As journalists have grown more confident of their power and influence, if not
of their popularity, anthologies of reportage have appeared with increasing
frequency in recent decades. Robert Fox and the Folio Society have produced
the supersize version, a four-volume, 2,000-page compendium, which opens
with Herodotus on crocodiles and closes with a New York Times journalist
fretting about what his BlackBerry may be doing to his sanity.
It includes all the classics you would expect and a great deal more besides.
Fox is an enthusiast and not fussy about definitions. Most authors here were
eyewitnesses but he has included propaganda, confessions, kiss and tell (a
wry complaint by one of Wellington’s mistresses about the Iron Duke’s
crashingly dull conversation), history written long after the event, the odd
unreliable memoir, parental instruction, reportage disguised as fiction,
oratory and gossip. The first volume takes a thirty-page excursion into
Cretan archaeology, zooming forwards to the twentieth century with no
sterner purpose than to give us the deft and charming memoir by Dilys Powell
of the excavator of Knossos, Arthur Evans.
The reader too should zig-zag and dip. Fox is a little more interested in the
details of war than most of us and there are a handful of writers here who
belong in history’s footnotes. But the writing is allowed to speak for
itself without interference by the editor; links are plain and brief. The
best of these accounts take you straight into the room, the hospital, the
river, the panic-stricken retreat under fire. To last for centuries, the
eyewitness must withstand the cross-examination of historians. But the
taste, the smell, the noise must also still live when the words have long
been stripped from their original audience and context. The qualities needed
to pass these tests have not altered much: the ability to be vivid without
resorting to invention, an eye for telling detail, an instinct for a phrase
and prose like clear glass.
Walt Whitman’s accounts of the American Civil War contain passages of what
would now be called “Why Oh Why?” journalism. But as he comes to the
hospital cot of the young lieutenant from Chancellorsville, he stops emoting
and photographs the scene in a sentence. “Notice that water pail by the side
of the bed with a quantity of blood and bloody pieces of muslin, nearly
full; that tells the story.” Whitman, then working for a newspaper, belongs
to a minority in these volumes: the professional journalist. Only in the
fourth volume, covering the assassination of Tsar Alexander II to the
present day, do the professionals appear frequently. Only that volume’s very
last section, which opens with Robert Fisk on the massacre at Chatila and
John Simpson on Tiananmen Square, is called “The Age of the Reporters”.
But then the bloggers appear, writers of no training but natural talent,
positioned by chance to see events and parts of the world which the news
machines cannot reach. Fox never asks the question raised by his huge box of
witnesses: were the professionals any better than the amateurs? The answer
matters for the future as well as for the past. With the spread of digital
technology, anyone can now be their own publisher. In these new
circumstances, what defines journalism? What are journalists for? Many
bloggers and operators in new media have already answered the question by
declaring the “mainstream media” redundant.
They predict that newspapers will close, deprived of advertising income and
young readers, both migrating to the internet. The power of the separate
priesthood of journalists, created because newspapers were capital-intensive
businesses only a few could own and because governments wanted tame
journalism, evaporates. “Citizen journalists”, enjoying instant peer-to-peer
communication, storm the ramparts of the decaying old media regime. Was the
age of the reporters just a passing final phase in Fox’s 2,500-year survey?
Nothing will be that simple; but the upheavals will continue. Three quite
different shifts are under way. The advertising income which grew and
sustained the media systems of Europe and America in the second half of the
twentieth century has shrunk and will reduce still further. Not all the
newspapers and television channels that lived on that income will survive.
At the same time, people feel they have less time to read newspapers; they
felt this just as papers grew larger and larger on the advertising booms of
the 1980s and 90s. Young people are not acquiring the newspaper-reading
habit and are watching less news and current affairs on television.
Newspapers are in a double bind: with falling traditional income and little
from new media, they can only hope that their digital income will improve.
These pressures have not significantly reduced the number of newspaper
titles yet, but they have hollowed out many newsrooms. Less money is
available to be spent on ambitious journalism. Newspapers will not vanish,
but there will be fewer of them and they will be increasingly the preferred
medium of older people.
Secondly, the public “record” has changed shape. Regular cycles of printed
publication meant that there might have been many competing versions of the
truth, but there was a stable, permanent record of each one. Every author in
Eyewitness to History was frozen in print, whether the first version was in
cuneiform or on a computer. But much reporting does not now have this
stability. The record of what happened now becomes more malleable than it
was, more provisional and more open to correction and enrichment by many
sources. That can produce powerful reporting: bloggers write what will
remain for a long time some of the best records of daily life now in, say,
China or Iran. But the very porousness and openness leaves digital
publishing very open to abuse given the scale, anonymity and anarchy of the
web. What we know of the world has become a mixture of the fixed and printed
and the ever-updatable, ever-evolving record.
