The Reuters Institute has delivered its annual verdict, and it is damning: trust in news has fallen to historic lows. Only 34% of Britons now trust the media. This is not a crisis of fact-checking or a fleeting pandemic of misinformation.
This is the death rattle of a profession that traded its soul for clickbait. We have witnessed the Fourth Estate transform into a fifth column of partisan spectacle. The remedy is not more transparency or more ‘engagement’.
It is a return to the dour, painstaking, and often boring work of journalism as it was practised in the age of print. But the damage runs deeper. The public has learned that today’s news is a product, not a public service.
Headlines are designed to enrage, not to inform. The collapse of trust mirrors the collapse of authority in every institution: the church, the monarchy, the state. We are living through a new Dark Age, where the only truth is the one that flatters your prejudices.
The BBC and its rivals must stop chasing the viral and embrace the dull. They must abandon the 24-hour news cycle that rewards hysteria. Editors should be sacked if they run another ‘BREAKING’ story that is merely a tweet.
The alternative is a society where every citizen is their own fact-checker, and every conversation devolves into a shouting match. That is not democracy. That is the Fall of Rome with better wifi.
