Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Looking for the 'Golden Age' of Journalism

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 31, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

30:33

Looking for the 'Golden Age' of Journalism

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The media overall, but journalism especially, in many ways are facing a crisis of trust.
	According to the Idelman Trust Brameta 2017, in the last five years, the trust in traditional media declined by 5%, from 62 to 57%, and for the United States alone, this appears to be even more severe.
	According to a Gallup poll from the year 2016, the average trust in media dropped by 21%.
	A similar picture can essentially be found worldwide, with admittedly a few exceptions.
	This drop of trust is often accompanied by a call back to a romanticized form of journalism and news.
	It's basically a call like, oh, if we only return to good journalism like we had back in the day, everything will be fine.
	Now of course the term back in the day is mostly left open for interpretation, as is usually the case with those romanticized versions of the past.
	There is this weird myth-like belief that journalism used to be good, that there was some sort of golden age of journalism, and that we are only now really seeing some kind of decline.
	But this actually couldn't be further from the truth.
	Journalism was never great, and there were historical situations where journalism was even worse than today.
	I often find myself wondering, when was this supposed golden age of journalism supposed to be happening?
	When was journalism great?
	When was journalism genuinely good?
	I had a few different versions of a response to those questions scripted, but none of them sadly really got the point across I'm gonna try and make here.
	So instead, let's play a little game, okay?
	I'm gonna read a quote for you, and while I'm reading it, you'll write me a nice little comment about what time period the quote is referring to.
	Let's see how many of you get it right.
	Okay, here we go.
	Further increasing the reader's tendency to sense that news items were issued from hostile or at least unsympathetic sources were the frequent contradictory reports.
	Differences of fact or interpretation emerge from one issue of a paper to the next one or even in different parts of a single issue.
	Views of the same subject varied a great deal, because many differences stemmed from the coverage of the same event in the reports of several cities.
	These contradictions reinforce the perception that the newspaper has an accumulation of many biases alien to the reader.
	Now, take a second, okay?
	Think about it.
	To what period in time is this quote referring to?
	I bet that at least some of you probably thought that the quote was referring to contemporary journalism.
	Well, I've got some bad news for you.
	The quote is from the book The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment by Jacques Arcenza from the year 2003.
	And the quote is drumroll about news, especially in France in the 17th and 18th century.
	The quote is literally about the early stages of news, newspapers, and journalism in continental Europe.
	Proto-journalism had essentially exactly the same issues as contemporary journalism.
	Now I can hear some of you contrary and smarty pants already complaining, aha, but Dr. Lehman, you forgot about earlier news sources like the AVC.
	And while that claim is technically true, the Avisi are structurally and functionally so vastly different from actual newspapers that I really wouldn't consider them to be journalistic in any sense of the word really.
	They were rather short, centralized messages, usually from one court to a few others, the word aviso literally meaning notice of warning.
	And they were not as widespread as people may think.
	But it's still true though that they are the predecessors of journalism and I'm not contesting that.
	So let's talk a little bit about those real quick and then move back to journalism proper.
	In the 2009 publication Court and Politics in Papal Rome 1492-1700, we actually find a short description of one type of aviso and we even get an example.
	On page 40 we can find, Therefore, a reading of such texts must be combined with perusal of the Avici, brief notices of Roman events that circulated throughout Europe and did recount odd twists, mishabs and retell stories of disorders and brawls arising during the solemn procession.
	As a personal note here, Avisi were of course not exclusive to the solemn procession but dealt with all kinds of stuff and they were also not exclusive to Rome.
	Anyway, back to the quote.
	For example, an eviso of the 2nd November 1555 reported, When the Pope went last Monday to San Giovanni, accompanied by all the court and the soldiers and the whole populo to take possessor of his besporic according to the ancient customs, a bit of a brawl broke out between Papiro Capicuccia, Capisucci, who was leading some of the mercenaries, and some taffs from the Rioni of Ponte and Trustevera.
	At this point I'm gonna cut the quote short because I want you to actually do some research on your own.
