Press complaints

I went along to check out Sir Christopher Meyer's famous red socks at the Press Complaints Commission's meet the public session in Newcastle. Not surprisingly, although everyone likes to complain about newspapers, it was a particularly thin and presumably not terribly representative sliver of the public which presented itself to be met. The audience ran to about 15 (and that's if you include the chap from Newsnight, his cameraman and the PCC's own very welcoming minders and helpers).

This is not to say there weren't some useful issues under discussion but for me the evening illustrated two interesting points.

One is that scandal apparently ain't wot it used to be; although, say, David Blunkett might not have had the time of his life over recent months, we have had little or no mention of the press drinking in the last chance saloon. In part this does seem to give weight to Meyer's assertion that the PCC has now acquired sufficient stature and perceived independence to have moved 'beyond self-regulation' (read why Meyer believes the PCC is 'the creature that broke free from its creators’ here).

The other reason is that the vast majority of the injustices - or perceived injustices - wrought by the press involve individuals, and more often that not they are individuals who get caught up in a media maelstrom through sheer bad luck; something terrible happens in their lives or to someone close to them and suddenly, without ever wanting this to happen, they become part of the news.

Two themes caught my attention. Representatives of Age Concern and a mental health organisation both challenged the panel to do something about the language papers use to describe certain groups, whether 'infantalising' people by branding them elderly, or through the casual use of works like loony and schizophrenic.

As panel member and former Newcastle Evening Chronicle editor Alison Hastings suggested, newsrooms can often be slow to recognise the way in which acceptable language is evolving. As she said, most newsrooms have style guides which will cover reporting of sensitive subjects; the change in the way suicides are reported (or, increasingly, not reported) is a good example of newspapers being responsible and constructive. The difficulty is that, like any other profession, newspapers have their own 'cultural language' - short, sharp and colourful - which becomes ingrained and quite natural to its exponents. Writers don't necessarily reflect deeply on the more subtle meanings their words carry - indeed how could they when those words dispensed at the speed and in the quantity demanded by the news business?

It is up to interest groups like those working in mental health to quietly and constructively speak with editors and develop new approaches to such words. There is no point in demanding that 'politically correct' language must be used, but there is almost always scope to find words and phrases that are both culturally acceptable and within the lexicon of everyday speech. For example, the University of Sunderland's style guide suggests students use firefighter not fireman, police officer not policeman; such alternatives are both more accurate and no more difficult on the ear. We do not however, advocate replacing businessman with the inelegant businessperson, a word no-one ever actually says; rather we suggest using the individual post, say manager, or director.   

The other major theme centred around quite fundamental questions of 'what is news for?' OK, the questioners didn't quite put it like that, but that is essentially what they were asking. One man spoke volubly of his struggles with the Hartlepool Mail on behalf of Friends of the Earth, another was a councillor frustrated at coverage of North Tyneside. Certainly with the case of North Tyneside, in my reading he was not questioning the accuracy of reporting, but the reluctance of newspapers to write about all the good things that were happening in his patch.

It is an old, old story, but one that demands examination. The councillor notes, quite rightly, that lots of people do lots of good things every day, but that never gets into the newspapers. Yes, lots of trains run on time, lots of alarm clocks go off as they should, people say please and thank you in shops, but you don't bother telling friends and colleagues that this happened - it's not news. News has to be different and, to a large degree, it has to be unexpected; together this often equates to unpleasant.   

Alison Hastings made the sensible observation that most local and regional newspapers are very much aware that their readers don't want to be given an uncompromisingly bleak view of where they live. (She is right, but you wouldn't necessarily think so when reading some North East titles).

And isn't it odd that North Tyneside Council is complaining that it can't get its message across at a time when, as the research Chris Rushton's presented to the Making the News conference clearly illustrated, newspapers are ever more dependent on news releases put out by public relations people who are highly allergic to anything that carries even the sniff of being downbeat?

The chap from Hartlepool complained that the Mail had a monopoly in the town. Well, perhaps so in terms of print, but is it too fanciful to suggest that something springing out of weblogs might one day challenge this monopoly? And is it yet more fanciful to suggest that is this happens it will produce a content that is shaped rather less by either the newsroom conventions that forefront crime and misfortune nor by the relentlessly positive and rosy stuff fed out by PR teams...? 

Comments

[Stuart Bruce]

It's not hard to get most local or regional papers to print "good" news. But you do need to package it as news - something readers will be interested in. For example instead of stories about drunken young people and anti-social behaviour you can pitch a story about a young mum battling against the odds to set-up a community group to help improve the estate. Same story, different angles. The problem is that many local councillors don't know how to do this and the non-political nature of council PR offices (rightly so) means they don't always get the support/advice they need.