Cause Without A Rebel?

Over at the Communication, Media and Development policy blog, James Deane (the BBC World Service Trust guy, not the dead actor) writes a provocative post about the role of the media in helping to make developing country governments more accountable to their citizens, and making service providers more accountable to those meant to benefit.  He says:

James is absolutely right to focus on the question of where the demand is for more information and better accountability.  The growth of the demand side is important for two reasons:

- first, additional information and transparency are clearly not going to contribute to poverty reduction if there is nobody using that information to increase accountability and drive up standards

- second, the emergence of individuals and organisations using the information will create a virtuous circle by putting pressure on governments and donors to be more transparent.

James argues that the media must play a central role in filling this gap: 

This is a natural perspective from someone connected to the mainstream media, but I wonder if it is rooted in 20th Century ideas of the role of the media?

James is right that journalists have in the past played a role in finding disparate, often complex information and presenting it in a simpler form. But that role is increasingly changing, which is part of the reason that the mainstream media is convulsing with change. The public increasingly don't need journalists to collect and simplify information.  If we want to read a company or a government press release, we can do it for ourselves: we don't need some hack in a newspaper office to reprint it in a paper.  We can increasingly synthesize information from many different sources.  Fact-checking, which has anyway gone out of fashion on many newspapers, is better done by the crowd, in its wisdom, in the comments section of a blog than by an intern on the news desk.   I would rather hear directly from an expert on a particular topic than I would have that view intermediated by journalists with little time, no expertise, and a proprietor breathing over their shoulders. 

It would be nice if journalists did "speak truth unto power" more often. But they are locked into an industry requiring significant capital investment (printing presses, TV studios etc) and economically dependent on the owners of all that capital for their livelihoods.  And those owners have a view about what truth they want spoken. So journalists don't do as much of that truth-speaking as they might.  In the modern age it is bloggers, whose work requires almost no up-front investment, who are prepared to take on vested interests, more than journalists.  It was a citizen with a mobile phone who told us what happened to Ian Tomlinson, not a TV news crew. It was a blogger with a leaked email who broke the Damien McBride story.    

Investigative journalism, done well, is different. If that dies, we are all in trouble. But a lot of what passes for journalism in the mainstream media is dying out because it not longer serves a valuable social purpose.

The citizens of a country do not need journalists to tell them whether the services they receive meet their needs. They do not need journalists to tell them whether the economy is doing well.  And increasingly they do not need journalists to speak for them - not least because journalists increasingly rarely do.

The famous example of increased accountability for service delivery - the Public Expenditure Tracking Survey in Uganda which led to an increase in the money spent on schools there - did not depend on journalists breaking the story; and it did not require journalists to gather the information and simplify it for the public. Nor did journalists speak for the public.  The public understood well enough what the information meant, and they demanded change.

Here at aidinfo, we don't just believe in transparency, we believe that it is essential to get information published in an accessible way.  (In fact, quite a lot of information is already public if you know where to look.  It is just not in a form that can easily be used.)  By making the information available in a way that is consistent, comprehensive, comparable, and easy to access and manipulate, we will reduce the barriers to entry for people and organisations who want to play the intermediation role that James describes for journalists. When the barriers are lowered, all sorts of people with an interest can gather and interpret the information directly: political parties, parliamentarians and their researchers, civil society organisations, and individuals with a particular interest.   

Of course, journalists have a role to play, and nobody would be happier than me if they played it more. But I think James may be overstating the central role that journalists will play in the future. We need to invest much more in the demand side, but journalists and the mainstream media are likely to be less and less important.

James finishes with a plea for "a more coherent strategy that draws on all actors engaged in enhancing accountability of development spending" and "an accountability architecture that strategically matches money - or perhaps more accurately policy focus - with need in ways that include a media dimension."  In common with much of today's mainstream development thinking, this sounds to me like a very top-down, centralised approach to resource allocation and accountability.  We won't get better accountability by doing central evaluations and planning: we will get it by putting real power in the hands of the people who are supposed to benefit from aid.  I have a high degree of confidence that when they have that power, they will use it, whether or not we have a strategy.