	So if you want to know how it continues, you actually have to read the book.
	Oh no, you poor thing!
	No!
	You have to do research!
	No!
	Yeah, but I hope you get the picture, okay?
	Short notices of events, mostly concerning some kind of court narrative, mostly found in and around Rome and Venice.
	Hardly something journalistic.
	And now let's move back to newspapers and journalism proper.
	As we've seen with the earlier quote from the French press in the Age of Enlightenment, the earliest newspapers were often plagued by essentially the same issues as today.
	The infamous Gazette de Francs, one of the most well-known continental newspapers, was essentially a state-sanctioned and censored megaphone of French royalty.
	Which is really interesting, because at times you'll find a modern narrative that goes basically like this.
	Oh you know, it's true that the earliest French newspapers were essentially just state propaganda, but everything changed after 1770, and especially after the French Revolution, which brought about actual good journalism.
	And while there are certain adherence to this sort of narrative, even in the academic establishment, this narrative is actually really controversial.
	Again, in French Press in the Age of Enlightenment, we'll find a few relevant quotes.
	In the middle 1770s, the foreign minister Comte Verjon, to further his policy of supporting the American revolutionaries against the British, helped set up and subsidize the Affaire de l'Angleterre et de l'Amérique.
	Another, and in this case completely different, political periodical was the Annales literaire et politique, begun in 1777 by Simone Nicolas-Henri Linguette.
	In a sense, this paper resembles the Foreign Gazette, because it was a privately run journal published abroad.
	But that vastly overstates the comparison.
	Like the Affaires de l'Angletaire et de l'Amérique, the Annals was a journal with a focus, in this case the opinions of Linguette, and his views were possibly the most extreme published prior to the revolution.
	I think I'm leading myself out of a window here.
	I think that the notion of balanced and good journalism from 1770 onwards is largely informed from the way we see the world today.
	Monarchy bad, democracy good.
	But when we really think about it, the two examples that I just provided here, even though supporting Republican and or democratic endeavors, are just as in conflict with journalistic ethics as their royal counterparts.
	They are both still primarily there to push some kind of narrative or another.
	They just so happened to align with our Republican worldviews.
	Especially during the revolution, it really appears as if the newspapers basically just switched a lenience.
	The level of bias though remained the same, or maybe even increased.
	Now, for the sake of intellectual honesty, it's important to know that there actually was an improvement both in quality and in quantity of news over time.
	In 1745 there were 15 periodicals in France.
	In 1785 there were already 82.
	Many of those were also foreign publications that were not as susceptible to French censorship.
	All of that is true, but it's still not this grand inception of a golden age of free, enlightened, republican continental journalism.
	And this tradition of an exceptionally partisan press in France then continued, depending on viewpoint, into the late 19th and even 20th century.
	So it's very unlikely that France hosted this weird golden age of journalism that everyone wants to return to.
	If we want to find this sort of ominous golden age, we have to keep looking.
	And where else to start, if not with France's greatest rival who also happens to have a completely opposing journalistic tradition, England and later on Great Britain.
	The story here starts a little bit earlier, in the 16th century, but is essentially the same.
	News are controlled and censored by the government.
	In Dangerous Talk by David Cressy, we find a few examples of how seditious or treasonable speech, which also applies to news, even though the main tool of censoring news at that time was press licensing, but that's a topic for an entire different video.
	Anyway, in Dangerous Talk we find out how seditious or treasonable speech was treated in the 16th century.
	The most common punishment under Edward VI for words of a seditious nature was for the offender to stand in the pillory, perhaps with an ear nailed to the post and with a paper on his head declaring the nature of the offence.
	The authorities had discretion to decide whether one or both ears would be cropped or sheared, whether the pillaring should be repeated in more than one marketplace, the extent of any fine and the length and severity of imprisonment.
	A Norfolkman, William Wittard or Wissingseed, endured the pillory and the loss of an ear in February 1550 after speaking seditious words and was then dismissed with a good lesson.
