In a dangerous era journalism needs to show some backbone again

The National

03-07-2025

Having spent almost my entire working life in journalism, it's almost a given then that at some point during a break, I reflect on the nature of the job and profession that has engaged me for the best part of 40 years.
Two things added to that sense of questioning journalism's meaning during my brief time off. The first was my choice of holiday reading, a memoir of Graydon Carter the one-time editor of Vanity Fair magazine aptly titled When The Going Was Good, and the other was the death earlier this week of the great foreign correspondent, author and ITN news presenter Sandy Gall, with whom a certain generation of readers will no doubt be familiar.
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It was Gall himself who in great part inspired my own initial reporting sorties in Afghanistan back in the early 80s when I first met him and before the country and its travails became a near obsession for the both of us.
Both Carter and Gall were journalists of what some might call the 'golden age' of reporting in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It was a time when budgets were high, as were the expectations of readers and viewers of the journalists they depended on to cover and explain the great stories of the time.
Journalism back then seemed to have a clear sense of purpose in holding power to account with a laser-like probing power. No story was too far away. No person was exempt from scrutiny should they cross the line of acceptable political behaviour. Be it Watergate or war reporting, the journalists' beat knew few limits.
It was a time too before 'fake news', a time also before journalists became targets – literally – for doing their job, or so it seems when looking back.
The reality of course is slightly different, for such threats have in fact always posed a challenge to the media going about their work, just perhaps not to the extent they do now.
Which brings me to the dire state of so much of today's journalism, for what a contrast there is between those times when Carter and Gall were in their heyday compared to the media landscape of today.
For barring a few brave and notable exceptions, so much of our media landscape now seems inhabited by quislings and cowards. With hand on heart, I can say I've never at one and the same time been so ashamed and also so proud of some of my media colleagues. No story epitomises this right now more than events in Gaza and the Middle East.
On the one side we have journalists seemingly paralysed by fear of asking the questions that need to be asked of our politicians and on the other, the resounding bravery of our Palestinian colleagues who pursue their reporting with a courage the like of which has rarely been matched by the global media in modern times.
In such a climate, the likes of the BBC hides behind words like 'the perception of partiality,' in justifying its decision not to air the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, leaving it to Channel 4 to pick up.
But leaving Gaza aside, there is a much deeper malaise in journalism right now. Some of it is a result of the media's own making. Lack of investment, a dearth of imagination whereby the easy option rather than the 'difficult-to-tell-story' is the order of the day.
Then there are the shortcomings too when it comes to maximising the potential use of new formats and platforms.
Producing quality and in some cases great journalism, as the days of Carter, Gall and their generation showed, was never cheap, and the age-old maxim that you pay for what you get is something the industry singularly fails to recognise today.
But putting these internal inadequacies aside for a moment, there is another far more potent force undermining today's journalism.
I'm speaking of course about the way prominent politicians the world over are directly attacking 'troublesome' journalists with threats, lawsuits, or worse.
As Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, pointed out last year, many of these politicians are pressuring media companies to remove their work.
'They belittle and vilify individual reporters when it suits them, often singling out women and minorities. They encourage their supporters to distrust the news and sometimes incite them to attack journalists,' Nielsen rightly observed.
Across the world – everywhere you look right now – a growing number of governments and political authorities are not fulfilling their role as guarantors of the best possible environment for journalism.
Intimidation and censorship are today almost at unprecedented levels. Any thinking person too will recognise that at their worst, political threats to journalism are often part of wider, systematic, sustained efforts to weaken, undermine, or even dismantle the formal and informal institutions of democracy.
As outright political hostility to journalism grows, so the media needs allies and support from other quarters. As Professor Nielsen says, this effectively means the public that the media aim and claim to serve.
'At its best journalism has much to offer the public,' Nielen attests, and he's right. That much was evident back 'when the going was good', in those days that Graydon Carter refers to and when journalism served the public.
For that to happen again today two things especially are needed amongst others. The first is that public support must again be won over to deter political attacks and at least help build resilience to resist attempts to undermine independent news media.
The second is that journalism today has to find and show some spine again. In a dangerous era for the media, it must stop playing the role of political quisling. Instead, it should again aspire to be brave, dogged, resolute, and not shirk from calling out those deserving of it.