Who should pay for public interest journalism? UK Culture secretary Nadine Dorries just announced that the BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027 to be replaced by - it is not clear what but maybe a subscription model. In Scotland, my Union - the National Union of Journalists - has been grappling with this question. The working group - which includes my esteemed colleagues Joyce McMillan and Rob Edwards - has turned in a report full of creative ideas and suggestions inside a year. Let’s hope it doesn’t languish in a filing cabinet at Bute House - this is a live issue and Scotland is a useful size and setting in which to try some out innovative approaches.
We certainly do need more public-interest journalism - and urgently. Yesterday I finished a book I got for Christmas. Not a jolly gift perhaps, but immensely readable: “The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends”, by Anne Applebaum. In a meditative essay on people that she partied with in the 90s whom she would now cross the street to avoid (including Boris Johnson), Anne draws a comparison between the digital revolution we are living through and other historic moments disrupted by communications technology - radio in the 1930s and the printing press in the 1480s.
The printing press spread bad ideas as well as good. One bad one was Malleus Maleficarum a witch-phobic tract published in 1486. Described by Wikipedia as “both propaganda and a manual for like-minded zealots,” the author Heinrich Kramer took full advantage of the printing press to disseminate his work which was hardly out of print for the next 200 years. The first wave of witch-burning swept Europe a few years after it hit the bookstands.
As Applebaum puts it: “All kinds of wonderful things flowed from the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century: mass literacy; the spread of reliable knowledge, the end of the Catholic Church's monopoly on information. But those same things also contributed to new divisions, to polarisation and political change. The new tech made it possible for ordinary people to read the Bible, a change that helped inspire the Protestant Reformation - and in turn many decades of bloody religious wars. Martyrs were hanged, churches and villages sacked in a furious, righteous maelstrom that subsided only with the Enlightenment and the broad acceptance of religious tolerance”.
Anne describes an upsurge in resentful anger which is turning her former friends to spittle-flecked conspiracy theorists looking for scapegoats, apologists for Trump, Orban and Brexit. She sees the same principle at work now as in the past - a rejection of the increasing complexity that came as a result of disruption - when people feel they have lost their old certainties, they want someone to blame. That is what she sees motivating many in the alt-right movement today, who whip themselves into a frenzy with fake news. She cites film footage supposedly showing Muslims celebrating the destruction of Notre Dame in France - it never happened, the footage was from another country and a different time, but it was shared millions of times on social media.
The BBC was founded in October, 1922. Its Reithian values may seem somewhat tarnished now but it was a star to steer by for many, as the lights went out across Europe in the 1930s.
I had never really considered the role of radio in the rise of Naziism so I had to do a bit of internet research. It didn’t take long to establish that it played a major role. In 1933, at the Berlin Radio Exhibition, the Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels,said “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.” At that event, the Nazis launched a cheap transmitter, the Volksempfänger. They went on to cover Germany with masts and exempt swathes of the population from subscription fees.
From that point, German radio pumped out propaganda aimed primarily at uneducated people. One strand was endless reports or rallies, demonstrations, events which all supposedly showed the tremendous popularity of the Fuhrer. The other was fake news, blaming Germany’s economic collapse on a sinister conspiracy operated by Jews.
Back to the present day. Anne Applebaum darts here and there in her elegantly structured book, from Poland to the US, Hungary to the UK, where she is scathing about what she sees as the “racial undertones” of the Brexiters’ English nationalism, excluding non-whites as well as Scots and Northern Irish. Anne quotes a former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher who tells her “Oh Scotland will go, and we will carry on”. At a Spectator event, she finds British Conservative politicians partying with representatives of Orban’s Hungarian Government.
In Spain “In the run-up to the Spanish electoral season, I spent several hours in Madrid, some of them late at night in a restaurant (where else would it be in Spain)?) with a friend…He showed me a set of coloured network maps of the Spanish online conversation. The large squiggle in the middle was part of the “mainstream” conversation in which lots of people were interconnected. He also showed me three outlying, polarized conversations. These were separate echo chambers whose members were merely talking and listening to one another. One was the Catalan secessionist conversation, one was the far-left conversation and the other was the Vox conversation.”
The friend demonstrated that the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users on the Spanish internet, meaning bots, or else real people who post very frequently and probably professionally” was within these three communities. Nearly half were in the Vox bubble. They had pumped out nearly 4.5 million pro-Vox and anti-Islamist messages in the previous year.
In an Italian ballroom one evening in 2020, Anne attends an event where alt-right types from various Nationalist movements are attempting to make common cause and join forces. “Slowly, this half-hidden online world is acquiring a real-world face.”
The information wars are on again. The BBC is in a damaged state. The UK Government does not appear to respect the convention that the BBC should be independent and has made several political appointments to its board since 2016. After Dorries announcement, climate change campaigner and writer Gorge Monbiot tweeted: “I find it hard to support an organisation that sees me as an extremist. I find it hard to support an organisation that, to a large extent, created Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg. I find it hard to support an organisation that grovels before its enemies. Sorry.” Ouch. There are still a great many fantastic journalists working for the BBC but it seems that the “Overton window’ - the range of acceptable views to broadcast has been moving rightwards.
Most of the best quality impartial journalism available today is behind paywalls. The FT costs between £35 and £50 a month, for example. The Guardian is a rare exception, funded by donation and a trust, but to be parochial for a moment, it covers Scotland like a foreign country, with one or two correspondents who struggle for space and its reporting staff has been much reduced in recent years. There are very few top-quality publications which are free to read.
Against this background, public interest journalism, reliable, readable, entertaining writing that can perhaps cock a bit of a snook at the anger merchants and is free to consume seems important. It would be great to see one of the Working Group’s ideas - an independent Insitute supported by a mixture of public and private funds - producing some top quality public interest journalism, about Scottish and international affairs, free to read, in English and accessible to all.
I got this response from a reader…
Great piece- but might I add a comment. That while moveable type allowed for cheaper word books, that probably does not have , given rates of literacy, perhaps as much clout at the visuals of a wood cut in which the Pope is portrayed as the beast from the sea (Revelation 13). So there can be a pictorial "dumbing down"- is not that part of the social media wars in which a meme can be more effective as a means of mass communication than a TED talk or an online article?