	In May 1551 Juan Harris, having spoken traitorous words against the King's Majesty, denying him to be king, was referred to the next assesses.
	The following May, one Fording, a fellow of Eton College, was detained in the fleet prison for repeating certain lewd words touching the secession of the crown.
	Another unfortunate went to the tower in May 1553 for reporting of certain words touching the King's Majesty's person.
	Only around 1694 do we see some noteworthy improvements to this repression of free speech.
	In this year, the Licensing Order of 1643, as I mentioned before one of those ominous press licensing deals, the Licensing Order of 1643, lapsed out and expired.
	Now the history of British journalism is really really complicated.
	Way too complicated to do it justice in this short video.
	But there are actually a few good publications to get a first insight into it.
	First one is fittingly called The History of British Journalism by Alexander Andrews.
	Or if you want something a tad more up-to-date but from a slightly more focused viewpoint, you can take a look at Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention by Chalabe from 1996.
	And if you are interested in a much more contextual and, say, compact read, I can recommend the Encyclopedia of Journalism from the year 2009.
	Now as always, you can find all the relevant sources for download in the description.
	Just scroll down, click the link and there you go academic literature.
	Yay!
	If for some reason any of the links doesn't work, just look up a tutorial for Sci-Hub and Libgen because there should be enough of those by now, wink wink, and download the paper for yourself.
	Basically to make an exceptionally complicated matter as simple as possible.
	In the 18th and 19th century, British journalism was probably the most advanced and what we would colloquially call quote-unquote best journalism around.
	There are a few continental competitors mostly around today's Belgium and Netherlands, but that's a topic for another video.
	Not only was British journalism far more independent of governmental restrictions than its continental counterparts, it was also qualitatively superior.
	This was for many reasons actually, ranging from rather complicated economic factors that can be summed up as making more money, therefore being able to invest more money, up to really simple factors such as British newspapers having, and I kid you not, simply having more pages than their continental counterparts.
	At the same time, this apparent quote-unquote freedom of the press and the related monetary incentives also slowly but steadily led to increasingly mundane and sensationalist news in the 19th century.
	In 1888, the French novelist and journalist Émile Zolain described British journalism as transformed journalism, killed the great articles of discussion, killed literary critique, and increasingly gives more importance to news dispatches, trivial news, and to the articles of reporters and interviewers.
	But even with that, we have to keep in mind that this criticism comes from an almost opposed journalistic tradition and school of thought.
	So it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
	The question now of course is, did we just stumble upon the golden age of journalism, where everything was great and awesome?
	Sadly, this doesn't appear to be the case.
	The German researcher Jürgen Wilken summarizes this in his 2013 publication Journalism, as follows.
	The printer was responsible for the news, along with the advertisements, whereas the authors themselves oversaw the essay section and other sundry contributions.
	They weren't required to limit themselves to writing sober reports, but could also publish critical articles and voice their own opinion.
	It was helpful that a bipolar party system already existed in England, with the Whigs and the Tories, resulting in the establishment of opposition newspapers.
	Nevertheless, journalism was rarely autonomous.
	Rather, as many papers were backed financially by the government, political parties or individual politicians, it frequently engaged in propaganda.
	So overall, while admittedly, British journalism appears to have essentially a quote-unquote head start in continental journalism, and while it does appear to show overall really positive trends, there are still the noteworthy issues of newspapers in general, and journalists in specific being used as megaphones, serving some kind of narrative or another, serving some kind of agenda or another.
	And even worse than that, the free market approach of British journalism very soon turned into a double-edged sword.
	During the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century, the British newspaper landscape was essentially monopolized by just a handful of people.
	Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount of Rothmere, founded, together with his brother Alfred, the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror.
	And by 1921, they, or rather their entire family, controlled the Daily Mirror, Evening News, Glasgow Daily Record, Sunday Mail, and Sunday Pictorial.
	Max Aitken, Baron of Beaverbrook, controlled another huge chunk of media, namely the Daily Express.
