Journalists Need to Get Out More

By Simon Kuper

Friday, March 04, 2016

When Spotlight won the Oscar for best picture, every print journalist cheered. But the celebration of brave Boston Globe reporters investigating paedophile priests flatters our dying industry. Most people distrust us and have stopped buying our products. Populists in particular, from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump, make a living out of insulting us.

Worse, they have a point. We are flummoxed by their rise, in large part because we rarely report from the places — mostly exurbs and poor provincial towns — where their voters live. Journalists in western countries (including me) tend to huddle in a few rich big cities, speaking to people like ourselves. No wonder the people we exclude are angry.

When a clever ruling class encounters popular anger, it knows what to do: change a little so that everything can stay the same. The classic case is 19th-century Britain: toffs avoided revolution and clung on to power by gradually letting more ordinary people vote. In today’s populist moment, the media — like every establishment group — need to change. Journalists should spread into the provinces and listen to ordinary people.

National media have probably always over-covered the metropolis. When I began reading British newspapers as a teenager in London, I assumed I was reading local London editions, because almost all the news was about London (north of the river). The first time I went somewhere else in Britain and bought a national newspaper, I realised: it is a London paper. It’s just called a national newspaper.

Until the early 21st century, western countries had strong local newspapers too, from the Boston Globe to the Yorkshire Evening Post. The provinces got covered.

Then the internet destroyed local papers. Even the Globe’s newsroom has shrunk, while its circulation has plummeted. Today, most remaining journalists live in metropolitan enclaves such as Brooklyn, north London and central Paris, and look like the elites they cover. “Elitist Britain”, the 2014 report of a government-appointed commission, found that 54 of the country’s “top 100 media professionals” attended private schools. Journalists, politicians, senior civil servants and business people meet as classmates, then marry each other or become neighbours.

Admittedly, we need lots of journalists in capital cities, because that’s where power is. However, there are now too many. The result is “inside the Beltway” reporting that fixates on Boris Johnson’s position on Brexit instead of venturing into the hinterland to see what voters think. It’s worse in France: Le Monde newspaper often reads like a Versailles palace gazette circa 1788, chronicling which courtiers are currently in favour. Here are three headlines from adjoining pages in the February 21 edition: “How Montebourg [former economics minister] is preparing his return”, “In the Republican Party, two departures that harm Nicolas Sarkozy”, and “François Hollande: I could be a candidate, I could not be a candidate.”

I’m a metropolitan animal, as guilty as my peers. It’s more agreeable interviewing someone in a five-star hotel lobby an easy subway ride from home than in a freezing community centre in some rundown small town. But the rundown small town is closer to the average national experience.

Once every four years, during the US primaries, the American media discover the heartland. Evan Osnos, covering the 2016 race for The New Yorker, marvels: “Twenty-four hours spent on the ground in South Dakota is worth about six weeks in your office in Washington.” He says you learn more listening to “all these people out there”.

The obvious solution is to station more journalists “out there”. That would save reporters the bother of dashing around the metropolis covering what the historian Daniel Boorstin called “manufactured pseudo-events”, such as lying press conferences that, anyway, are now streamed online. It would end the absurdity of having the American commentariat take the nation’s pulse from Brooklyn. It would show people “out there” that the media know they exist. Best of all, a journalist moving from an overpriced metropolis to the provinces will get the sort of de facto pay rise that’s now almost unheard of in our industry. (I’m still not volunteering.)

Sending educated young people to the countryside may sound like a Maoist re-education campaign but the media need a shake-up. Just 43 per cent of Europeans now trust the written press, reports the European Commission. Four in 10 Americans, an all-time low, have “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in mass media, say pollsters Gallup. Trump knows exactly what he is doing when he attacks journalists as well as politicians. Think of his misogynistic onslaught on Fox presenter Megyn Kelly, or his threat on Monday to change the laws “so that the press has to be honest”.

Every section of the western establishment now has to reach out to the downtrodden without simply aping Trumpist racism. Future political hopefuls might learn from Hillary Clinton’s travails and not get into bed with banks. Harvard might abolish tuition fees. Banks might accept a little more regulation. A big establishment push, and perhaps it won’t be 1789 again.