In everyday journalism there is a practice so regular, so little questioned that it can almost be called a default mode. To witnessing and sense-making, many journalists add a third element: telling us whether something is morally acceptable or not.
Usually it isn't.
This is what Martin Bell calls reporting that "cares as well as knows". Martin Bell may be sparing and knowledgeable in his caring but others aren't so careful. Indignation is now a routine commodity in news. Reporting without the judgement and selection involved in sense-making achieves little. But the style and posture into which much reporting has slipped goes further – a mission creep on a grand scale into quite different territory.
We need to go back to Paul Dacre's speech to the Society of Editors in 2008 to find the manifesto for moral outrage. The Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday was complaining about the decisions of Mr Jutsice Eady in the case the News of the World lost against Max Moseley, who, the paper claimed, had been taking part in "sick Nazi orgies".
"Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour," Dacre argued. "If readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such numbers."
He then gave the game away:
"If mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations, with obvious worrying implications for the democratic process."
This is grotesque and self-deluding arrogance. The point here is not the narrow legal issues of defamation and privacy on which the Mosley case turned, but the effect of this stance on journalists. There are those in society entitled to defend moral standards, but encouraging journalists to see themselves as moral referees has not helped to create or sustain trust in the profession.
Beginning perhaps with Watergate, a number of developments in journalism have contributed to the inflation of its mission. Whatever the causes, the result has been an epidemic of attitude masquerading as analysis, emotion trumping reasoning from the facts. I didn't agree with all of the "feral beasts" speech that Tony Blair made just before leaving Downing Street, but I winced when he said of today's media: "attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement." Have I been guilty of that? I'm sure I have.
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