	This essentially means that out of the top six newspapers of the year 1921, three were owned by one family, the Harmsworth family, namely the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and Daily Sketch.
	One was somewhat independent even though politically highly biased, Daily Chronicle, and the last one was owned by another press baron that just mentioned, Max Eitken, the Daily Express.
	Now, why is this important?
	The problem here is not the monopolization itself, but rather how this monopolization was used and abused.
	Adrian Birmingham, in his 2005 publication, Monitoring the Popular Press, A Historical Perspective, describes the situation as following.
	The political aspirations of these press barons went much further than those of contemporary proprietors and editors, and their activities were often far more open and direct.
	Perhaps the most notorious example came days before the 1924 general election, when Rothermere's Daily Mail gave huge publicity to the Zinoviev letter, a provocative forgery purportedly written by the head of the Communist Internationale to British activists in a bid to discredit the Labour Party.
	But the vitriol was not directed solely at the left.
	Biverbrook and Rothermere regularly lambasted Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Party leader, and after the 1929 general election attempted to undermine his leadership via an empire-free trade crusade.
	They used their papers to launch and support a United Empire Party, which put up opponents against Conservative Party candidates in crucial by-elections.
	This vigorous campaign provided the occasion for Baldwin's famous speech, condemning the press barons for exercising power without responsibility.
	Although Baldwin survived, it later became clear that the press had pushed him to the verge of resignation.
	Birmingham also gives us a short glimpse into the somewhat contemporary research situation of that monopolization, and describes a research report of Britain on this monopolization and on those families.
	The authors were concerned that a dangerous tendency has recently been manifesting itself by which entertainment ceases to be ancillary to news and either supersedes it or absorbs it.
	Many people, they observed, welcome a newspaper that under the guise of presenting news enables them to escape from the grimness of actual events and the effort of thought by opening the back door of triviality and sex appeal.
	The general accuracy of the press is comparably low by scientific or administrative standards.
	Again, a quote and a description that seems eerily familiar, doesn't it?
	So even though the 18th and 19th century seemed to be rather promising times for journalism in Britain, it was also this period that cooked up some of the nastiest issues of journalism so far.
	Monopolization and abuse of seeming neutrality and the concept of news for political gain.
	And if we move to Britain's big or little brother, depending on your perspective, the United States, this period in time saw the creation of the term yellow journalism.
	Journalism specifically meant to sell, regardless of any integrity, going as far as completely fabricating content.
	So to summarize the findings so far, no golden age of journalism during its inception and early stages because of massive governmental censorship and essentially just being a megaphone for the rich and the powerful and usually for the royalties.
	No golden age of journalism during the 18th and 19th century because of still massive partisanship.
	It has to be said though that this period, at least in Britain, appears to display some rather positive journalism.
	And no golden age in the 19th and early 20th century because of massive monopolies and the use of journalism for political ends with no accountability on the side of the media.
	So overall this doesn't seem too great for adherents of the theory of a golden age of journalism.
	But you know, maybe, maybe we have to move up a bit.
	Maybe we can still find some kind of golden age of genuinely good journalism somewhere.
	I'm gonna skip World War I and World War II because, I mean, let's be honest here, they really aren't even candidates for a golden age of journalism.
	This period, or rather those periods, were plagued by self-imposed censorship in the West and state-imposed censorship in the East.
	News became completely secondary to the war efforts.
	So let's move up a bit further.
	Let's look at news shortly after the Second World War.
	I don't think that there is any single event that sums up the issues of journalism in the late 40s and early 50s as well as the Nuremberg trials do.
	These were the trials of leading German officials conducted by the victors of the Second World War.
	If you want a bit of in-depth reading about this, because this is actually absolutely fascinating from a media perspective, if you want some kind of background reading on this, I recommend Antio Holmiller's reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish press 1945-1950, from the year 2011.
	To make this as compact as possible, contrary to popular belief, concentration camps and the Holocaust were somewhat of public knowledge in the West during the Second World War.
