Investigamative Journamalism
A much shorter post than yesterday’s, this one.
Some people may have been following the story of Ian Tomlinson, the man who died while caught up in the violence at the G20 protests last week. Back Towards the Locus has probably the best summary of what we know about what happened, derived as it is from that old fashioned technique of relying on reports from the scene, eyewitnesses and corroborating evidence.
In the meantime, the Dead Tree Media covered the full range from wanton exaggeration to making shit up to reading stuff other people had made up and expressing faux outrage.
It’s possible to laugh this kind of nonsense off sometimes, like when The Sun gets caught with its pants round its ankles for believing any old alarmist cobblers about Islamic terrorists in the UK rather than investigating whether their sole source for a front page story was, in fact, making it all up. In this case though it seems that there are some rather more serious and pernicious issues at hand than good old fashioned tabloid racism. Rather than suddenly collapsing and then being helped by police who suffered bravely under an onslaught of bottles and imaginary bricks, it turns out that various witnesses are claiming the man - who seems to have been on his way home and had nothing to do with the protests - was first attacked by police and then helped by protesters when he collapsed for the second time.
Couple this with reports from the “climate camp” sub-protest, which range from police being free and easy with the laws applying to themselves to deliberately covering their ID numbers during clashes and you have a rather problematic indictment of the vast majority of the right wing press in this country (which is more-or-less all of it). It’s not that the police are always and forever the bad guys, but rather it is the case that the role of the press should be to offer us mere mortals some protection against the excesses of the state by shining a light onto its behaviour. If, through complicity or simple incompetence, the media presents the standard authoritarian narratives that the crusties deserved to get beaten like animals, it is an abdication of the trust the fourth estate holds. It has got to the stage where we might as well not bother with private ownership of some newspapers, because no reporting gets done between the official press release and publication of the paper itself, unless there’s a chance someone got their tits out during the story.
With jobs vanishing and wages frozen, it’s hardly the fault of individual journalists that they can’t be everywhere or see everything. Rather what we’re seeing is a continuation of a trend where newspaper owners try and squeeze 20% profit margins out of companies not designed for that level of return, and in doing so continually gut the industry they own of anything that would continue to justify its existence. The expansion of independent reporting in independent, online venues isn’t at a stage yet where it can replace the traditional media’s reach. We are thus left with a very troubling gap in government accountability which nobody seems able to fill. Interesting times.
