ARCHBISHOP OF
Some time ago, I published another of Ruth's
articles about her observances of the Church of England. I am completely
comfortable with surrendering my column to her again. Apparently, the British press are holding His Grace, the Archbishop of
Archbishop hits out at web-based media 'nonsense'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for “paranoid fantasy,
self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry”. He described the atmosphere on
the world wide web as a free-for-all that was “close
to that of unpoliced conversation”.
In a lecture to media professionals, politicians and church
leaders at
Dr Williams also extended his wide-ranging critique of
journalistic practice to the traditional media, arguing that there are
“embarrassingly low levels of trust” in the profession and that claims about
what is in the public interest need closer scrutiny. He called for a “more
realistic, less fevered” approach to stories by journalists and added: “There
is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and
attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the
vulnerable.”
He attacked the “high levels of adversarial and suspicious
probing” that send the clear message that any kind of concealment means “guilty
until proved innocent”, and he challenged journalists and broadcasters to
attempt to regain lost public confidence.
Dr Williams said that the way news is packaged inhibits the
public from becoming engaged with issues and understanding them.
He added: “There is a tension at the heart of the
journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what
other sources can’t — information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer
or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the
same time it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers
and the information it purveys as a commodity.”
He conceded that journalism has its own pressures that help
to determine the way stories emerge and added: “Journalistic communication is
bound to a market model, whose ambiguities we have looked at; it is not going
to change overnight by moral exhortation.” But he still called for a
reassessment of news values. He said: “There are undoubtedly facts which would
be of huge interest to a certain sort of public, but are not by any stretch of
the imagination matters of public interest in the sense that not knowing them
creates or prolongs a seriously unjust situation.”
The way most news is packaged and marketed tends to work
against real engagement and deeper public understanding, creating a parallel
universe remote from most people’s real experience, he said.
He added: “The assumptions of the way public interest is
often appealed to in the present climate look less impressive under scrutiny.
“If the profession is to perform its necessary job, some aspects of current
practice are lethally damaging to it, and contribute to the embarrassingly low
level of trust in the profession, especially in the
He recommended a greater willingness to correct mistakes in
order to offset “the deep cynicism that is generated by a marked habit of
reluctance to apologise or explain”. Dr Williams said
that it was important not to scapegoat the media and praised the courage of
journalists such as Frank Gardner of the
"Moral change"?
Did he really mean to say that? This kind of dumb stuff always comes out when
well-meaning clerics get involved in political and politically motivated social
issues. I thank Ruth, and hope that everyone who reads this,
writes in and tells us all what they think.