	We'll find articles about the Dachau concentration camp as early as 1934, and by 1942, sporadic articles about the ongoing genocides in Europe started popping up in the West.
	And starting 1945 then comes the Nuremberg trials.
	We have to just really quickly diverge from our journalistic focus and talk about the main points of those trials.
	They are really important to understand why exactly the press had the issues it had.
	So let's talk about the main charges here real quick.
	1.
	Conspiracy to commit charges 2, 3 and 4, which are listed here.
	2.
	Crimes against peace, defined as participation in the planning and waging of a war of aggression in violation of numerous international treaties.
	3.
	War crimes, defined as violations of the internationally agreed upon rules for waging war.
	And 4.
	Crimes against humanity.
	While the Eastern countries plus Sweden and Finland actually did cover the last part in their news reports, including the various genocides in Europe, the Western press treated the entire thing much, much differently.
	On December the 15th, when the canonical figure of 6 million murdered Jews was considered, the main news story of the day was a large-scale police operation in West End.
	A few weeks later, Hermann Grebe's testimony on killing Jews in Ukraine in 1942 escaped the paper's attention, while in contrast, it was consistently reported in the Swedish and Finnish press.
	Instead, the main news item from Germany reads, Hun radio goes Nazi.
	As these examples show, it was evident that the more systematic approach to the Jewish genocide was shunned by the nationalistic frame of reporting, which often concentrated on the mistreatment of the Allied soldiers, especially the killings of the captured Allied pilots by quote-unquote the Huns.
	Even as the infamous documentary Nazi concentration camps was shown during the trials, by the way, an absolutely fascinating movie, I'm gonna link it in the description.
	The movie not only shows a good bit of disgusting reality, but also shows the inception of certain Holocaust myths in fact.
	It's this movie that, to my best knowledge, features the human skin lampshade myth for the first time ever.
	And even as this movie that's really hard to stomach was shown during the trials, the newspapers didn't really care.
	In fact, the coverage of the Nuremberg trial during the time of the Nazi concentration camps movie left the headlines and first pages of newspapers and moved way, way back.
	The Birmingham Gazette from the 13th November 1945 for example, does cover the movie, but only on page 4 and only in a rather short and tiny article.
	And again, the focus of the article is on the reactions of the German officials and not the actual content of the movie.
	To get back to the main charges brought up during the Nuremberg trials, the entire Western narrative reflected the ranking of those charges in a sense.
	The entire Western narrative was completely dominated by the conspiracy and war of aggression framework, with a good bit of war crimes sprinkled here and there.
	And this sort of dependence of journalism on the official narrative can only be understood if you also understand the way journalism operated during this time.
	It was the time of official sources, of big political quotes, of gentlemen politicians and of governmental and institutional trust.
	Journalism during this time had overall a large degree of trust into their respective governments and took a good chunk of its information directly from various governmental agencies, thereby also adopting the official frame of a war of aggression and conspiracy and largely ignoring the aspect of genocide, as was the official governmental narrative during the Nuremberg trials.
	As a bit of trivia here, we actually saw the exact opposite on the Soviet side.
	And while I don't think anyone argues for a golden age of journalism in the Soviet Union, it's still important to note for context's sake that their journalism focused much, much more on the crimes against humanity, at times even going as far as blatantly fabricating content.
	So yeah, again, no golden age, it's basically just bootlicking at this point.
	So maybe, just maybe, we have to move into the 60s and 70s to find this promised land of a golden age of journalism.
	Spoiler alert, it's not here either.
	I'm sorry.
	In fact, even though this period is often touted as THE period of governmental distrust, a period of transition away from just governmental bootlicking to actual critical journalism, which it certainly was, I'm not denying that, this period also saw the rise of the so-called new or contextual journalism as one of the, if not the main method of writing news.
	Think and Schutzen have a great paper on this from the year 2013, The Rise of Contextual Journalism 1950s to 2000s.
	And at one point they describe a study that in my opinion exactly showcases the issues, or rather the structural instability of the concept of new or contextual journalism.
