Return to Cockburn
Claud Cockburn, one of the finest hacks there has ever been, wrote that journalism is very simple: it is a mixture of advertising and entertainment and to succeed you need only decide who you want to entertain and what cause, as it were, you wish to advertise. He had no time for journalism as the pursuit of abstract truth, and – as a member in good standing of the British imperial class and an intermittent Stalinist – he would have laughed at the idea that journalists had a sacred duty to democracy until tears of neat whisky streamed down his cheeks.
Cockburn wished to lose his illusions without losing hope, as he wrote admiringly of a Stalinist friend. His energy, optimism, and courage are still inspiring; he was also an excellent stylist, whose plain and forceful manner concealed a great deal of art. He cared more for the English language than for all of his causes and most of his wives. So, if there is any guide who can lead us, like Virgil, through the descent into dreadful clickbait hell, Cockburn is the man.
He must have inspired many people into journalism with his autobiographies, but I don’t think he ever set out to be a journalist. What he wanted was a way to travel and to savour the variety of the world, and when he was a young man working for The Times offered the least constrained way to do this that was still respectable. ‘The press, sir, and the gentleman from the Times’ as a Victorian flunkey is said to have introduced journalists to the prime minister.
So he started off respectable, and at his least respectable, invented a form of journalism that did not depend on advertising and was aimed squarely at an elite audience. To put it another way, he invented Substack eighty years before Substack did. This matters, because everything bad that has happened to journalism in the last thirty years or so can be blamed on changes in the advertising industry and the way that the internet has destroyed the economic basis of mass market journalism. This is a catastrophe for journalism as a trade, of course; but it is also tangled with a political catastrophe.
Most of the stories in the national news and almost all the stories in the tabloids might as well be about life on Mars for all the influence the readers can have on them, or they will have on the readers. This means there is no immediate penalty for most readers if they prefer to believe whatever they would like to be true. There is no market pressure on the media to prefer truth over entertainment. In fact when the press is ad-subsidised there is a considerable incentive to be studiously agnostic about all truth claims about anything. This is carried to an extreme on social media: there, partly under the influence of the American law known as Section 230, the owners and publishers take no view and no responsibility for anything that appears. Google, Facebook, and so on are really giant advertising companies. They are not in the business of delivering information to their audience, but delivering their audience to their advertisers. That is why Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to remain the default search engine on Mac and iPhone.
This was also the business that traditional newspapers were in, but that was something they did not acknowledge even to themselves, still less to their readers. When The Independent started, the journalists there would say ‘we want to be what The Times would be if it were still a proper paper’, but the medical correspondent was known as Oliver Willy for his ability to find sex stories in the most unlikely science, and the advertising department made much of our coverage of Formula One, which was meant to attract young men with more money than sense. That was how things worked for about a hundred years until the internet produced a much more efficient way to deliver an audience to advertisers. It was much more precisely targeted, reached far more people because it cost them nothing, and could use all kinds of media more immediately attention grabbing than print.
This is all very shocking but the more shocking question that worries me, after more than forty years in the trade, is why anyone should care at all whether a given story is true or not. Most people do not and most journalism gives them no special reason to care either. The less powerful reason for this is that we journalists get a lot wrong, usually through haste and ignorance: the kind of shameless overconfidence which causes AI to hallucinate is an occupational disease of journalism done by humans too. That’s inevitable so long as speed is important. There is much we don’t know when we write and, more dangerously, there is always a reliance on the errors of earlier stories, whether these are factual or the more insidious and more serious errors of interpretation – the ones where true facts are placed in the context of a false narrative.
Cockburn himself got a great many stories wrong, sometimes quite deliberately: in his memoirs he describes inventing from the whole cloth a mutiny among the Francoist forces during the Spanish Civil War. This wasn’t pure naughtiness or cynicism: the French government was about to make a decision about a shipment of arms which the Nationalist side desperately needed, and Cockburn and his fellow Communists wanted to give the impression that to let the guns through would mean the government was supporting the winning side. For most readers that story raises ethical issues which permanently stain Cockburn’s reputation – a journalist who will deliberately lie for his cause loses most of his credibility. But there is another important aspect to the story: it was aimed at people who would actually take decisions. It mattered whether they believed him or not.
