Book Excerpt: ‘Saving Journalism: The Rise, Demise And Survival Of The News’
(EXCERPT) Could the flourishing history of journalism provide clues for enabling it to flourish in future? Why is society’s watchdog, the press, with its long and often honorable pedigree, going feral? Failing to bark at misrepresentation and fraud, while snarling at truth?
Why does journalism have the privileged position it does? As commercialization collides with the greatest communication revolution since Gutenberg, why are both revenues and media ethics in meltdown?
If digital and now AI-produced media have “the most prodigious capability for spreading lies the world has ever seen” (Alan Rusbridger, Editor, The Guardian, U.K.), is it coincidence that readers turning away in the millions, globally?
Yes, news mongering there has always been! But responsible journalism has foundations that have been sadly neglected.
Why did journalism — the Fourth Estate epitomized by Edmund Burke — emerge first in Europe, even though China had printing nearly a thousand years earlier? That epic tale is not known to many people today, not even most journalists.
How far back do the origins of public discourse go? What was it about moral fervour, all the way back to the Hebrew people, that revolutionized not only Greek and Roman classical narrative, but also the understanding of values, character, personality, and indeed language itself? Should it surprise us that America’s first newspaper editor was a Christian preacher? What was the connection between Bible translation and public discourse, of which responsible journalism was the most brilliant — and indispensable — adjunct?
For some, a surprising tale, for others even an unpalatable one: Saving Journalism recounts it’s often heroic past — and, just possibly, may equip and inspire you to help win back its future.
The following is an excerpt from Jenny Taylor’s new book:
I set up Lapido Media from my dining room in 2005 with one unpaid American missionary assistant and no budget. By the time it closed down, in 2017, we had raised more than £1 million in charitable funds and individual donations, employed five staff, were read in Downing Street, and were networked around the world.
Lapido means to “speak up” in Acholi, the language of Northern Uganda.
I had somehow found the nerve to make a phone call to former Sunday Telegraph editor — and, latterly, columnist for the Independent — Dominic Lawson to launch it for us. To my surprise, I got through to him direct—and, even more surprising, he agreed to help, without a clue who I was. We launched at Vaughan Smith’s prestigious Frontline Club for foreign correspondents in Paddington. We called the event “Neutrality or Truth: Reporting Religion Post-7/7.”
It seemed to break the dam of reserve about how to write news in the tense aftermath of the London Underground bombings. Journalists were at that moment like rabbits in the headlights, unable to digest the recent catastrophic developments in terms of religiously motivated political violence. Multiculturalism was not supposed to be like this. Until this point, if all religions were the same, you were required to be “equal” about your coverage, which in fact meant not reporting the facts. Equality had wrongly come to mean “the same as.”
Did it mean treating the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as if he were hook-clawed fundamentalist Abu Hamza? Both had beards, both preached to their throngs, both could be apocalyptic.
Ludicrously, journalists honestly seemed not to know — and, if there were a difference, wasn’t it discriminatory and/or illegal to say so anyway? The event generated massive coverage in the national and international media, including half an hour on CNN’s Correspondents slot.
This was all vindication of my passionately held view that you could approach journalism from a perspective that took your own and others’ spirituality seriously, because it produced better stories. Real journalists do “get religion”, and they were often far more interested and sympathetic in private to what I was doing than people generally imagine.
It was no surprise to me then that I had an easier ride with journalists than with the Church, which — like any organization — tries to control the narrative when and where it involves them.
The rise of the free press and the “civil ideal” of the news is a story that needs fully retrieving for our time, but that has not been my task.
What I’ve tried to do is tease out those key moments when religion and the desire for freedom coalesced as a fiercer than normal passion to communicate truth — and then to show what happens when that passion loses its roots.
In reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, the Guardian journalist Nicholas Lezard’s view was transformed. “Its basic principle — that the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society — is, when you think about it, mind-bending.” Indeed.
Journalism was its seed — and, if the seed seems to have died for a season, is it not time to work for it to bear fruit again?
This excerpt is courtesy of Pippa Rann Books & Media. You can purchase the book here.
Dr. Jenny Taylor is a journalist, writer and researcher in religion. Her doctorate in the study of religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies focused on the impact of Islam on British governance.