This Media Tribe Disfigures Public Life

A recent speech, The Media: Public Interest and Common Good: lecture delivered at Lambeth Palace by The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have pissed off a few people. The speech was a sweeping criticism, leveled at television, newspapers, even the internet.

Ironically, the Archbishops ideas are available on the internet in full text, as a kind of electronic encyclical, so that his words can be read by a much larger group of people than the original audience of the speech. This is ironic because the media seems to have been offended by the Archbishops criticism. This brings to mind the silly old adage: any press is good press.

And some of it is good press, by which I mean that the speech contains some very good ideas. This is contrary to what the reaction to the speech would tell you. The Archbishop said

We need to deflate some of the rhetoric about the media as guardians and nurturers of democracy simply by virtue of the constant exposure of ‘information’ and we need to be cautious about a use of ‘public interest’ language that ignores the complexity and, often, artificiality of our ideas of ‘the public’.

The main idea in the speech is not an offensive one. The Archbishop criticized the fact that the Media is “Implicitly defining public interest as a right to know any kind of information that is being withheld” which feeds a culture of fear and mistrust.
The fact that the media used a wounded approach inits coverage of the speech only confirms, in my mind, what the Archbishop said: journalism as a profession largely exists to surprise. Check out this headline from The Guardian: Archbishop attacks ‘lethal’ media

I honestly think that the word attack there is misleading. I think that the newspapers response to the article supports the main ideas of the speech. You can see for yourself. Read the speech, and then read the article, and see for yourself.

Of course, people on the internet had their own, immediate response to the Archbishops criticism. Grumpy Old Bookman says:

The speech claimed that the atmosphere on the world-wide web was a free-for-all that was ‘close to that of an unpoliced conversation.’Well, you’re damn right there, Archie. An unpoliced conversation is exactly what it is. And long may it remain so. If and when those of us who blog want any controls imposed on us by the Archbishop of Canterbury, his holiness the Pope, or any one of a thousand Ayatollahs, we will ask for them. In the meantime, holding your breath would be injurious to your health.

Grumpy Old Bookman is a bit too grumpy in response, I think. Any orthodoxy, any church of any sort is going to be opposed to an unpoliced conversation After all, what is orthodoxy, what is church, if not a policed conversation? What is an Archbishop but a chief of religion police? Thats his job, and for centuries it has been a good job.

I do wish the Archbishop had used the word uninformed instead of the word unpoliced, but I get where he’s coming from, as much as I myself do not wish to be policed in my conversation.

The Archbishop himself was quick to criticize

the fact that certain people have decided what’s good for you to know…what needs to be challenged is such people’s right to decide for others.

This doesnt strike me as the kind of rhetoric that you�d get from an ardent policer of conversation. What�s going on here? What does he really mean by criticizing an unpoliced conversation?

This is the Archbishops real criticism of electronic media. I think he makes an important point here:

The question that seems to pose itself is whether a balance can be struck between the professionalism of the classical media and the relative free-for-all of online communication. Onora O’Neil spoke about ‘assessable communication’ as the ideal. This means incorporating into what is communicated some of the material you might need to judge its reliability: ’showing your workings’, distinguishing more sharply between report and comment, allowing some ways of evaluating reported reactions to something (is this from a person or body who represents anything serious? �).

I couldn’t help think of the “Grumpy” bloggers out there when I got to the part of the speech that asked of internet commentary: “Is this comment there simply because it is obligatory to have at least one really hostile voice, never mind its credibility?”
In my experience, Protestant Americans in particular have trouble with this one: that in some sense it might be crucial to our survival as a humane race that we participate in policed conversations. In what sense is it crucial?

In a world before modern science, just as in a world with modern science, as in a world with or without a free press, somehow it must be determined what is true and what it not true, what is good and what is bad, right/wrong etc. Most people are too busy for this, or, in a world before modern literacy, the bulk of the human race was incompetent to make such decisions. The Archbishop typifies this sort of person as a chap who doesn’t care much about anything. We have needed authorities. We do still need them, in one way or another, because the jury is still out on the bulk of the human race, I�m afraid.