We all want the news to accurately reflect the world. But with so many competing media channels offering different perspectives, should we accept that this goal is a fantasy? Is it media organisations or individual journalists that set the world’s agenda? And should we accept that what they present is merely their own fiction, or is there a larger framework of objectivity that we should require and demand? John Lloyd is the current contributing editor to the Financial Times, and the founder of the research centre and think tank Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Hilary Lawson is a journalist and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The two discuss whether objective news is an illusion and who we should trust for our information. John Lloyd begins by saying that while newspaper reports are called ‘stories’, they should not be considered fictional narratives.
John Lloyd (Scottish accent): They’re stories in the same way as novels and short stories are stories, but they’re not fiction. They are an attempt to make sense in a narrative form of current events. I would say that what objective or neutral journalism or, even more importantly, public service journalism [does] is to report in good faith; that you will tell the truth and that you will give opposite points of view and you will try for balance and neutrality. It is perfectly true that that isn’t achievable. But it’s a bit like the Holy Grail – you’re never going to get it, but it’s out there and it makes you act virtuously. You have to be a virtuous journalist to get at something like the truth.
GROUPTHINK
Hilary Lawson agrees, yet he emphasises that ‘good faith’ or ‘integrity’, as he calls it, must be sought by individual journalists independently of the media organisation they belong to:
Hilary Lawson (English accent): The idea that objective truth is just lying around is of course an illusion! But I don’t think that then means that anything goes. I think journalists need integrity. That they’ve tried to put together an account… it is a story, it’s not the objective truth; they are pulling together what they see as the facts within that frame. We want to encourage journalists to get out of the ‘groupthink’ of their organisations, of the society they find themselves in, and have the integrity to think through their particular take on the world so they might be able to change it for the better.
BRITISH IS BEST?
Yet Lloyd defends Western media organisations, holding up the example of public service broadcaster the BBC as the “gold standard of liberal journalism.” He contrasts the venerable British institution to propagandist media organisations, such as Russia Today:
John Lloyd: The BBC, I think, does attempt, for all that it gets battered by accusations of bias on the left and bias on the right, to tell stories in good faith. It puts out a series of facts, in a narrative form, which are designed to give the reader or the viewer a sense of what’s going on. But also a context within which it lives. Russia Today, which is the international arm of the Russian state television, is not reporting in good faith, which isn’t to say that some of what it broadcasts is not true. But its underpinning is propagandist; to say, one: Russia is great again, and two: the fact that it wasn’t great for the last twenty years has been the fault of the West.
ARROGANCE
Lawson provocatively suggests that the BBC has an agenda no less propagandist than that of Russia. He even compares it with the media organisations of the Soviet era:
Hilary Lawson: If you were in 1970s Soviet Russia, you would adopt the institutional values of your organisations in your society, you would adopt the framework of the things you had grown up with and lived with, the organisations you worked for… Just as there are a lot of people in the BBC now who believe that what they’re doing is genuinely telling you what’s going on in the world, but in a [the] same sort of way they are part of their… our [the British] current cultural ‘groupthink’.
THE PARTY LINE
Lloyd, who was Eastern European Editor and then Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times in the 1980s and 1990s, has personal experience of the workings of the country’s media. He clarifies the differences between BBC and Soviet journalism:
John Lloyd: The [Soviet] journalist was faced with a series of orders – what had to go in. If the General Secretary made a speech, it went in in full. If someone had been shown to be disliked by the Communist Party, you would do a story, which would be largely written for you, or at least the facts would be given to you, that he was corrupt [for example]. The fact that you may have thought he wasn’t or that it was exaggerated didn’t count. The BBC, like other Western newspapers and broadcast organisations, has within it a discipline, a system whereby reporters and editors are tasked with finding out what actually happened. And even if what happened was not good for Britain or for the BBC, or whoever it might be – that’s the truth.
changing sides
Lawson doesn’t buy it. His own experience, reporting from Afghanistan in the 1990s, has shown how Western media organisations can firewall the truth because they are so fixated on their own agenda:
Hilary Lawson: I remember being in Afghanistan at the time that the Americans were supporting the mujahideen. And the story at the time, of course, was that the Americans were on the side of truth and trying to rid Afghanistan of an appalling communist government. Well, we all know the outcome of that, which is actually they were not on the side of good at all, they were actually arming a whole series of people which we now regard as being the devil incarnate. I at the time tried to tell the story and there was trouble with Channel Four [news] saying [to me], “What is this? What are you doing, Hilary?” That is the nature of groupthink. And it was widespread across the whole of the Western media.
THE OPEN PRESS
Yet Lloyd points out that this shows that liberal journalism does have space for the truth – even minority truths.
John Lloyd: But that does, it seems to me, show that the liberal conception of journalism, that is, that a reporter will be able to find out the truth, works! Even if you were the minority, you were able to insert into the debate a narrative which went against it and which proved ultimately to be right – sometimes minorities are quite wrong. The liberal conception of journalism has a space for that, the authoritarian conception of journalism, which actually is strengthening in China, in Russia, in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, doesn’t.