23 jan

Read most of Rob Wijnberg’s book about the future of journalism. He is a dutch philosopher who turned towards journalism and is unhappy about the experience. Journalism is superficial, it doesn’t deal well with relevant issues, journalists copy each other, the opinion is more important than the newsfact. Everything is considered extremely important till the next day, or more and more often ten minutes later, something different is extremely important.
Or as Wijnberg quotes the American journalist Walter Lippmann: ‘When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.’
Lippmann wrote this in 1955, so it is questionable in what way Wijnberg is addressing a new problem. But at the other side, the rise of social media has put more pressure on journalism. Everything has to be faster. And the faster journalism becomes, the more extreme the processes Lippmann described.
I have another concern. Everything becomes so personal. Wijnberg describes the blame culture as a direct consequence of the opinion culture. Everything has to be good or bad and since good things are boring, most things journalists write about are bad. But when most things are bad, to make an item distinguishable it has to be terrible. And when most things are terrible, if you want to make an item distinguishable it has to be horrific.
To be extremely excited about something becomes the norm. It is in these kind of circumstances that the British Ukip, th American Tea Party and the Dutch Freedom Party get feet on the ground. They offer nothing else than a ventilation ground for excited opinions. Just because these excited opinions are shared by many people, doesn’t mean that there is any value in them. That is as much as an undemocratic statement I’m prepared to make for today.
Wijnberg started an admirable new journalism website which will focus on things that matter, written by people (mostly journalists) that look farther than their nose is long. The one thing that I do not like – haven’t seen the website, don’t want to pay for it! – is that he likes opinions in his articles. Objectivity doesn’t exist of course, but the journalist as part of the judgment process will be pretty tiresome I suspect.
It is a fascinating book though and offers ample of paragraphs on which to reflect on past mistakes. One of those is the fact that I learned to be sceptical about something a person says: ‘When someone says they contemplate about wanting something, they want it. When they say they want something, they claim it and when they say they claim something, you condemn them for it.’
I find this now hopelessly aggressive. In fact, I sympathize completely with the contemplations about wanting something, although I still have a little understanding for the claim culture.