algorithm has no political philosophy, social conscience or sense of proportion. It does not distinguish between what is important and what is merely irresistible. It asks only one question: Will people click?
If a thoughtful examination of water scarcity receives modest attention while a video of a politician losing his temper attracts millions of views, the algorithm draws a rational commercial conclusion: humanity wants more temper and less water.
Social-media platforms insist that they merely show users what interests them. This is rather like a restaurant claiming that it bears no responsibility for serving only desserts because customers kept ordering cake.
Algorithms study what frightens us, flatters us, enrages us and confirms what we already believe. They learn our prejudices with extraordinary patience and then return them to us as personalised reality.
Two people living in the same city may inhabit entirely different informational worlds. Each receives news designed to preserve attention and strengthen existing beliefs. Both become increasingly certain. Neither becomes significantly better informed.
The algorithm does not ask whether a story is true in any meaningful sense. It asks whether the story is engaging. Anger is engaging. Fear is engaging. Mockery is engaging. Nuance, sadly, has poor retention metrics.
A headline that says, “Experts Disagree About the Long-Term Effects of a Complicated Policy” may be accurate, but it is unlikely to go viral.
“THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING” performs better. Usually, it changes nothing.
Corporate Ownership and Editorial Independence
Journalism also operates within corporate structures that expect respectable returns. Media organisations require capital, technology, distribution, talent and advertising. Someone must pay for all this, and the person paying occasionally develops an interest in what is being said.
Corporate ownership does not always produce direct censorship. Modern influence is often more sophisticated.
Nobody needs to telephone the newsroom and order an editor to kill a story. It may be enough to ask whether the story is “commercially aligned”, whether it could “damage strategic relationships”, or whether its publication is “appropriate at this stage”.
Corporate language is particularly useful because it can bury moral discomfort beneath professional vocabulary.
A story is not suppressed. It is “held for further review”.
An advertiser is not pressuring the publication. It is “expressing stakeholder concern”.
An owner is not interfering in editorial decisions. He is “seeking greater strategic coherence”.
The newsroom may be declared fiercely independent, provided that its independence does not disturb the interests of the owners, lenders, advertisers, political allies, business partners or anyone attending the annual leadership retreat.
This creates a peculiar form of courage. The media can be extraordinarily brave when exposing institutions that do not advertise with it.
A channel may spend weeks investigating a minor opposition politician while treating the questionable conduct of a major corporate sponsor as a complex matter requiring balance, patience and perhaps several years of reflection.
The advertiser, after all, is not merely a source of revenue. It is a valued partner in the democratic conversation.
The conversation tends to become especially democratic during the festive sales season.
News as Branded Entertainment
Corporate journalism increasingly resembles branded entertainment. News programmes have theme music, dramatic lighting, signature gestures and carefully cultivated personalities. The anchor is no longer merely a journalist but a personal brand.
Viewers do not simply watch the news. They join a tribe.
The anchor assures them that they are the sensible people, unlike the foolish viewers of competing channels. Every issue is framed as a moral contest between heroes and villains. Ambiguity is removed because ambiguity interferes with brand positioning.
Business reporting has undergone a similar transformation. A company announces quarterly results, the share price moves, and executives appear on television to explain that the organisation remains “resilient”, “future-ready” and “well positioned for sustainable growth”.
This may be announced immediately after the company has dismissed thousands of employees.
The employees may not feel especially future-ready.
Corporate journalism often treats layoffs as a strategic optimisation, rising prices as margin discipline and reduced service as operational efficiency. When ordinary people cut spending, they are facing hardship. When corporations cut people, they are unlocking value.
Language is a marvellous instrument. Properly used, it can make suffering sound like a productivity initiative.
Spectacle Over Significance
Across the world, a growing proportion of journalism contributes little to human understanding. It is obsessed with celebrity, sport, violence, scandal, controversy and spectacle.
None of these subjects is inherently unworthy. Sport can reveal discipline, identity and collective emotion. Entertainment can reflect culture. Public figures deserve scrutiny.
The problem begins when spectacle consumes everything else.
A celebrity’s airport clothing receives more analysis than a national employment report. A politician’s facial expression becomes breaking news. A billionaire’s social-media post generates more coverage than the working conditions of the people who created his wealth.
The media does not ignore serious issues entirely. It often gives them a brief appearance between more commercially attractive stories, like a small portion of vegetables placed beside a large serving of dessert.
