Chapter Three The Media Perspective

The Media Perspective

Sarah Parsonage One Question

Janine Gibson The Financial Times

Compared to other business sectors, media’s remit to educate its consumers is much more widely accepted.

“[45%] of us don’t trust the BBC to tell us the truth – we think that they have a special agenda, or are very biased, or a particular program is wrong. So that’s a profound problem for the role of media – and if the BBC can’t be trusted, then the rest of us are in trouble!” Janine Gibson

Yet while editorial standards at broadsheets have remained largely stable for decades, our trust in them has diminished; recent analysis by Press Gazette revealed that, in 2022, just 55% of the population trusts the BBC.

Once a supposed bastion of accuracy and rigour, the national broadcaster is now competing on a much broader playing field than it did even a decade ago. Social media and digital publishing have cut turnaround times to hitherto unthinkably short lengths, and the traditional business model – source, write, edit, publish – for running a newspaper has come close to being untenable. How can publications maintain editorial standards and impartiality without being left behind in the digital revolution’s wake?

As with any brand, media companies find themselves trying to reconcile their ethical and moral convictions with the realities of running a business. Similarly, audiences have to weigh their purported support for well-researched reporting against the inevitably higher costs it incurs to produce.

In Britain and beyond, media isn’t a monolith. Even among one genre – say tabloids, blogs or broadsheets – publications will be operating under aims as diverse as their editors and financial backers. Treating them as one entity might seem temptingly simple, but ultimately does more harm than good in the fight to educate consumers.

The more we can diversify in media, the better – at 92% white and with more than half of its industry leaders privately educated, journalism is one of the country’s most elitist professions; unsurprisingly, a homogenous cohort of producers risks an homogenous end product, all the more unlikely to hold each other to the high standards of accuracy that might redeem the industry’s reputation. “The markets have been skewed by various things like no-paywall publishing, which means that a lot of people chase a mass audience based on advertising, that inevitably leads to a certain kind of content. [On the other hand], very expensive well-resourced journalism, for very expensive wellresourced news organisations, is now very expensive, and clearly that has democratic issues.” Janine Gibson

“Fake news has always existed, but the open doors of the platforms and the lack of regulation there, the authority with which people can publish [something] that looks a bit like mainstream news, combined with the declining standards of some of the things that used to be mainstream news, have made this sort of free floor now very hard to pick through.” Janine Gibson

“I spent quite a lot of time on [my daughter’s] TikTok trying to figure out what the hell she’s doing […] and it’s terrifying. And she doesn’t have any concept of why this person, with charisma and authority and a knowing air of something or other, might be less authoritative than [...] the BBC.” Janine Gibson

“[Platforms like TikTok are] too scared to come [to a conversation like this], because they know their time is running out. They’re going to have to be regulated. The force has been disruptive and they know it.” Janine Gibson

As market realities lag behind new consumer trends, education is indeed crucial when it comes to combatting misinformation in media – but as we have seen before and will see again, internal education must be the priority. While public awareness campaigns or perhaps classes in school could empower people to interrogate the trustworthiness of their media sources, the extra time and money associated with high-quality content means that publications and platforms alike will need to be incentivised or regulated in order to reliably produce it.

MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL