Roger Mosey, centre, with Winston Mano, Director of the Africa Media Centre, University of Westminster, left, and CJA UK President Raymond Whitaker.
The media industry – what is now called the mainstream or legacy media – has to “stand firm” against the influence of social media rather than trying to imitate it. This was the message delivered by Roger Mosey, a former senior BBC editor and executive in news and sport, now Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
See excerpts from the lecture here:
Giving the Commonwealth Journalists Association’s second annual lecture at the University of Westminster, Mosey said it was essential for the established media to test the arguments being made on social media: “We must resist attempts to create an intellectual monoculture.”
How to get a balance between old and new media was still being debated, but the traditional media “should not lose faith”. It would be a mistake to try and become like social media, obsessed with clickbait and bite-sized news. Some editors, Mosey added, seemed to think that everything must be interactive, “asking us all the time what we think”, instead of seeking to inform us. Such consultation exercises were too often cosmetic, based on the tiny minority of the audience who got in touch.
A former editor of Today on BBC Radio 4, an agenda-setting programme for British politicians and journalists, Mosey said loss of faith in the mainstream media was not solely due to hostile figures such as Elon Musk, who had turned Twitter, now X, into a propaganda medium. The BBC and other traditional media had to recognise their own shortcomings.
Metropolitan journalists frequently failed to understand the country they were reporting on. During the recent elections in Britain and the US, the media were obsessed with the polls and the “horse race”, but the public were much less interested, being more concerned with their daily lives. Donald Trump’s MAGA followers were seen as “exotic animals in a zoo”, making the decisiveness of his victory a surprise. Similarly, the British media failed to spot the level of support for the Reform party, or areas where Muslim vote blocs had an impact.
Mosey said that some American journalists seemed to feel defeated by social media, which had created a “post-truth world”, an “echo chamber of alternative facts and opinions”. But if the battle had been lost in the US, it was not yet the case in Britain or Europe.
The question was whether traditional media, which was subject to forms of regulation, would be overwhelmed by social media platforms beyond the control of anyone apart from their billionaire owners. “While we have to accept the way the world has changed,” Mosey concluded, “we must stand firm against social media.”
- You can read the full text of Roger Mosey’s speech on the Commonwealth Round Table website: https://www.commonwealthroundtable.co.uk/general/media/time-to-stand-firm-social-media-and-challenges-to-reporting/
