Now that most of the dust has settled since the initial big bang release of Wikileaks material it is useful to reconsider how the traditional media responded to the phenomenon.
The print press and TV are actually deeply threatened by Wikileaks. Both media are under fundamental threat from the internet. Wikileaks further marginalises them.
Newspapers throughout the world are in trouble with declining readerships. Free to air and pay TV also struggle. This is not the place to delve into why that is the case. Having had recent experience with a national paper I can confirm that they are not within bull’s roar of understanding how to arrest the fundamental slide in print journalism. Greg Hywood at Fairfax seems to think that people want quality journalism. He’s wrong. There never was any quality journalism. The top minds have never gone into journalism in this country. Unlike the UK where there are cases of someone who got a first in classics at Cambridge and went into journalism, the sort of person who goes into journalism in Australia is way down the intellectual pecking order. Even if people want quality journalism (a proposition I fundamentally doubt) there aren’t the journalists to produce it.
Historically papers and TV have anointed people with expert status and have been the gatekeepers of opinion. They have in fact played the role of a massive intermediary or ticket clipper. They sit between the real players and pass judgement as the ball flies back and forth. While they are doing this the collect money from readers and advertisers. The internet strips them of that gatekeeper role. Martin Luther did the same to the Catholic Church during the Reformation. His anti ticket clipper argument was simple: why do you need those burnt out corrupt geezers in Rome to tell you what God says? You can have a direct dialogue with God yourself. The Vatican sent some papal knights round to sort him out.
It is the same with papers. They report on stuff and tell you what is important and trot out various people, including their own journalists, to provide you with various levels of self-interested “analysis”. However, nowadays technology allows any news event to be objectively recorded by anyone with a phone or digital camera and then the internet allows anyone (whether informed or misinformed) to make comment. You actually don’t need journalists for that.
What you need journalists for is to work hand in hand with politicians, business leaders and product providers to provider marketing stories of various kinds to sell product whether it be political spin or financial products. That is what journalism is really about – sales and marketing.
Wikileaks basically removes (“disintermediates” as the economists say) the press from the information process and they don’t like this. Once you throw information out there and let people make up their own mind without stage managing it in accordance with an agenda worked out by the backroom boys, the papers are fundamentally threatened. There is nothing more threatened than an already threatened species. The press is no different to the Vatican in the time of Luther.
Have a look at any newspaper. Is there anything amounting to a real insight into anything of importance? The Australian Financial Review wants you to pay $3 for its “insights” – like their non-prediction of the global financial crisis. Then there is the endless flatus written by political journalists. I could go on but this decrepit industry has the smell of irrelevance about it and I can’t be bothered wasting any further time on it. And that is what the market is saying when it comes to paper sales.