	They describe the study as follows.
	They found significant increases in initiative, prefacing a question with statements that construct a particular context, asking multiple questions within a single turn, or asking a follow-up question, in assertiveness, inviting a particular answer.
	Isn't it true that, or don't you think that?
	And in adversarialness.
	Mr. President, Senator so-and-so has criticized your policy X as disastrous for the economy, national defense and American morals.
	How do you respond?
	There was a notable rise on all of their measures of aggressiveness in 1969, and at no point after 1969 has the heightened level of aggressive questioning returned to the differential questioning style that prevailed during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
	What this study, the article is describing here, lovingly calls initiative, assertiveness or adversioness, in reality is nothing more than removing the barrier between journalist and the news.
	The journalist inserts him or herself into the story explicitly.
	This also means that all the biases, all the preconceived notions of something that the journalist has, are also dragged into the story.
	And not only implicitly, as was the case up until then, but in a very sort of explicit, overt manner.
	Essentially, if really boiled down, new or contextual journalism is journalism that rejects not only authority, but also objectivity.
	And just to give anyone criticizing this video a quick way out and a good entry point for dismissing any point I have made so far or will still make, here have a Wikipedia quote that I really like.
	It, new journalism, is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction, and emphasizing truth over facts, and intensive reportage in which reporters immerse themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them.
	This can, in my opinion, hardly be called a golden age of journalism, especially since this also was a time of massive social conflict.
	Vietnam, the civil rights movement, women's rights movements, Western journalism, very broadly and not academically speaking, turned into a battleground of ideologies, with journalists essentially becoming just activists with an institutionalized audience.
	So, again, no golden age here.
	And if we move up to the 80s and 90s, even though I haven't seen a single person so far arguing for a golden age of journalism in those two decades, if we move into the funky 80s and the EXTREME 90s, those two decades saw the rise of Rupert Murdoch and a never before seen level of monopolization across all media.
	And this monopolization makes even the early 20th century one look like a decentralized paradise.
	Signaling, in my opinion, one of the darkest periods of journalism so far.
	So where is the golden age of journalism?
	In about 500 years of history of journalism, starting with English journalism of the 15th and 16th century, over to French journalism of the 17th and 18th century, over to the press barons of the 18th and 19th century, the failures of the news in the 40s and 50s, and the abandonment of objectivity in the 60s and 70s, up until the mass monopolization of the 80s and 90s.
	In those 500 years, give or take, the golden age of journalism is nowhere to be found.
	The one thing that admittedly does kinda stick out so far is English and later on British journalism of the 18th and 19th century.
	But even then I wouldn't go as far as calling it a golden age of journalism.
	The notion of a golden age of journalism, in my opinion, appears to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of its history.
	So what does this mean for us?
	Contrary to the tone of this video, I still think that journalism provides a few really important services.
	And my personal distrust is not as much directed at the concept of journalism as individual journalists and news outlets.
	Although put it simply, the institutional idea is a good one.
	The people inside of it, not so much it appears.
	In addition to that, over the past few years we've seen a trend that in my opinion is exceptionally positive.
	The rise of alternative decentralized journalism by the people for the people.
	But what exactly this new, usually digital form of journalism will bring in the future and what it already does today, that's a topic for another video.
	Wink, wink.
	Like, share, subscribe, buy me TikToks.
	So there you have it.
	A cursory superficial look into the concept of a golden age of journalism.
	At this point, also thank you to my dudes over at Patreon.
	Without you, I probably wouldn't be here.
	I can't stress enough how much I appreciate your enlightened alt-centrist support.
	And a double thank you goes to two of my patrons who still haven't told me how to call them.
	So I'll still have to use their cover names August and Gypsies.
	Gypsies, August, double thank you my dudes.
	I genuinely appreciate it.
	And that's it for today's video.
	I am Dr. Lehman, glad you tuned in.
	Sargon, you are a cock, but you are a magnificent cock.
	Thank you for having me.

▲