MetaCatholic

Today’s Times provided a good (bad?) example of the increasing detachment of much journalism from fact. The print edition, which had gone to press before the New Hampshire polls closed, effectively reported the pundit and poll consensus as though it was the result. It did so under the headline “The tears are falling but Clinton vows to fight on”. The journalist Tom Baldwin had clearly forgotten that elections are about the counting of votes, not the sampling of voters.

Some of this is an effect of the 24/7 news machine. Facts don’t come in quickly enough, and very often events don’t happen fast enough, to feed a non-stop machine reporting news. The news today that there isn’t any news yet is not very good television.

Some of it, I think, is the way in which a small group of journalists, politicians, activists and pundits only ever seem to talk to each other. No-one in this small fraternity seems willing to break from the pack and offer a different opinion. Hearing each others voices creates a consensus, and the consensus becomes the badge of belonging to the in-crowd.

Some of it seems to be fascination with sensation. The idea that Hillary might lose, and Obama win in New Hampshire is such a big story that journalists want it to be true. This is not necessarily because they have any particular animus against Clinton (although some do) or because they have been caught by Obama’s powerful spell (though some have), but because a big story of an upset is simply so much more exciting than a smaller story of an expected result. There’s more airtime, as well as more excitement, in the spectacular upset. This brings with it the temptation to believe it’s true, because you want it to be true.

Finally, one must ask the question about bias. Tom Baldwin’s Times report begins like this:

As she watches her support melt away, the horror on the face of Hillary Clinton sometimes resembles that of CS Lewis’s Snow Queen on seeing summer return to Narnia.

Should a news report (rather than a comment piece) begin with an implicit comparison of a leading candidate to a witch, and a symbolic representation of the ungodly forces arrayed against Aslan’s Christ figure? I can’t help wondering whether a desire is revealed in such characterisations to see Hillary fail, and that it means that the reporter was looking only at the indications that fed his desire. Reporting the news, however, is meant to be about looking for the inconvenient truth (TM A Bore) and not staring into the Mirror of Erised.

Are we corporately losing the ability to require, discern and report the truth when it comes to matters on which people have personal opinions, and is this being fed by our media, or merely reflected in it?