Brown and bullying
Today’s brouhaha about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown being accused of bullying is a classic example of what is worryingly wrong about journalism today. It’s not about what happened, but who says it happened.
National Bullying Helpline
For those who haven’t been following the saga, here’s a quick recap: A Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline has contacted the media to say that people working for Gordon Brown have called her helpline to complain about bullying.
The media has run with this story, largely without questioning who Christine Pratt and the National Bullying Helpline are. The attitude seems to be: “Seems official enough, let’s run with it.”
Conflict of interests
Since then, others have pointed out the links between the helpline and the Conservative party, and also pointed out that Christine and David Pratt run a business that sells investigations into workplace bullying. This is a major conflict of interests, and the claims should have been treated with a great deal more scepticism than they were.
Voice of authority
Alas, we live in a culture where something is a story as long as someone reasonably important, with a vague visage of authority, says it is. It matters not whether the allegation is true or not – only that someone with a fancy title and media profile is willing to put their name to it.
Corroborating statements
And the same, unfortunately, applies in travel. A couple of years ago, I stopped working for one outlet after I was asked to provide an outside source that could confirm something I had discovered myself on the ground.
Frankly, I thought it was ridiculous that I had to corroborate something that I had personally experienced with a link to an article in a major newspaper that said the same thing. This wasn’t anything major or controversial either – it was about the relative heat in two Finnish saunas.
Respected sources
I was pissed off on numerous fronts. Surely the whole purpose of me writing it was that I’d been there? And if we all had to back up every statement with a quote from a respected source, then nothing new would ever be written.
Lonely Planet destinations list
The flipside is that whenever a respected source does say something, it is repeated endlessly as gospel. It infuriates me when Lonely Planet pumps out its up-and-coming destinations list, and it is repeated by all and sundry, essentially setting a large part of the editorial agenda for the next year.
Rent-a-quotes
It’s not that these travel experts don’t have valid expertise – quite to the contrary. But publications should have the balls to hire their own people to do their own investigations and work out what is really happening rather than relying on phoning up the same predictable cast of media-friendly rent-a-quotes.
Ask an expert
To be fair, this problem isn’t as chronic in travel as it is in news journalism. There is still some excellent writing out there where the story is allowed to tell itself rather than it being about who is doing the telling. But I fear the ask-an-expert approach is an ever encroaching danger. After all, as much as I like Simon Calder, I don’t want to have to ask him for his opinion every time I write something…
Tags: journalism, travel expert, Travel Writing
Not sure I understand, David. Isn’t your Finnish sauna corroboration an example of the publisher NOT taking something on face value and asking you to back it up, especially since you yourself could have based it on the newspaper story? IE the very thing you are complaining about.
@alastair I was merely saying that one sauna was hotter than the other. They wanted me to find a link to a respected site that would back this up. Which to me, was unbelievably petty. I’ve no problem with fact-checking – in fact I think it’s a great thing that doesn’t happen enough.
My point is that independent research is rendered entirely useless when everything has to be backed up by something someone important has already said.
The taking things from experts at face value is the flip side of this.
I sat in on some focus groups a few years back on whether people would trust travel info on the web. They would only trust it if it came with a recognisable label – eg Thomas Cook or Lonely Planet, even though the new info we were offering them was authoritative, more up-to-date, and in many cases written by the same people. Some however, then went on to say that they wouldn’t trust Thomas Cook because it was commercial, leaving only LP as a beacon! We eventually opted for branding the website with biogs of all the contributors to prove they were the ‘people who had written the LP books in the first place!’ Branding is all.
I’ve never understood the “top places to visit in 2010″ lists. Every publication comes out with them, and there is never any overlap. It is like the put names in a hat. No rational as to why these places will be special during 2010.
They might as well come out with a list of “random places to visit in 2010″.
Completely agree with you about the rise of the expert… lazy journalism. I blathered about it here in what I think was one of my better posts!
http://www.travelblather.com/2.....alism.html
“The cult of the expert
The alternative to pseudo research is to wheel in an ‘expert’. In the absence of hard facts, media organisations are turning to opinion instead. You don’t need to do hardcore costly research to back up your story if you can wheel out an expert – doesn’t really matter who he is or where from – to verify your claims. Doesn’t matter whether global warming will really kill us all by 2050 as long as a Professor from some university claims it will. And if he’s no longer around to stand by and back up his claim in 2050, better still. You see this so much in 24 hour news these days. Pseudo fact… backed up with waffle from expert… job done.”