One of the many things the Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy wants to do is to produce a running account of a major division in journalism – between those who believe that the technological shifts in the trade harm it, and those who believe that they are giving it a new and richer lease of life. For those who prefer to tread a Third Way, there is the view that it harms journalism now to enrich it later; Third Way sceptics would add “maybe”.

A devotee of Third Ways, I’m on that path: the sceptical version. It means I sway that way and this on the issue, with the evidence of harm striking more chords, presently, than the evidence of enrichment: inevitable, I guess, for one who has spent most of his working life in newspapers.

Here’s a particularly good-corrosive account ("The story behind the story", The Atlantic, October 2009) of harm, from Mark Bowden, himself a quarter of a century reporting on the Philadelphia Inquirer – a title now much reduced. He writes about the rise of the polemical “reporter” – that is, the political aide, or politically committed blogger, who now supplies news channels and newspapers, much reduced in staff numbers, with nuggets of “news”: he instances, especially, the snippets culled from seminars and interviews with Judge Sonia Sotomayer, the Circuit Court judge nominated by President Obama as a member of the Supreme Court, who sparked controversy for a statement that, as a Latino woman, her judgements might differ from those of a middle class white man. Bowden showed that this snippet, culled from a video of a seminar, was rolled around the news media and TV news shows without context or background reporting, so that it took on a sinister colouring not intended. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment – “there is no such thing as society” – suffered the same fate: the phenomenon is not new: but the means of transmission, and the lack of ability to check and contextualise, is. Bowden writes:

       “I would see their [political aides’ and committed bloggers’] approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The bloggers’ role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out in the wash. Nobody actually is right about anything no matter how much they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No: not the truth – victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us towards a world where all information is spun, and where all ‘news’ is unapologetically propaganda.”