The crisis of authority is of our own making – and it's getting out of hand, accelerated by our "network society", says Jason Walsh.

These days I don't much like criticising journalism, certainly not individual journalists at any rate. It's not that I think the press should be above criticism – quite the opposite, in fact. It's just that journalists' self-abasement has reached fever pitch in recent years – and I'm not speaking of the Leveson inquiry. 

When journalists started accepting that truth was beyond their ken, they found a willing audience – and body of work – in the form of academics who had completely given up on the very notion of truth, and certainly of empirical evidence, all the better to pass off their innate conservatism as "transgressive". 

During the 1990s we saw journalists beat a hasty retreat from their traditional position of objective reporting of events and sorting of facts. Most obviously this was seen in the so-called "journalism of attachment" that arose from a post-Cold War crisis in war reporting. What it amounted to was taking sides in complex conflicts and reducing them to simple, emotive and easily digestible morality tales. Journalists abandoned their claims to objectivity and, crucially, authority, saying both were not only impossible, but in fact morally suspect.

The assault on authority only got stronger with the rise of the internet, with editors relying on clicks alone as the sole metric by which a story is to be judged. The result is well understood: sturm und drang editorialising, endless 'news of the weird' and the growing cleave between those publications serving people with a financial interest in the world and those that formerly served the rest of us who were supposedly socially invested in the world. 

It gets worse, though.

Just this afternoon, fellow PressEurop contributor Stephen Rainey drew to my attention a story in the British press that quotes Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales bemoaning that public relations company Bell Pottinger has been editing Wikipedia entries to cast its clients in a more favourable light.

Well, tough luck Jimmy.

First of all, PR companies are hired specifically to cast their clients in a favourable light. That's what they do.

More importantly, this is what happens when you render authority itself suspect, attempting to replace it with the "wisdom of crowds" or endless, competing "plural narratives". 

Just what is actually going on here?

The fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone means it can never have authority. It can be right, it can be true, it can be interesting and it can be a starting point. But it cannot be trusted. This is only a problem if you plan to short-circuit the entire research process, instead preferring to receive a pat on the head or slap on the back for stating a secession of decontextualised info-nuggets.

Anyone who has been paying attention, and surely PressEurop readers have been, will know the shortage of authoritative, serious, self-assured analytic journalism has come back to bite us in the ongoing eurocrisis. 

But the crisis of authority goes well beyond the worlds of journalism and the academy.

In exactly the same way, neo-activist pseudo-political movements like 'Anonymous' and 'Occupy', run a mile from formal organisation, have agonised over making clear demands and allow everyone and no-one to speak for them. Spoken of as direct democracy in action, these operational methods actually mask a contempt for the demos and make a virtue of the necessity of the shallowness of connections in our brave new "network society". 

Making a call to reclaim authority, the possibility of truth and the importance of empirical evidence is a highly unpopular position today, leading as it does to claims of elitism.

This is, of course, nonsense.

Authority is not God-given, it comes with experience. It also must always be prepared to face challenges and answer as to its basis. In the case of journalists, authority derives from repetition and, even for generalist reporters, degrees of specialisation. Likewise, serious scholarly inquiry requires dogged attention to facts. In politics, what matters is using the democratic mandate to provide leadership – a marriage of legitimacy and authority.

We, all of us, need to stop slapping each other on our backs and get back to working out what actually matters in the world we live in.

Image by pfly. CC licenced.