Joined up Journalism

I recently rediscovered Adam Curtis, the investigative journalist and documentary film-maker.  I can't imagine what made me lose him in the first place - he's a man to follow.

I read his blog of Dec 2013 subtitled "The point at which journalism fails and modern power begins", and it gave me considerable pause for thought.

For some time I have been thinking that our global society is so complex that it's impossible to really validate any particular analysis or explanation that is offered by expert observers or the experts themselves.  To be technologically topical, the trouble with Big Data is that you can choose to slice and dice it in a way that proves the point you want to make for your own nefarious purposes.

Going back to the Curtis blog, he talks about McClure's Magazine which at the beginning of the 1900s did the first big exposé of bad practice in big business and politics.  But could the readers validate what McClure was saying?  I bet the targets of his three articles had some strong denials and counter explanations.  Or was the Magazine simply publishing on a wider scale what the readers already knew to be true?  So do we believe McClure?  How do we validate that?  Actually the answer is partly in the work at that time, because they did produce hard evidence, and partly in the lens of historical perspective, which shows the same picture from multiple sources.

Curtis says "The new journalism that McClure began spread like wildfire - and politicians took notice. They were led by the new President, Theodore Roosevelt, who decided to use the law to break the monopolies - or what he called "The Octopus" that was strangling democracy."  But Curtis makes a very simple link there, that Roosevelt took notice of McClure's journalism; that's not proved, although they apparently knew each other - Roosevelt already had a record as Police Commissioner of New York City and then Governor of New York of cleaning up the systems and removing corruption and fraud.  So do we believe Curtis?  How do we validate that? Perhaps I could if I did research beyond a quick google (which proved nothing), but is the public going to do that?  In principle I believe Curtis, or at least I believe his intentions, because of his body of work.  But it was complicated then, in 1906 - how many more times the power of ten is it complicated now?

Curtis ends with "Maybe today we are being farmed by the new system of power. But we can't see quite how it is happening - and we need a new journalism to explain what is really going on."  Yet are we not doing the investigative, exposure journalism all over the place now - wouldn't McClure be proud?  Is the problem simply that it is not joined up? And is that cock-up ... or conspiracy?  

Maybe we can't or won't join up the dots to see the biggest of pictures because the landscape is just too damned big.  And maybe because people, journalists included, have to specialise or focus on specific areas because they can't cover everything, and then they want to keep within that area in order to increase their seniority, to become an expert.

So perhaps we need a new breed of meta-journalists, who will analyse and investigate journalism and work in a very horizontal manner and try to join up the problems we see in banking, in taxation, in corporate structures, in food quality, in political management, in environmental management, in arms sales, and so on and so on.  Quite a challenge.