Speak plainly, Archbishop, and we'll quit our parallel universe
Richard Morrison
 
 
 
 
 
LIFE is short. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s expostulations are long. And journalists usually have 19 things on the go at any time. 

So I doubt whether many of my colleagues have read, let alone marked, learnt and inwardly digested, Rowan Williams’s speech about the 

British media. 

That’s a pity. Of course it isn’t easy for high-powered media types to take seriously a lecture on mass communication from a man 

heading an organisation as inept at communicating with the masses as the Anglican Church. But they should make the effort. 

Mystifyingly opaque though the Archbishop’s utterances may be (and he does have a gift bordering on genius for calling a spade a 

uni-handled, longitudinal, horticultural implement), he hits the mark with this critique of 21st-century British journalism in all 

its salacious, seamy glory. 

And since he also points out, not terribly originally, that “societies to some extent have the media they deserve and license”, 

his strictures ought to provoke you, the reading public, almost as much as they shame us, the offending hacks. (You can read the 

whole speech if you log onto www.archbishopofcanterbury.org.) 

First he identifies many undeniably bumptious traits of modern journalism. For instance, how we cynically cite “the public’s right 

to know” to justify voyeuristic prying, or to break “confidentialities that protect the vulnerable”. How we slant stories to make 

them hotter journalistic properties than they actually are. How we are obsessed with “breaking news”, even when events (such as the 

Pope’s death) disobligingly refuse to “move at the media pace”. How we prefer to report “surface dramas”, rather than probing important 

but hard-to-explain complexities. And, his most wounding observation, how we allow a “dominance among commentators — and columnists 

in particular — of people whose main or exclusive experience is urban, usually metropolitan”. Ooh, I say. Doesn’t he know about my 

holidays in Cornwall? 

So far, however, so commonplace. Journalists have heard all this before, and will reply with three well-worn defences. First, that 

“publish and be damned” is the only workable rule of thumb in our brutal business. Our task to find out things we aren’t supposed to, 

not engage in lofty debate about whether it’s wise for “the uninstructed public” (the archbishop’s revealing phrase) to be given facts 

before “the appropriate moment”. 

Secondly, the very offensiveness of the British press to archbishops and suchlike (we are viewed with “exasperation and scepticism” 

in his circle, apparently) is a good indication that we are doing our job: being unruly, raucous, irritating, and on the side of the 

mob rather than the Establishment. 

And thirdly, we are employed to sell papers, not improve the world. We leave that to priests and politicians. And what a great job 

they make of it. 

But Dr Williams has a subtler argument up his cassock sleeve. Newspapers, he says, aim to attract readers who share certain political 

and social views, then tailor their articles to confirm those prejudices, claiming that this is what the “general public” thinks. 

Well, I have never worked for the Mail or Guardian, but I still have a fair idea of what he is on about. By pandering to this selective 

world- view, the Archbishop goes on, newspapers “ close down areas of the imagination”, coarsen public discourse and end up of 

constructing a parallel universe that has little in common with the multifaceted real world. 

He urges journalists to be “more realistic, less fevered, more modestly provisional”, by which I presume he means that we should 

admit more often that we could be wrong. Then, he concludes, we might just “recover a sense of how to nurture public conversation 

in a mature democracy — even of a truth that sets people free”. 

Hmm. It’s a lovely thought. Just imagine the dialogue in the newsrooms of Britain if the Archbishop’s dream of Utopia came to pass: 

“What are you writing about?” “I thought I would do the truth that sets people free, actually.” 

“Wonderful notion, old boy. I’ll clear the centre-spread for you. We can run those topless pics of Abi Titmuss some other time.” 

But we in the media should think twice, or at least once, before scoffing at the Archbishop’s vision. The British press has always 

had its strident, superficial, infantile side. That’s its charm. But the crassness quotient is now overwhelming, and it does have 

a demeaning effect on public debate. 

Perhaps we should strike a deal with the Archbishop. We should agree to get out of our “parallel universe” more often, and reflect 

more truthfully the diversity of the real world. And in return? He should spend a week in a tabloid newsroom and learn how to sharpen 

up his prose. 

On target