Third and last, attitudes to journalists have moved in two divergent ways. As
broadcast journalists (and a few “pencils”) have become highly paid
celebrities who can fill the room at a conference or literary festival,
bitter debate rages inside political elites about the media’s supposedly
malign influence on public life. In Britain alone in the past five years, a
cluster of worried, angry books have asked question-titles such as “Can you
trust the media?”. One contributor to the TLS recently savaged the
“illimitable prurience of British newspapers and their ruthless,
sanctimonious targeting of public figures”. The philosopher Onora O’Neill
said simply in her Reith Lectures in 2002: “The press has acquired
unaccountable power that others cannot match”.
Each of these changes has separate causes. Taken together they mean that
journalism is in trouble as an idea. Does this matter? The fourth estate
cannot, thank goodness, be managed, reformed or even considered as a
coherently organized profession. But journalists could think more clearly
than they do about how to improve the level of trust in their work. The case
for the professionals needs making all over again.
With humility. The term “journalism” has been in use for less than 200 years,
but over the past century the word has suffered from mission creep on a
grand scale. When printed newspapers became a mass medium, reliable news was
hard to come by. Modern communications and affluence ensure that what was
once scarce is now in glut. As broadcasting gave audiences the first facts
of what had happened, newspapers appeared to survive the challenge but,
under the surface of apparent continuity, changed entirely. They shifted
away from dependence on news and spread into explanation, analysis, opinion
and, up to a point, investigative journalism.
There were good reasons for this shift, and Fox’s last volume offers powerful
examples. Journalists could not abolish the working conditions in the rubber
trade in the Belgian Congo, but they could make clear what they were. News
in this case consists of what someone does not want everyone to know. Even
when journalism was not a shocking revelation, its twentieth-century
practitioners became more interested in cause and effect, in why things were
happening. Many journalists did not approve.
Walter Lippmann was the first of many who tried to decouple news reporting
from the pursuit of wider truth. “The function of news is to signalize an
event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set
them in relation with each other and make a picture of reality on which men
can act.” The strict separation of news and comment proved too artificial.
Explanation, which required the risk and skill of judgement being applied,
needed to be built into reporting. What Lippmann’s definition usefully
underlines is the selection involved in drawing the picture in words. The
reader must trust the draughtsman’s choice.
Many media critics believe that the elision of fact and comment commits the
original sin and explains what has gone wrong. But newspapers and,
increasingly, broadcasters have added a third function to journalism.
Serious journalism contains information (news) and sense-making (context,
explanation and, crucially, selection). To these tasks, reporters – and not
just columnists – have added the job of telling us whether something is
acceptable or not. Analysis must have a moral edge.
If reporters are practising what Martin Bell calls “a journalism that cares as
well as knows”, that goes further than sense-making. Bell may be sparing in
his caring but not all his imitators are. What offends many readers, viewers
and listeners is the extent to which moral judgement has become routine.
Scorn has become a mannerism. The writers collected by Fox voice many
emotions, but they are striking for not indulging much in caring or
contempt. Editors who have converged to follow this trend are confessing
that good reporting and editing are not enough to hold fickle readers and
viewers. But if they keep their nerve, they may find that these old skills
remain in demand. We abbreviate into the word “editor” layers of quality
control, text editing, checking, design, agenda-setting, selection and
creation of an editorial personality. Many digerati believe that digital
communications, with no space constraint and no publication cycle, leave no
gate-keeping role for editors. A brief glance at the world’s most successful
news publishers on the internet will reveal that this is not so. Editing
skills are exercised differently there and must adapt, for they are badly
needed in digital media. The need to make material compelling and to instil
trust does not disappear because the means of transmission has modernized.
With vastly more material available for consumption than ever before, the
ability to select and distil may come to be more valued than ever.
The idea and ideal of journalism has been smudged and blurred by worries about
economics and the means of delivery. The vehicles for reporting have to
adapt. The rivalry between print and the screen may evaporate as screens
become thinner, more flexible and more portable. The traditional bundle that
is the newspaper, magazine or news bulletin may morph into many different
versions. But digital communications have not damaged language or its power.
On the contrary, screens and keyboards have allowed words to be produced and
consumed more widely and in greater quantities than ever before. Amateurs
and professional witnesses to events may compete, but together they enrich
the written record. Perhaps Eyewitness to History stops at the dawn of a
golden age of writing.
Robert Fox
EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY
Four volumes, 2,032pp. Folio Society. £120.
www.foliosociety.com
George Brock is International Editor of The Times and was President of
the World Editors’ Forum 2004–08.
