Nick Davies has put ‘churnalism’ on the map, but where did the word first appear? Thanks to the miracle of Nexis, you can go back to the beginning of the 1990s to find it in yet another media jeremiad, this time from the late Boston Globe columnist, David Nyhan.
When trash appears as news (May 2, 1991)
The news media are sliding merrily downmarket, trying to retain shrinking advertising revenue and spur sales with spicier, riskier, gamier “news” that wouldn’t have made it two or three years ago.
While it’s still too early for the returns from the land of Thinktankdom and the collective verdict of the sages of academe, something is rotten in the media. Specifically: the content.
“Churnalism” would be a better name for it…
Why have so many of our leading news organizations suddenly gone gaga over trash-news? And all at the same time?
I’ll take a wild guess. Whenever something goes bad in a profession, be it medical research, military procurement, or the administering of college athletics, Nyhan’s first option is: look at the lust for money.
Check the numbers in the news biz. What do the papers, magazines and TV networks have in common? Shrinking advertising, lowered incomes, and falling circulation, ratings and, in some cases, stock prices. What do do?
Nervous editors, lashed by anxious proprietors, decided to spice up the mix. Smarm it up. Stink it up. Go downmarket. Lower standards. So long, Edward R. Murrow; hello, trash. Trash sells.
Trash is cheaper to produce than quality investigative journalism that can be very detailed, very boring, and very expensive — never mind that it can be very significant.
No bulletin here, kids: sex sells. Even when it stinks.
And that was seventeen years ago…
It’s not the actual word ‘churnalism’ but a certain William Wordsworth expressed similar horror about the downward slide of journalism in this 1846 poem called “Illustrated Books and Newspapers”:
DISCOURSE was deemed Man’s noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought – dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood – back to childhood; for the age –
Back towards caverned life’s first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!
He wouldn’t have like Facebook, but perhaps GPS would have helped get him from Westminster Bridge to Tintern Abbey!
We are always in decline from a Golden Age, whatever the subject. Wordsworth’s own Lyrical Ballads were reviled on publication, just as when I took over my office 11 years ago one of the first documents I found (and it was pretty old even then) was an NCTJ report bemoaning the inability of student journalists to spell. Or write news.
I seem to remember there being some psychological research that puts a golden age permanently 20 years behind where we are currently.
Nick’s golden age ended in 1986 which is 22, but he started writing in 2005/6!
hi — im doing research for my degree on churnalism — where did you find this article from the Boston Globe? It would be great if you could post the original link. Thanks. Mike
Sorry Mike — you’ll find it in Nexis I guess, but it’s not available online.