Journalism in Crisis 09: Media in crisis faces five recurrent problems, says professor

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A new set of public interventions, adapted to meet the individual contexts of each country, are needed to remedy recurrent flaws in American and European journalism, Professor James Curran outlined in the first keynote speech of the two-day Journalism in Crisis conference .

Speaking to an audience of students, media professionals and academics at the Westminster University event in association with British Journalism Review, Curran, professor of communications at Goldsmiths University of London said that the net addressed some elements, but not all the weaknesses of modern journalism.

Making distinctions between the way that US and UK news operations work in terms of news culture and public funding and regulation, he identified a 'crisis in media reformism' with five recurrent problems, summarised below:

• Artificial additives injected into journalism to boost circulation and popularity of news: Curran looked at the Sun's handling of the MMR scare, as a particular example of this.

• The unrepresentative nature of commercial media: wealthy shareholders, and senior journalists who tend to be more affluent than their audiences, with a more prevalent trend of conservatism, than in the general population.

• The 'cosy' relationships between media publishers and interested parties: Curran used the example of the New York Times' - which he called the 'finest English language newspaper in the world' - failure to identify problems in the US government's handling of the Iraq war.

• The 'economies of scale and scope' which distort the 'functioning of democracy': for example, he said, Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister and media owner, was able to head a 'plastic party' after the failure to safeguard impartiality and balance.

• The UK media's focus on national and local news, with less interest in international news: a situation which has being going on for a long time, Curran said.

Examining each of these five problems in the context of the web, Curran said he is not convinced greater online participation would solve them - though he did highlight particular areas of success, for example, the investigative efforts of the Politico news site.

"It would appear that the web is not a self-correcting mechanism," he said. But, he added more optimistically, there was a new 'feedback loop' in place for journalism, not available before the internet.

More coverage of Journalism in Crisis 2009 to follow from Journalism.co.uk. Follow @journalism_live on Twitter. A livestream can be viewed at this link .