Journalism and Social Media

Journalism, often regarded as the 4th Estate, has been greatly affected by social media.  However, despite there being a number of technological determinists who believe that the internet and social media will save journalism, those who study the theory of political economy are far less sanguine. 

Journalism is currently subject to a number of pressures.  The most severe of these are political and economic, with journalists being paid very little and journalists having very little time due to staff cuts and increased workload.

As news has become corporatized, news corporations have made every effort to minimize costs and maximise profit (the Mini-Max approach) and this has meant that assignments and investigations that are long-winded and costly are no longer undertaken.

To step into this gap, governments and corporations assemble press releases that are ready for time-poor journalists to cut and paste into newspaper articles.  Unfortunately it appears that journalists are often too hard pressed to fact check these press releases, and as such a constant stream of unchecked PR flows straight into the mainstream media.  This does not just happen in ‘low quality’ tabloid newspapers, but also in the supposedly ‘higher class’ broadsheets.

It also seems the case that there is less room on news desks for reporters who have specialised knowledge of a subject.  As such, reports on complex issues such as science or economics are often over-simplified or sometimes factually incorrect.  With no knowledge within the news desk to spot and correct such issues, unless knowledgeable readers spot errors and a correction is issued, mis-information is fed into the public domain and never corrected.  This leads the public to be slightly less well-informed than they were previously.  Especially now the internet means that articles are archived and available almost permanently.

There have been efforts to blame the current state of news on lazy journalists.  However, this has been likened to blaming production line workers for the design of the cars that roll off the production line.  

Political Economists such as Chomsky argue that the hierarchical nature of the status quo, whereby news corporations have their own agendas that are often set by pragmatic business decision-making requirements and political pressures will determine which stories the journalists are permitted to focus on and publish.

As such, far from its traditional image of lengthy investigations taking journalists out of the office, modern journalism is a desk bound job, that has been significantly de-skilled.

The way in which the internet and social media has assisted journalism is in the availability of user generated content.  It is not possible for journalists to predict where a news event may occur, but with the advent of video-capable mobile phones, it is possible for public ‘on the ground’ at an event to submit footage to mainstream news channels and have their footage assimilated into professional broadcasts.  This has proven hugely useful for existing media conglomerates, as they gain key footage at no cost, but still retain control of the news agenda.  

Sadly, it has not proven the case that the media has been revolutionised by the internet however.  In large part, this is because individuals have built up trust relationships with existing networks, and still visit (for example) the BBC or CNN website for their news, rather than selecting a new, less established news source.