One oddity of being a journalist these days is that non-journalists are always critiquing the profession. It isn’t only Donald Trump. Many see broadsheet newspapers and public-sector broadcasters as a liberal cartel that cooks up “ fake news”. But few of our accusers understand our everyday working practices. That’s normal: hardly anyone knows much about life in other professions. I’ve only the vaguest idea of how people in construction or advertising do their jobs, or how they think of themselves. Below I have responded to common charges against contemporary upmarket journalism by explaining how it actually works day by day.
“You made that up.” In the era of Google and social media, making stuff up is now a route to rapid humiliation and dismissal. Readers will catch you. It was much easier to distort before the internet. Think of Walter Duranty, The New York Times correspondent in Stalin’s USSR, who in 1933 denied there was a Soviet famine. Few Ukraine-based readers wrote in to correct him.
Anyway, Google — along with millennials working for media organisations as low-paid fact-checkers — has vastly improved journalistic accuracy. When I recently researched a historical biography, I was aghast at all the howlers in 1960s newspapers.