Art Nouveau Ho

On Thursday night, the newsroom of the Capital Gazette— a local Maryland paper not far from my hometown— was broken into by a man who shot out the glass door, then killed five staff members, four of whom were journalists.

I don’t talk about journalism much here. But the fashion for bashing “the media” as a whole is reaching my friends, and there are things that need saying.

I’m not talking about criticism of individual media sources, or inspection of biases— those are both healthy, and needed. I’m talking about people who say “the media” as though it were all one thing, from one source rather than many. Often it will come with an adjective: “the liberal media” or “the centrist media”.

To be sure, the Murdochs, Sinclairs, Mercers, Dacres and their ilk are not forces for good. Far from it. One should be suspicious of any site that puts a political agenda ahead of the facts. That isn’t journalism.

Journalism is the courage of reporters like Ibrahim Alfa Ahmed, who went deep into territory held by Boko Haram militia. As a radio journalist, his reputation made strangers trust him enough to give him hard drives and phones with material recorded in Boko Haram bases and training camps. If he had been caught with these, he would have been killed— but he escaped with his life and brought the story back.

Journalism is the fortitude of Jason Rezaian, a journalist with the Washington Post. While working as their Tehran correspondent, he was taken prisoner for a year and a half. He was prevented from communicating with his wife and his mother. His illnesses went untreated. The charge was espionage: a frequent excuse used by totalitarian governments to imprison journalists. He's now free and writing again.

It’s not just in war zones that journalists risk their lives. I’m thinking of my friend Petra Mayer, a books journalist who found a homemade bomb in a New York street and phoned it in to the police and the newsroom.

I think of the tenacity of David Fahrenthold and Carole Cadwallader, who spend years of their lives combing through accounts, travel records, emails, interviews— finding the connections, the falsehoods, the illegal money. I think of the harassment, abuse and death threats they get from those who wish they'd stop asking questions.

Abuse of journalists has long been normalised in the online comments section, which few news sites have the staff or the resources to moderate effectively. Comments sections are also popular targets for professional Russian trolls working individually or in groups.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump encouraged abuse of journalists. As President, he has continued that, calling them “enemies of the people”. His supporters have taken this as permission to step up their harassment.

Earlier this week, Milo Yiannopoulos texted two Observer reporters who had questioned him: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

Meanwhile, journalists continue to annoy the powerful, ask awkward questions and uncover hidden truths. And the Rezaians, Fahrentholds and Cadwalladers of tomorrow continue to come up through local journalism.

On Thursday, the Capital's newsroom was attacked. Thursday night, they mourned their dead-- and prepared the next day's paper.

As someone who gets the majority of their news online, I am incensed over the proposed cuts to the BBC's website. That site is the beau ideal of websites: no ads, no messy Flash crap and the links stay good forever. (Or at least until now.)

Apparently the vast archive of written articles, recipes and general information are "competing unfairly" with commercial news sources. That is, they have too much good content, so they have to make it less and worse.

The thing is, that site is a perfect example of the BBC fulfilling its mandate-- which is to make information freely available to as much of the public as possible. That archive of news articles, historical précis pieces, recipes and general life information is OURS. We PAID FOR IT and are soon to pay more (since the licence fee will now rise in line with inflation). The government has no right at all to take it from us.

Compare and contrast the US-based National Public Radio's website (for which I occasionally write): That site is full of excellent content, much of which, again, stays archived forever. You can listen to years' worth of in-house mini-concerts by all sorts of musicians who dropped into NPR for a session. ( http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/ ) They have much of the radio content archived, but they also have a huge amount of audio, video and written articles that aren't on the radio, including a huge "arts and life" section. And NPR is *one radio station*, not a multi-channel media juggernaut like the BBC.

It's not hard to see the fingerprints of the Murdoch empire all over the recent white paper-- the (paywalled) Times recently ran a story with the headline "BBC's entertainment and soft news costs rivals £115m". But there's also a broader Tory philosophy at work here: that things that are free and public always need to be *not quite as good* as things you pay for. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons they're so determined to kneecap the NHS is to drive people to spend money on private health care and private insurance. Similarly, Cameron and his cronies have realised that the only way to force online readers to pony up for paywalled content, or endure sites that vomit Flash and autoplaying video ads all over the page, is to make the advert-free content at the BBC less good.

Of course, the BBC isn't free; it's paid for by us. But the Tories have handwaved that away and made the decision without any consutation with license-fee payers. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a page-covering ad flashing up on top of the article you're trying to read, forever.

(Posted to Facebook 14 May 2016. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end for the BBC.)