Making sense of the digital age

Election campaigns — when voters need factual, informative reporting that digs beneath politicians’ spin — underline the value of professional, quality journalism. In his Keith Murdoch Oration last night, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson noted that the world’s dominant digital companies were ill-equipped to cope with contemporary challenges.

Scrutinising elections, we suggest, is one of them. Some politicians, experienced reporters are noticing, are doing their best to avoid scrutiny by pitching to sympathetic online and social media outlets where, they hope, their claims will echo around the blog and twittersphere with scant regard for opposing arguments. Some mainstream media outlets aid and abet the process. In the US, as Mr Thomson noted, a significant majority of the Washington press corps falls into two categories — “liberals who are professionals and professional liberals”. In Australia, the same could be said of many working for the ABC, the Nine-owned Fairfax print media and others.

There is a reason The Wall Street Journal, which has just won a Pulitzer prize, is the most trusted paper in the US, Mr Thomson said: “The reporters report and the columnists columnise, and the difference between the two is obvious.” Without the investment in journalism by Rupert Murdoch, neither the Journal nor The Times in Britain would be as trusted, and The Australian would never have been created: “These inconvenient truths tend to be ignored but they are immutable facts.”

More broadly, technology had run ahead of societies’ and politicians’ abilities to cope. While the world was on the cusp of “truly extraordinary developments in artificial intelligence”, our “shared level of emotional intelligence is plumbing the depths”. A mob mentality had taken hold in the West, Mr Thomson said, which included “illiberal liberals” on an “insatiable quest for indignation and umbrage”. It was vituperation as virtue.

Quality newspapers, digital and in print, are a means by which readers gain maximum advantage in the information age while cutting through spin, ideologies and dross.