Although his son Patrick has written a moving biography paying tribute to his father as the voice of the powerless, what gave the voice power was the people who heard it. His newsletter, The Week, was read by the elite and about them too. This is as it must be: the elite are the only people who might be stirred into decisive action by what they read or hear. The powerlessness of the readers of mass market journalism to affect the things they read about is both an effect and a cause of the decay of truth in the media.
The other secret of Cockburn’s success in the Thirties was that he made a great parade of being too poor to be worth suing. This was not an affectation on his part. His memoirs are full of hair’s breadth escapes from his creditors. Even in the Sixties, when Cockburn guest edited Private Eye, the novelist Henry Reed warned Emma Tennant, who had married one of Cockburn’s sons, that if she went out for a drink with her father-in-law she would always find herself landed with the bill.
More prosperous news operations are well worth suing, though. They more they rely on advertising, and the more successfully they do so, the weaker they must become in political terms. Donald Trump shaking down American television networks for millions of dollars is only the latest and most vivid illustration of this. A news organisation that has a single very rich owner can resist political pressure almost as well as one that has no money at all. But once they become businesses owned and controlled by anonymous shareholders, they will always choose profit over probity. All of these factors were working to make journalism less fun and less effective even thirty or forty years ago, in what now seems the golden age before the internet.
There are two jaws to the vice that has squeezed the old media businesses and the journalism they supported. One is the destruction of the advertising market, and the other – which is what I have discussed up till now – is the destruction of an elite coherent audience, one which is neither Corbynist nor conspiracist but has a fairly accurate picture of the ways that power works and of the real, difficult choices involved in government.
There is still a market for hard facts of the sort that audience needs but it’s no longer served by news organisations: trying to check my belief that there are now five times as many journalists employed in PR than in the news media in the US, I just stumbled on a site that provides apparently reliable and properly researched statistics at prices ranging from £160 to £480 a month, billed yearly – and that’s for individual accounts. Corporate ones are more expensive.
AI will squeeze the vice from both sides but the real damage will be done to the economics of the business, not to journalistic standards. I am a paradoxical optimist here, because I believe that the media landscape is already so awful that the most powerful computer programs in history cannot make it very much worse. Nothing could. Humans are already doing badly the bad jobs that AI will automate. This is hardly an original insight. The earliest work I know on the impact of computers on journalism comes in Michael Frayn’s satirical novel, The Tin Men, in which a research institute is trying to build intelligent computers. What makes the book so wonderfully prescient is that Frayn is interested in algorithms, not in the blinking lights.
The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article.With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them. Once Goldwasser and his colleagues had proved the theory, commercial interests would no doubt swiftly put it into practice.The stylisa- tion of the modern newspaper would be complete. Its last residual connection with the raw, messy, offendable real world would have been broken.
This was published in 1965, but it describes exactly the process by which today’s AIs produce news. The following section, in which Goldwasser follows the computer’s instructions to produce a leader on a royal wedding, is even funnier, especially if you have ever been a leader writer, but it’s too long to quote. Read the whole book.
The point that Frayn has grasped is that humans can work to an algorithm quite as faithfully as any computer, if just more slowly and expensively. Perhaps news writing has always been formulaic: the word ‘stereotype’ itself derives from preassembled blocks of type, but market pressures gave a new direction to the algorithm. Now what you select for is not truth – about which the algorithm is entirely neutral, so long as no legal risk in involved – but enough novelty to keep the reader half engaged without ever lapsing into thought or full attention.
The whole of the web is already set up to measure the performance of human journalists against the algorithm: Reach, the conglomerate which owns most of England’s regional papers, already expects its journalists to produce eight stories a day without leaving the office. While it’s possible that AI will churn out rewritten press releases even more quickly than humans can, it won’t make a huge financial difference to the business.
