Of course, this was before people accessed news on social media, before Rupert Murdoch’s virulent campaigns, before phone-hacking scandals, and before so many people concluded that the mainstream press was not necessarily the best arbiter of truth. It was also before thousands of locked-down Victorians tuned in to watch the daily press conferences of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and were shocked at the way some journalists peppered him with questions. Press conferences have long been bullish affairs: you ask an elected representative a question, often multiple times, then you find an angle and write the story. Yet, for some, the indecorous quality of the press conferences broke that covenant between reader and reporter, and highlighted not only the banality of news gathering but the grey areas in which it operates. The curtain had been drawn back. People didn’t trust some of the journalists to ask questions on their behalf.

Which makes News and How to Use It – by Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian – a timely work. Adopting an A–Z glossary of news-related terms, journalism biographies, and scandals, Rusbridger attempts to index the many-faceted issues of the Western, English-speaking media – not least of which is the loss of faith among those whom journalists seek to serve. Indeed, the problem of accuracy is at the core of many readers’ concerns, and Rusbridger captures how hard it is, even for the most well-intentioned reporters, to be accurate: ‘When do you use the word assassination (rather than “killing”)? Is it a wall, or a barrier, or a fence or a separation barrier? Is it a border, or a boundary, or a green line, or the 1949 Armistice Line? Is there such a thing as a “cycle of violence”? If so, who started it – or is it better not to go there?’

Alan Rusbridger at the International Journalism Festival, 2014 (Alessio Jacona/Wikimedia Commons)

Rusbridger is rightly concerned about some media organisations’ blasé approach to truth and accuracy. As advertising dollars have moved to the far less lucrative online realm, it takes a brave editor to demote an incendiary columnist who clearly does not know what they are talking about but who brings much-needed attention and readership. Yet he also argues that subjective ‘campaigning’ journalism has its place. The Guardian’s exposés of bribery allegations against arms company BAE Systems are one example; The Sunday Times’s relentless pursuit of truth in the Thalidomide scandal is another. Campaigns work best when there is ‘not much argument about the justness of the cause they articulate’, and indeed sometimes campaigns fail because there was no one there to claim them. As Rusbridger points out, some commentators argue that the Grenfell Tower fire would not have happened had local journalists been available to listen to residents’ complaints about the quality of the external cladding. It also makes it easier for despots, such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, to cry ‘fake news’ when there are fewer local journalists on the ground, covering events in real time and filing daily record journalism.

The missteps and abuses of media proprietors play a large role in the public’s waning trust, and the entry on Rupert Murdoch does not disappoint. In the manner of an assiduous journalist, Rusbridger tries to provide a complete picture of Murdoch rather than a one-dimensional study – ‘he loves newspapers and respects journalists’, he manages – before outlining many flaws, including the culture of phone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World, his boundless influence over politicians, and the media monopoly he enjoys in Australia.

Thankfully, Rusbridger does not advance the rather ludicrous notion that Murdoch’s editorial agenda extends to every journalist, in every paper, so that all of his news pages are essentially a ‘through edit’ for the mogul’s ideological line. (The Murdoch-controlled Fox News, which Rusbridger only briefly touches on, may be a different story.) However, he is right to propose that, despite the many talented reporters at Murdoch-owned publications, a worrying level of groupthink exists at News Corp, especially among senior management and editors. One has to only witness, as I have, the fear in editors’ eyes when Murdoch pays one of his papers a visit to get a sense of the sway he holds.

Rusbridger devotes a considerable amount of time to parsing the climate crisis, and the way it breeds misinformation among right-wing pundits. He is instructive when he calls on journalists to avoid attributing every bushfire to the warming of the planet, as ‘it breeds the same confusion that allows climate deniers to use cold weather events as proof that global warming is a hoax’. Rusbridger is similarly illuminating on the ‘numbers’ entry, offering advice to reporters about how to assess the relevance of statistics and to sort the genuinely helpful data from the inconsequential. Reporters should ask how the data was collected, by whom, the sample size, what quality-assurance processes took place, and whether a poll used non-probability or quasi-probability sampling. In medicine, he notes, the ‘gold standard’ is the double-blind, randomised controlled trial.

Rusbridger is a stylish writer – his prose is taut, concise, punchy – but the book fails in its remit, largely because one is never sure what the remit is. In some entries, Rusbridger is instructing readers on how to evaluate the trustworthiness of their news; other times he is addressing journalists directly. Sometimes he is impugning appalling behaviour or skewering the profession’s penchant for inflammatory puns – worth a book in its own right – while at other times he is merely defining a journalism term without much accompanying comment. The problems of journalism are, likewise, far too complicated to be shoehorned into an A–Z format, and Rusbridger’s approach comes across as a clumsy attempt at avoiding the constraints of a hypothesis and the rigid dichotomy of good versus bad journalism.

The result is a book that lacks a hierarchical arrangement of information, with terms such as ‘bias’ and ‘boredom’ gifted almost equal weight, though they impact on journalism in different ways. On the rare occasion that Rusbridger approaches synthesis or attempts a conclusion, it is usually a rather uninspiring sentiment to the effect that the journalist’s job is harder these days yet ‘more important than ever’. He is more sophisticated at the end of his entry on ‘Experts’, in which he outlines the growing public weariness with expertise and advances an idea that could form the basis of an exploration into a renewed pact between journalist and reader: ‘Perhaps for the public, the real definition of an expert is someone who has dived so deep into a topic they know how much they don’t know and are prepared to take that ignorance seriously.’ It would have been a better place for him to start.