LONDON LETTER: Last bastion of proper journalism is community press

ONE of the perks of not being involved in the UK media anymore is that I no longer feel guilty when I switch off the 24-hour news channels.

It certainly wasn’t always like that. In fact, when 24-hour global news kicked off in 1980 with Ted Turner starting CNN, as a news junkie I thought this was more momentous than the invention of the Gutenberg Press 540 years beforehand.

I have now done a complete flip-flop.

To me, still speaking as a news person, round-the-clock bulletins actually do more to muddle facts than report them.

Okay, that’s quite a big claim. But as far as I am concerned, the last bastion of proper journalism is the community press – such as the newspaper you are currently reading.

I have written about this before: community reporters are the last of the breed who actually go out and meet the people they report on.

However, it’s a big leap to compare a bi-weekly community newspaper to the tsunami of daily content spewed out by Sky, BBC and CNN, so I’ll try and explain why.

The core problem with 24-hour global news is that you actually run out of real news. Not that nothing is happening, but you have continuously to find something happening that appeals to your target audience.

For example, the state of goat mange in Waziristan may be of intense interest to a Pashtun farmer, but less so to a hipster in London.

Much ado about nothing

This results in endless and meaningless updates of the same story and classic non-journalism.

The most recent non-story is the release of the so-called Panama Papers where David Cameron is accused of profiting from a legal hedge fund in Ireland, which he declared on his tax return.

There must have been a miscommunication somewhere along the line as the BBC ‘mistakenly’ got hold of some tax lawyer whom they though would gleefully put the knife in.

It didn’t work. Instead the tax expert said this: ‘The true headline to your story should be ‘Man makes moderate profit from mundane investment and says so on tax form’.’

The horrified look on the face of the BBC anchor who was expecting blood on the sand was an absolute gem. She hastily cut the interview short.

There was another one about Cameron’s wife Samantha being entitled to a £53 000 tax allowance on clothing while her husband cruelly slashed disability subsidies.

With 24-hour news you would think they would have had time to get both sides of this story. I mean, even the thickest politician knows there are zero votes in penalizing the disabled.

Instead, the flip side of the coin could have been that one of the more common forms of ‘disability’ in the UK is ordinary backache – something you or I would probably take a couple of Ibuprofen for. That, rather than genuine sufferers, was the aim of the ‘cruel slashes’.

I don’t think 24-hour news works that well even for breaking events. I switched onto Sky for updates on the recent terror attacks in Belgium and after about an hour I could recite verbatim what the anchor was going to say next.

Repetitive

Indeed, for the rest of the day, all 24-hour news consisted of was reruns and hauling in yet another witness who didn’t see much or a gormless politician denouncing the attacks.

I soon switched off. I don’t need countless condemnations of terror attacks. I want to know what is being done to prevent future ones.

So if you are a news junkie, it’s better to wait for the standard bulletins and get a full update. Or better still, read the live blogs on newspapers which consist of pithy and fresh one-liners saying exactly what’s breaking without wading through replays.

Finally, because it’s a voracious monster feeding on a non-stop cycle, 24-hours news has to hype stories up.

That’s why you get self-important commentators giving views on stuff few people care about and politicians reacting to stuff nobody cares about.

So take my advice (may as well, no one else does) and go back to roots reporting.

Such as the paper you are now reading.