The economics are even more attractive if you don’t care where your ‘journalists’ are. Don’t anyone tell the Daily Telegraph but last year it cost a Wall Street Journal writer all of $105 to hire a young man in Pakistan to build him a fully automated website that churned out politically slanted stories rewritten from real news sites all day and night: they were supposed to shift the vote in a US Senate election. Presumably it would be even cheaper today. James Ball, a British technology writer, has knocked up a site which automatically generates podcasts in which two voices discuss the last five minutes’ headlines endlessly and it cost him even less money. But sites like those are increasingly read by other bots rather than humans anyway.
What will finally crush the traditional news business is the effect of AI on the other jaw of the vice: the advertising income that keeps newspaper sites alive. About 40 percent of the traffic to US newspaper sites comes through Google. There’s no reason to believe that British or other European papers are any different. And once Google starts to feed AI summaries into its search results there is no reason for many users to click through to news sites. AI gloop on Google’s own site is indistinguishable in quality from the gloop on news sites, whether that is itself generated by AIs or humans imitating AI. It’s hard to see how news organisations as we know them can survive another 40 percent cut in revenue.
Facebook can already deliver much more finely divided audience segments to advertisers, ensuring that they spend their money only on the people they want to reach. YouTube (which of course Google owns) delivers enormous audiences for stories which would once have gone to newspapers or conventional television.
The Nelk Boys are a couple of right-wing Canadian streamers whose breakthrough came when they told the Los Angeles Police Department that they had coke in the boot of the car, when all along it was – haha – only a case of Coca Cola. The resulting video has been watched 49 million times. Along with their fervent support for Donald Trump, this qualified them to interview Benjamin Netanyahu in the middle of the Gaza famine using questions supplied by his staff. The question, at which even their fans balked, came when they asked him what was his favourite McDonald’s hamburger. How can any traditional newspaper compete with that? The Nelk Boys don’t even need YouTube to make money anymore. They were ‘demonetised’ in 2020, meaning that Google was so disgusted by their behaviour that it decided to take all the money for the ads on their show itself rather than paying the creators a cut. They have recovered with their own brands of clothing and alcopops – the clothing brand alone is said to bring in $100 million a year. That shows what is really meant by ‘relatable content’.
It also suggests the last lesson that Cockburn has to teach us. His newsletter had personality, which helped readers make judgments about its trustworthiness much as we judge the trustworthiness of other people. He had only scorn for what is known as ‘the view from nowhere’ in American journalism. No one, not even American journalists, really believes in that today.
Instead of the view from nowhere he offered the view from where he was and this was a very recognisable perspective. Any journalist knows of sources who are useful precisely because they are biased and passionate, driven by hatred to tell the truth. Anyone locked in bureaucratic combat will know the weak spots of their enemy and will share what they can with a journalist. And what is true of sources is increasingly true of journalists: they must be judged as individual voices. When all collective brands, like newspapers are crushed in the same economic vice, fewer and fewer can maintain their integrity.
This stress on individual voices or personalities looks like a great step backwards and perhaps it is. But I think it is inevitable. It is hastened as the skills of literacy are lost – half of all American adults did not read a single book last year; most college students, it’s reported, cannot read books even if they try, because they have only been taught from extracts and commentaries. It hardly matters whether the digests that they read are produced by AI rather than human followers of the algorithms when the students never experience direct contact with the mind of a writer.
In a visual culture force of argument is replaced by force of personality, which is a quality that has nothing to do with truthfulness. Boris Johnson, former prime minister, was a successful liar as a print journalist, but he would never have been a successful politician without television. Despite the example of men like Johnson or Michael Gove, former Chancellor of Exchequer and current editor of The Spectator, there are still many journalists whose skills and integrity I admire a great deal but I can’t imagine any of them shifting $100 million worth of branded T-shirts every year as the Nelk Boys do.
Across the Atlantic, America is now governed by a reality television star and journalism has been powerless to hinder him. The Washington Post claims that ‘Democracy dies in Darkness’ which may be true, but the Trump administration shows that democracy also dies on the screens in front of us in real time. Perhaps we should be strengthened by the reflection that Cockburn lived through times even worse and darker than our own and had to shed at least as many illusions as we must, yet still kept his hope and his style.