John Lloyd, Director of Journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, has written an article in The Financial Times about the rising power of the media.
John writes: In the past year journalism, which in the west sees itself as beset by decline, has vastly increased its power. Three large developments have made the implicit, yet huge, claim that journalism, our way of knowing what is happening in our complex world, is essentially a matter of competing high-decibel political dispute and total transparency. Taken together, these developments the takeover of US politics by the broadcast media; the revelations about governments around the world from the WikiLeaks website, and The Daily Telegraph expos of business secretary Vince Cables true feelings about the UK coalition government ensured that the media ended the year with large victories over politics and politicians. Whats more, all three were claimed in the public interest. Yet it could as easily be said that they were morally indefensible. At the very least, each demonstrated that the line between public interest and moral indefensibility is thin and getting thinner.
