Journalists are often referred to as rats, liars and shameless exploiters. Sadly, the journalistic field that produces such people is rarely subject to critique. It is vital to grasp that news is a social construction of reality. A snippet of news can never cover the ‘whole story’, capture empirical truth or place events in historical context. Daily news is compiled of snapshots of reality assembled by editors. Yet this news coverage frames the way in which we think about, and understand, the world around us. It is therefore important to understand how news is selected, framed and constructed so that we can be informed receivers of news and realise its limitations.

One important characteristic of the media industry is that it works as a bandwagon. All professional journalists are news junkies. Every editor will read all the other newspapers on the way to work, listen to radio news and have rolling news channels playing in the newsroom. To know what to say, you have to know what everybody else has said. Press Agencies make good money from recycling stories. When I worked for Ferrari Press Agency in Kent one of my tasks was to watch Richard and Judy and re-spin celebrity interviews into little news-in-brief stories for tabloids. I had a little piece about Jamie Oliver playing his drums loudly placed in the Daily Star. It is a successful commercial formula because people want more of what they already know. Newspapers want to cover what is talked about on television and television programmes delight in having their stories picked up by newspapers.

Journalism is a narcissistic field. It is not only that the mainstream media will cover the same stories, but that they will even become entrenched in a certain angle. Over breakfast at the BBC, Andrew Marr talked to me about how this affected coverage at the start of the Iraq war. “We spent a lot of time talking about the legality of the war and the UN. However, we were too interested in the legality issue and whether the Labour party would split. We weren’t looking at the bigger philosophical question of what happens when you kick the door in on a country. It’s so different. We failed to analyse that properly and so did the government.”

Politics bears a heavy influence over media coverage and the Iraq war provides another illuminating example. The Pentagon dreamed up the idea of offering media outlets the opportunity to send ‘embedded journalists’ to Iraq. Embedded journalists are reporters embedded with the US or British army. News organisations understandably lapped up the chance to glean exciting, live footage of the war while governments in both countries celebrated the greatest PR coup of the war. The embedded journalists felt a natural sense of protection towards their soldiers. The film footage was automatically biased, as the camera carried the viewer along with the drama of an advancing army and showed attacks by the other side. One journalist admits realising it had gone too far when he picked up a gun to fend off an ‘enemy’ Iraqi. Despite efforts to objectify the reports, the visual footage blaring into our TV screens spoke louder than words.

Images are supremely powerful. Andrew Marr says, “I’m concerned about the direction of news. I think that because complex things are discussed in politics you need the language and syntax to work your way through the subtle distinctions. An entirely image-based political culture doesn’t let you do that. That’s why the Nazis invented the Nuremberg Rally because if the images are strong enough then they can stop you thinking”. Marr provides an evocative warning. The images of the twin towers collapsing replaced the need for a narrative. Many of us feel that we know the story of 9/11 because we’re so familiar with the pictures. Images really can stop people from thinking.

Television news coverage has to dramatise news in pictures, but even newspapers are developing in that direction. Most front pages lead with a powerful image and text space decreases year by year. A developed argument requires time and space. Subtle stages of an argument can lead readers to new thoughts and conclusions. Short sentences and easy stories can only confirm familiar ideas. Television news faces the limitations of time restrictions. Many autonomous experts refuse to discuss a story on television because they are unable to summarise a complex issue in a couple of minutes. In their place, news programmes hire pundits or pseudo-experts to do the job. Such characters are willing to summarise a story in an engaging, media-savvy way that appeals to populist producers. Sky News calls them ‘Rent-a-Gobs’.

Some Sky News staff are also amused by the motto about their station, ‘wrong, but not wrong for long’. This refers to the fact that in a bid to report a story first they will often compromise accuracy. No matter though, that’s easily corrected by the ticker changing. Bad journalism relies on this short-term memory effect. News is biased towards the ‘new’. Now, bear with me on this and please don’t condemn me for not seeing the obvious as BBC reporter Ben Brown did scathingly when he said “Well, uh, news is new”. My point is that the emphasis on ‘new’ implies the opposite is to be ‘out-of-date’. Focussing constantly on new events means that many important stories are not covered because they are not strictly ‘new’. Journalists can only cover an ongoing story if they find a new angle on it. Something is clearly wrong with a frame that forces that. Ongoing problems such as starving people in Africa, global inequality and global warming are tougher to call news. It is a travesty that a politician will receive media coverage when making a promise, but will rarely be reported for not fulfilling it over time.

