Dirty Trench-coat, Battered Trilby, Burning Sense of Public Duty...?

A piece by Peter Preston in last Sunday's Observer on the abominable, no-winners lockout (or strike, if you're management) at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation seemed to suggest that journalists were failing in their public duty by, for example, not covering (how, if there's a lockout?) the Miami New Orleans (mistakes get self-perpetuating) flood. Or fuck-up. Or let's just call it the Miami Fluck-Up, shall we? [EDIT: Or how about The New Orleans Fluck-up. I think my brain-keyboard circuits got fried and I am going to sue Randy Newman for getting that damned Miami song stuck in my head).

Preston wrote:

Who needs to be back to work while New Orleans sinks into the ooze? Someone else will cover it.

which mightily offended Toronto-based TV produced Robin Rowland, and not surprisingly. But there are two things worth picking up here.

First, Preston – one of Britain's most respected liberal/left journalists, editor of The Guardian for twenty years and a man who has regularly put his neck on the block for, in the broadest sense, public accountability and public decency – is using the Fireman Argument against CBC journalists. That's to say, that journalism is such an important part of the polity that journalists should shrink from industrial action.

Preston clearly still believes in the "higher purpose" of journalism: the public duty of the Press as the Fourth Estate, without which the other three estates – Monarch and Parliament, Church and Army – would go about their daily business of exploiting and lying to the people. And there is a part of the Press which goes along with him. The problem is that the rest of the Press are now as collusive in, and as guilty of, exploiting and lying to the the people as government, opposition and religious "leaders". (The Army doesn't lie. The Army just does what it's told and keeps its mouth shut in public.)

The argument gets clouded because of what seems to be a failure of language. We use "the Press" or "the media" across the board, for the good guys as well as the pure-finders [1], and so arguments about the subject either need to be repeatedly qualified or offer too much scope for ambiguity. Eventually, like "men" in extreme feminist discourse of the 1980s, the words take on their negative connotation almost exclusively, on the sound Darwinian principle that violence will almost always defeat pacifism. (I spend much of my time in journalism and the words "Press" and "media", even to me, carry the second-order signification of a cynical wet-lipped sleazebag destitute of moral sensibility, of a narrow-eyed and decontextualised opportunist.)

The Canadian public, argues Preston, don't particularly care about the CBC. If it dies, they won't really notice; just click onto one of the other 3,791 channels and carry on. The same might be said of the BBC. And in both cases, it would be correct. People wiil just carry on. But the culture – not the "high" culture or the "low" culture or even the "mass" culture, simply the culture – will be diminished, not by being vulgarised, but by being commodified, reified and, worst of all, homogenised. Statistics will be substituted for judgement: the inevitable effect of the current delusion that the only valid paradigm for human activity is that of business operating in the marketplace.

But the paradigm enacts its own tautology. If the market wants a market paradigm, a market paradigm is what it will get; try and go against it and the market will simply expel you.

The question, then, can only be really asked in Yiddish. The question is: Nu?

The other interesting thing about the Ooze Affair is the speed with which Peter Preston responded to Rowland's complaint. Not because his reputation was suffering; not because Rowland had power over Preston; not because spin-doctors told him to; but because his attitude to his profession required it. And that is something all four estates, and everyone else, can learn from.

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[1] People who collected dog-shit to sell. (Tanneries bought it to treat animal-skins.)

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