Opinion: Dr Gavin Ellis says, given journalism is an indispensable part of the engine that drives our democracy, more must be done to convince the public to care about it.
It is painful to picture a world in which there are no journalists.
It is a world in which the powerful are accountable largely for those things they are prepared to reveal; the things that show them in the best light. It is a world populated by PR people whose job it is to place their clients or employers in the best light.
It is a world in which disinformation goes unchallenged and its perpetrators can distort both the beam and public perceptions. It is a world in which aggregators can put all of that focus in the best light with the twiddle of an algorithm.
It is a world in which no light is shone on those things people may not want you to know, but which you need to know and have a right to know.
Journalism has served society for hundreds of years. Daniel Defoe was doing it well before he created Robinson Crusoe, perhaps after reading an article about the rescue of marooned privateer Alexander Selkirk in the newspaper The Englishman in 1713.
Like most human endeavours, journalism is a mix of the virtuous and the venal, of fortune and folly. Now, however, it faces the prospect of death, and society would be guilty of culpable homicide: the corpses of the people whose jobs we were prepared to see abolished will be interred in caskets made from the media organisations we allowed to collapse.
Of course, there will be pleas in mitigation. The optimists among us will look to the digital universe and claim there is now so much information in free flow that we no longer need reporters to collect news or editors to scrutinise it before publication. We can find what we want to know without ‘outside help’, thank you very much.
There is no denying that the world is awash with more material than at any other time in human history, and it is more accessible than ever before. Theoretically, we have direct access to sources of information where previously we relied on news media as intermediaries.
Two attitudes have developed from this 21st century reality, particularly among what we must alphabetically assume to be the final two generations of Homo sapiens – Y and Z.
The first is that, in informational terms, volume equates with value. The second is that journalists are like cartwrights – artisans making quaint products we no longer require.
In May, the University’s Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures published a position paper that I co wrote with the somewhat rhetorical title of If Not Journalists, Then Who? that painted a possible future in which reporters followed in the footsteps of the artisans who built horse-drawn coaches and wagons.
However, cartwrights were replaced by automobile assembly-line workers doing a better job in meeting the same need – creating a means of transport. In the position paper we were unable to identify another institution or occupation that would be able to fulfil the public interest role of journalists, let alone do it better.
The paper painted a grim picture, stating: “News media and the provision of reliable news to citizens in Aotearoa New Zealand are suffering a form of ecosystem collapse. A combination of predation, changes to the media, destructive behaviour, and adaptive limitations are pushing the environments in which journalism is produced to the point where their effective extinction may be measured in years rather than decades.
“Like any ecological loss, this extinction will have consequences that extend beyond the disappearance of the interacting organisms that form the news ecosystem. Just as the disappearance of Amazonian rainforests affects world climate, the loss of professional, institutional journalism has profound implications for democracy and social cohesion.”
We identified a broad spectrum of issues that must be addressed if journalism is to survive – from financial sustainability and technological challenges to settings that govern its contribution to democracy and to social cohesion. The options and recommendations in the paper were aimed at both media organisations and government.
The paper painted a grim picture, stating: “News media and the provision of reliable news to citizens in Aotearoa New Zealand are suffering a form of ecosystem collapse.”
One of our observations was that much more needs to be done to persuade the public that journalism is an indispensable part of the engine that drives democracy. In other words, the public need to understand that allowing journalism to wither will have a direct effect on their ability to function as a cohesive society.
I do not believe the average New Zealander understands that reality and, as a result, places little or no value on journalists or the organisations that give weight to their endeavours. It may be part of the reason two thirds of us are ready to distrust news media well beyond their actual shortcomings. It may be why we are more inclined to critique its faults than to highlight its merits.
The most persuasive way to demonstrate journalism’s worth would be to observe the impact of its death, but that, to put it mildly, would be counterproductive. Even a day without news – no newspapers, radio and television bulletins, or updates to digital platforms – would make the point, but I doubt that news media managers, driven by the bottom line, would cooperate.
Instead, you could carry out a mental exercise. Ask yourself if you could find the information contained in the first six stories of today’s newspaper, news website, or broadcast news bulletin. And if so, how? Now calculate how long it would take you to gather it.
Finally, think about having to do that every day if you wish to be part of a functioning society. Or perhaps you would be happy to leave it to the daily scrapings of some large language model, aggregated ‘on your behalf’ by a transnational’s secret algorithm.
Media consultant, commentator and researcher Dr Gavin Ellis (ONZM) is an honorary research fellow at Koi Tū. He has more than 50 years of experience in news media and lectured on media and communications at the University for a decade.
Hear Gavin discuss insights from the paper as part of the 2024 Raising the Bar event on Spotify (tinyurl.com/rtb-spotify-ellis) or SoundCloud (tinyurl.com/rtb-soundcloud-ellis). To learn more about the paper, visit: informedfutures.org/if-not-journalists-then-who//
This article first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Ingenio magazine.
