Journalism’s role in shaping the way that we think

Is our generation the worst one yet? Or is the next going to get more violent and thus make it even more dangerous for our children? There’s been a spate of recent violence on the public transport system in Melbourne, particularly on the notorious “Frankston” line and the media has not been shy in reporting it. Sensational headlines, sporadic comments by ‘witnesses’ and the same story written in different ways for 3 or 4 days in a row.

Just 20 years ago the internet was in its infancy, an embryo compared to its evolved state today. Static text pages, the god-forbidden splash page and gecko browsers were it. You needed to be a trained expert in writing HTML and what little existed of CSS at the time to call yourself a web designer. Aesthetic sense or graphic design training was at the bottom of the list of required skills and your knowledge of spacer gifs (or shims as they were called) and your ability to create infinitely-nested tables were a sign of a good web designer. Clients came to you with a brief that essentially said “my business needs to be on the internet.” A web designer was programmer.

Over the years the role of the internet in our daily lives as well as the role of a web designer has undoubtedly changed. We see the traditional ‘web designer’ being split in to niche jobs – visual designer, front-end programmer, user experience specialist, back-end programmer, producer etc. The increasing importance of the internet and the rise of user-generated content has changed the playing field not only for businesses but individuals as well. The speed of worldwide communication and the reporting of news in particular is phenomenal, even by yesterday’s standards.

The ease of web-publishing these days seems to be fostering a growing trend suggesting that we, as a society, are getting bored with old content. If something hasn’t changed on a web page in a couple of days we question whether someone is even updating the site anymore. A twitter status of “about  3 days ago” probably means that person or business isn’t a serious tweeter – you question whether you should ‘follow’ or return to the site you just visited if these people are only updating once a week. You know you can get more up to date information somewhere else. The expectation about content delivery and our ability as a society to consume this information is, I believe, on an unsustainable curve. An individual simply can’t write quality content everyday. When I say quality content I mean the stuff that’s worth reading, that makes you think, that adds value to someone’s daily life.

Humans love to be informed, we thrive on the knowing and sharing of knowledge. “Did you hear about…” is often the opening line around a water cooler whether it’s about politics, sport or art. We feel pride if we’re the first one to know about a particular event and conversely feel ‘out of the loop’ if we haven’t heard something and someone (or several people) have. Media giants know this and so they feel, as journalists, they have a responsibility to keep us informed. With the overwhelming pressure on companies like Fairfax media to keep the stats for page hits, facebook ‘friends’and user readership up it seems they’ve adopted  the ‘more is more’ approach – the problem I see here is repetition. Reporting on the same stories in different ways is skewing our perspective on the relevance and importance of events in our daily lives.

Take train violence; where once a journalist had 24 hours to turn around an article, they can now have it in the public domain in minutes, even seconds if they’re in the right place at the right time. What does this mean for us as media consumers? We get to read the ‘in progress’ edit… for 3 days. It seems that there are 3 distinct approaches to publishing news articles on today’s commercial news websites.

Breaking news is important so the first article that seems to get published is the ‘We found out this just happened, we don’t know any details but we published it first’. This is the article with the sensational headline “Commuters left shaken by gang attack!” But when you click to read the whole article you get a couple of paragraphs (if you’re lucky) simply describing as many of the W’s (Who, What, Where, Why, How) – that the reporter has deemed valid information at that particular moment. Often there’s no witness statement, no police statement, no statement from Metro; for want of better words it’s simply a ‘tweet’. But, in the grand scheme of things, we associate this news publisher as one with it’s finger on the pulse so we’re likely to come back.

Once the website has established itself as bringing you ‘cutting edge’ news it can now relax for the afternoon and do some real journalism. Talk to witnesses and police, get statements and details about what *actually* happened – the stuff that used to make news News. So, 24 hours after the event there’s often a more traditional, in-depth news story published on the website about the events that actually unfolded, the headline is often downgraded to something a little less sensationalist “Commuters feared over safety” – because as it turns out there was no gang, not many commuters needed psychological help and the ‘attack’ involved someone throwing a bottle at a closed train carriage.

Once the real report is presented a follow-up is sometimes written which is based on comments that weren’t gathered as part of the original report due to poor reporting or perhaps it’s yet another chance to have a shot at the train operator “Metro has no regrets over train violence” or something to that effect tends to be the headline. It’s aim? To keep the story alive and to connect with readers on the common ground of negative social sentiment towards ‘Metro’.

What we end up with is, over the course of 4 days, the original, sensational and fear-invoking headline is constantly brought to our attention. It feels like 4 days of violence, not one isolated and rare act. If you were to find out that the actual statistics on violent attacks on the Melbourne public transport network were 33 in one million (as reported by The Age)  you would think that it would be of little concern to the tens of thousands that catch the train or bus or tram each day to and from work. But, research shows that violence on the train is of big concern to commuters. What I personally find funny is that the article that quotes these figures (written by the same company that wrote the 3 articles telling us how dangerous our trains are)  is written with a feeling of bafflement, like their readers are all a bit paranoid and that we should relax a bit more on our train ride home.

I don’t expect Fairfax to blame itself for the fear it instills in its readership, if it were my business, my bread on the table, I know I wouldn’t. But responsibility does need to lie somewhere and with the ability now for talented reporters and writers to publish and re-publish their ideas and research for information hungry consumers to devour in every minute of everyday I believe there needs to be some consideration taken by writers to assure the rest of society that violence probably hasn’t increased as much as we think in this new generation. The usual scapegoats of the entertainment industry – video games and violent films have always been around. In the 50’s rock’n’roll was considered to be propogated by Lucifer himself! The internet is of course the next thing to be scared of because of child pornography websites and complete lack of understanding about privacy and sharing personal information to strangers worldwide but perhaps the wolf in sheep’s clothing are our journalists and media companies – whether they know it yet or not.