The emphasis on the ‘new’ leads to our news lacking context. Stories appear without explanation and disappear without a solution. Such reportage breeds apathy as political stories are reported in the same way as natural disasters. News is almost biased against understanding as it doesn’t reinsert stories into a network of relevant relationships that could make them truly comprehensible. George Galloway described Newsnight’s Gavin Esler as “a rancid toadie” because he recently vehemently criticised the Iraq war after supporting it at the time. Galloway fumed, “Is he cynically sitting there making these accusations or does he have the ability that many journalists have of merely wiping their own slate clean? I notice no humility from journalists today. I don’t see a mea culpa very often from the press. It’s as if these journalists can just sail on”. The reality is that journalists can sail on because, as Barney Jones (Producer of Sunday AM at the BBC) says, “Broadcast journalism tends to be Kleenex journalism: you consume it, chuck it away and go on to the next”.

I was interested in speaking to George Galloway after his infamous battle on Sky News last August where he accused the presenter of biased reportage and condemned the Murdoch empire. Furthermore, Galloway won his libel case against The Telegraph and unveiled the Fake Sheikh of The News of the Word. He is clearly a man disgruntled with the British media. While smoking a cigar at Portcullis House, Galloway told me; “We have a media overwhelmingly, even in its best parts, that passively receives misinformation, disinformation, and regurgitates it and then treats anyone who speaks up against that prevailing orthodoxy as either a madman or a criminal, or in my case both”. Quoting the words of Doctor Johnson, Galloway gravely states “There is no dictatorship so grim as the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy”. Furthermore, “The public are caught in a pincer movement between a lying government and a media which in some parts was also part of the lying conspiracy but even in the best parts were prepared to regurgitate the lies of the lying government in an uncritical way. This is a dereliction of all duties of journalism. Journalism can mean nothing unless it means the treating of official information sceptically”.

Marr concedes that he wasn’t sceptical enough during the Iraq war build-up. “I feel culpable in that I waved the dodgy dossier. I was just breathless as was anyone at that point. I’m absolutely sure that I was fooled and that I then was part of propagating that”. Galloway would approve of Marr’s mea culpa, all too rare in the media industry. He might also feel vindicated by the admissions from Head of BBC News Peter Horrocks that politicians do frame the debate. “What politicians say is an important part of the news and we need to reflect that but we’re at least as likely to pick up on that and critique it as we are to fall in line with it. The broader point, how far do what politicians say shape where the ground for debate is? That’s clearly true”.

Not only do politicians focus the debate, they also make far more explicit interventions. Tony Blair blocked much regulation of the press to give Rupert Murdoch free reign in exchange for editorial support. Newspapers traditionally offer editorial support and even the impartial BBC has surprisingly close connections. Horrocks tells me, “There is an interaction between politicians and the BBC at all sorts of different levels. Blair asked a group of us in a couple of months ago just to have a chat about the final few months of his premiership. That’s quite interesting, to get an insight into his mind, he’s trying to persuade us of his point of view. I regularly have meetings with senior politicians who are trying to do that. But it doesn’t always work”. The fact that Horrocks says ‘it doesn’t always work’ implies that sometimes it just might.

I asked Peter Horrocks why the BBC and other news media had failed to cover the genocide in Darfur over the past four years. Horrocks replied that the BBC had featured a few programmes on Darfur every year. I refuted that these programmes amount to real news coverage. In answer, Horrocks replied that the BBC hadn’t focussed on Darfur because the politicians didn’t. Darfur is unpopular for a number of reasons, primarily because Africa possesses little economic interest for Britain. Accepting the lack of political interest in Darfur, the region still possesses humanitarian interest and requires international intervention. I suggested that if the news media did cover Darfur, then the public inevitably would question why the Government were neglecting the issue. Surely the media realises its power to set the agenda as much as the politicians do, the media is responsible for holding our politicians to account, it’s part of a functioning democracy. Horrocks replied, “That’s not our job. It’s not our job to get people to do things. It’s our job to reflect the world accurately”. Few statements have ever been so loaded with irony. Reflecting the world accurately would of course be to acknowledge the significance and human tragedy of hundreds of thousands of people dying in Darfur. When Horrocks talks of reflecting the world accurately he in fact means reflecting the political priorities of Britain accurately. That is what the British journalistic field does.