The future of the media

An interesting paradox, it seems to me, about the “serious” media. Like newspapers.

I have the feeling they’re going away. Who wants a chunk of dead tree that costs money? And contains content selected for you by someone else? Who wants to pay to read opinions in a paper when you can find better argued opinions on the web? The Indy actually prints “selected tweets” for us! Like we can’t find them ourselves? And TV? Who wants to pay to watch a “broadcast” at a time they can’t choose, of something they can’t interact with? If I was short of cash, my TV license would be the first thing to go. I’m not sure I can remember the last time I watched it – maybe a few weeks ago? Oh, wait, it was the world cup :-(

TV seems to have descended to two things: live broadcast of sport, which some people are willing to pay for, fair enough, and in this case, it makes sense that the customer can’t choose the time. And soap and “reality TV”, the great oxymoron. I can’t imagine that newspapers or “serious” TV have any future in the world of the web.

Yet at the same time, the media seem to have tremendous power. They define “the agenda”. In the Independent this morning: an extract from the private diary of the immigration minister under the previous government, and how he found that the media simply defined “what the question was” and would not report the government’s point of view. (Not just that they disagreed with it, but that they wouldn’t even present what it was). The private thoughts of a very senior minister, in charge of probably the second highest question on the agenda at the election, and his main concern was not how to solve the actual problem, but frustration that the electorate were being fed a filtered and constructed picture by the media.

I do find it extremely offensive that the papers and the “serious” radio and TV (Paxman, Today, PM programme, etc) try to tell me what the issues are I should be concerned about. Here’s me wondering how we cut carbon emissions, how we fund old age when we’re living so much longer, and what the real purpose of education is in our society, and the papers are telling me today I’m supposed to be really up in arms about “non-dom peers”. Eh?

Similar points in the minister’s diary about the expenses scandal: he was not found to have done anything wrong, but had to repay money because of a retrospective rules change (this is his version). The media would not acknowledge that this category existed: you had to be either a saint or a duck-house owning trough-snouter. My own impression was that the media wanted it to be about wickedness, as always. A story saying “actually the system was just set up wrong and badly administered” wasn’t exciting enough for them. They told the story they wanted to tell, and any MP who argued with them, they just labelled as one of the bad guys.

It’s also true, of course, that the Westminster crowd are equally cut off from reality in their bubble. That came out in spades when Gordo labelled someone a bigot for having views that a majority of the electorate agree with. I remember hearing one of the MPs wives saying on the radio that it was outrageous that she could lose her job as her husband’s PA, when she hadn’t personally done anything wrong. Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.

How to reconcile my ideas of the media as on the one hand, having so much power that they effectively steer the result of the election, and on the other hand as being a dying institution, I don’t know.

But I strongly advise you not to take seriously what you read in the papers. It’s a construct, a virtual reality that bears little relationship to anything. Think of it as a cartoon strip.