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Impressionism: And now, the fake news

The deplorable state of journalism is the result of a shift in values
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Impressionism with Rob O'Flanagan

Someone recently suggested I write a thorough and definitive commentary on the state of contemporary journalism.  

I’m sure there is some 20-something news junkie out there who might have a better handle on it than I do. Me, I just sort of watch it with a stunned sense of bewilderment mixed with equal parts rage and despondency. And I dream of a cabin in the woods.  

I believe the proliferation of fake news, junk news and celebrity news has something to do with the erosion of basic human values, like the value of telling the truth and fostering, in constructive, honest and informative ways, the advancement of civilization and the building of a better world. That farsighted perspective has been replaced by one of immediate gratification.  

In place of that higher value, the mentality of the attention seeker has been given free-rein. It’s a mentality that the Internet seems to have forced out of us all.

In my rather extreme view, it is now infinitely more important to get noticed, to keep up, to be popular, than it is to be progressive, to care about the future, to care about the truth.

From time to time, when I get a mind to sort through and clear up the many scraps and sheets of paper I tend to preserve as keepsakes of unfulfilled writing ideas, I come across one scrap that has a few lines that go something like this: “There has been an incident involving the royalty. No details have been released.”

I had big plans and high hopes for those two lines. I was going to craft them into a performance art piece, in the absurd vein of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, just going on and on about how there had been an incident involving the royalty. But since no details are known about the incident, speculation is the only thing available with which to fill the terrible silence.

It was over ten years ago that CBC Radio reported basically those words verbatim. “There has been an incident involving the British royalty. Details are not known at this point.” There had been an alleged incident, there were no details, it could be big, we don’t know, there may be more to come, we’re not sure. Hold your breath.

I remember laughing very hard and predicting the end of journalism as we know it. There was never a follow-up story. There was no incident.  

Somewhere in there lies the lamentable story of journalism’s general decline. Get attention, however you can get it. Go ahead and report rumours, breaking the cardinal rule of sound journalism. Go ahead and do a story even if it is not verifiable. There is really no pressing need to ask “is it true” at every step of the way, just get it out there.

That one little report seemed to be a harbinger of the fake news, the cheap news, the shoddy journalism we get too much of these days.  

Like oil and diamonds once were, journalism, too, used to be a scarce thing. You had your daily or weekly newspaper, your local television station, your radio news people generally reading condensed versions of the work of their print journalism rivals. There was competition, but not much of it.

The Internet changed everything, especially the value of good journalism. Just as it overwhelmed and choked out civilized dialogue by suddenly giving everyone’s ridiculous opinion a public dumping site, the Internet also diluted journalism.

Stories had to be fast and furious, and plentiful to keep up with the fierce pace of the information superhighway, and to keep a much more distractible reader from going elsewhere.   

A lot of journalism here in the Western World has lost its way. Yes, there has always been fake news and bad journalism down through the ages. But in general terms it seems far worse now. What can be trusted?  

I suppose there has always been a certain degree of unreality and absurdity out there in the real world, but I doubt that I have ever seen it so pervasive and thorough as it is right now. The current journalism environment has certainly contributed to this deplorable state of affairs.

And it will probably only change for the better when there is a general return to higher human values.


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Rob O'Flanagan

About the Author: Rob O'Flanagan

Rob O’Flanagan has been a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and columnist for over twenty years. He has won numerous Ontario Newspaper Awards and a National Newspaper Award.
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