Traditional journalism was expected to understand popular feeling, give expression to it, encourage desirable public sentiments and fearlessly expose social defects.
The final responsibility is the most difficult.
It is easy to criticise distant elites. It is harder to tell the audience that its own appetite for outrage, convenience, consumption and confirmation is helping to produce the journalism it claims to dislike.
We blame channels for sensationalism, then reward sensationalism with attention.
We condemn misleading headlines, then forward articles we have not read.
We complain that television debates are noisy, then continue watching to see whether someone finally throws a glass of water.
Technology as the Official Religion
Modern society has developed an almost religious faith in technology. We assume that advanced technology is always beneficial and that any problem created by technology can be solved by introducing more technology.
If social media destroys attention, an app can measure our screen time.
If automation creates anxiety, an artificial-intelligence wellness assistant can ask how we feel.
If online shopping encourages excessive consumption, the platform can recommend “sustainable products” based on the seventeen unnecessary items we bought last month.
If misinformation spreads through algorithms, perhaps newer algorithms can protect us from the older algorithms.
The solution to the machine, apparently, is a larger machine.
Technology is powerful, but power is not wisdom. Journalism must question the assumption that perpetual progress and endless expansion are natural laws. It must ask what progress means in a world facing ecological limits, resource pressures and widening inequality.
We continue to define the good life as a combination of faster delivery, larger screens, smarter appliances and fewer encounters with other human beings.
Even refrigerators now send notifications.
Human civilisation has finally advanced to the point where milk can contact us directly.
The Journalism We Actually Need
The journalism of the future must help society redefine progress. Economic growth cannot, by itself, answer questions about dignity, community, meaning or ecological survival.
A world using less energy and fewer resources may be harder in several respects. It may require restraint, adaptation, durability and more thoughtful consumption.
These ideas are difficult to sell in economies built on the belief that the customer must always want more.
Retailers know the contradiction well. Businesses praise sustainability while launching weekly collections. Customers demand ethically produced goods, provided they are inexpensive, delivered tomorrow and available with a generous return policy.
A garment is advertised as timeless and replaced the following season.
A smartphone is described as revolutionary and declared obsolete eighteen months later.
Journalism should expose these contradictions without pretending that journalists stand outside them. Media organisations also chase growth, expand platforms, optimise engagement and compete for attention. They criticise consumer culture while depending on advertisements encouraging more consumption.
The newspaper warns of ecological collapse on one page and advertises a luxury sports utility vehicle on the next.
This is called editorial balance.
Between Power and Public Appetite
Journalists who take their responsibilities seriously occupy an uncomfortable position.
On one side stands a political and commercial elite with little interest in changing systems from which it benefits.
On the other stands a public that frequently demands more convenience, more consumption, more entertainment and fewer uncomfortable truths.
The media depends financially on both.
Governments provide access.
Corporations provide advertising.
Technology platforms provide distribution.
Audiences provide attention.
Each may withdraw support when journalism becomes inconvenient.
This is the central peril of journalism: it must remain commercially viable without becoming intellectually vacant; technologically relevant without becoming algorithmically obedient; popular without flattering popular prejudice; and independent while its salary, distribution and visibility depend on powerful institutions.
It must speak truth to power while recognising that power does not always sit in parliament or a corporate boardroom.
Sometimes power sits on a sofa holding a smartphone, demanding content that confirms what it already believes.
Few Are Guilty, but All Are Responsible
It is tempting to blame the decline of journalism entirely on media owners, political interests, advertisers, social-media companies and theatrical anchors. They deserve serious scrutiny.
But audiences also shape journalism.
Every click is a small editorial vote.
Every forwarded rumour rewards carelessness.
Every angry comment tells the algorithm that outrage works.
Every evening spent watching televised combat teaches the channel that combat is profitable.
Few may be directly guilty, but all of us carry some responsibility.
A new journalism is urgently needed—one that values context over speed, inquiry over certainty and public responsibility over manufactured excitement.
It must be willing to disappoint governments, corporations, advertisers, algorithms and audiences.
That is a very demanding business model.
But journalism was never meant to be merely a business model. It was meant to help society see itself clearly, especially when society prefers flattering lighting. Journalism should not merely tell us what happened yesterday. It should help us understand what we are becoming tomorrow.
And when necessary, it should have the courage to tell us that the biggest story is not always what powerful people are doing to the world.
Sometimes, the biggest story is what powerful people, profitable algorithms and willing audiences are doing together—while each confidently blames the other two.
God bless!
