“…most prevalent media bias is the bias in favour of news”

There’s a temptation to panic when, like most key players in the newspaper business, profits start heading through the floor. I’m not saying that that is what the Sunday Times did to the UK government yesterday because I’ve not read the rest of the piece.

But as I noted on Friday, beyond certain magazines like The Economist (which is actually having a good #Covid19 war) the press generally is struggling to report a complex, dynamic (and largely at this stage unfathomable) situation.

In Conservative Home David Gaulke makes an important observation of the news industry (and not only in the UK):

“…the most prevalent media bias is the bias in favour of news. Something new must be happening. Restrictions should be tightened. Or…relaxed. They certainly shouldn’t just stay the same, because that wouldn’t be news. And the nation demands news.”

Except, that it probably doesn’t. Or, I should say, it doesn’t right now. One of my older kids is a nurse who (unlike her old da) has very little time for politics or the media, now listens (unlike her old da) religiously to the government press briefings.

Each day she hears desperate journalists for clear answers to the same questions spokesmen couldn’t answer the day before. This is stenography as journalism, which is not intended to inform but to enrage by selling our own stereotypes back to us.

Or as Terry Pratchett once said, “what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.” Anyhoo, here’s the government’s ‘fisking’ response to the accusations in the Sunday Times’ article…

Response to Sunday Times Insight article

“Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs” by Foreign and Commonwealth Office is licensed under CC BY

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty