CULTURE, THE ECONOMY & THE MEDIA

Speaking on an excellent episode of The Culture Show a couple of months ago, the veteran campaigning newspaper editor Sir Harold Evans - who notoriously fell out with Rupert Murdoch - stated that the key task for the news media at present was to understand the reasons for the financial/housing market collapse and what should be done to ensure that this is not repeated.

Sir Harold now lives in the United States and his comments reflect this, but the principle applies equally to the systemic failure of the banking system and subsequent economic crisis in this country.

Since the heyday of Sir Harold's career in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s, coverage of economic issues by our news media has changed dramatically, with increased reporting of supposedly well-performing sectors, such as finance and property, and a steep decline in coverage of industrial sectors, particularly in the regions. However, notwithstanding this shift in focus, much of the mainstream media still failed to anticipate the events which precipitated our longest post-war recession, from which the UK is only just emerging.

One reason for this is the strong tendency of journalists to rely on media releases from major companies and government organisations, carefully prepared for their consumption. Real investigative journalism of the kind promoted by Evans has declined significantly, again particularly where this might require some hard labour amongst Britain's industrial hinterlands. Perhaps this kind of work is now a job for the so-called "citizen journalist". The Blogosphere certainly did anticipate some of problems associated with financial and property speculation.

The very good reason for this is that the Blogosphere is just as much - perhaps more so - about production as consumption. Regaining this balance is the key challenge facing economies such as the United States and Britain. In short, since the 1970s we have lost much of our mass culture of manufacture, with trends in mass consumption being increasingly manipulated through media organisations - including national and international governmental ones - instead.

This is precisely why an enterprise like the search engine Google is so important, and why not so long ago Google was voted most trusted brand by consumers. Let's hope it can retain this status.