The New Nation - Internet Edition

Phillip Knightley

Three major developments in the history of British journalism have taken place almost unremarked.

The first involves the way British newspapers and television covered the attacks in Mumbai; the second concerns the reporting of the financial crisis and the third, although it happened in the United States, shows the way the future of English-language journalism is developing.

The Mumbai attacks were fast-moving stories so there is some excuse for the confused reporting. But there is no excuse for the way the British press put a symbolic Union Jack on all its stories. All the British victims were automatically heroes, but there is a limit to the mileage to be had from heroes alone.

So the attackers were also British, according to the tabloid press. The Mirror reported that two of the attackers were from Leeds, two from Bradford and one from Hartlepool. "Butchers of Mumbai are Brits", announced the Express. But they weren't. Within hours, news bulletins announced there was no British connection. OK. But the Mail on Sunday said that UK cash funded the operation. No confirmation of this either.

Desperate for some link to Britain, the Telegraph said that the attackers "knew what they were doing". They were not attacking India, or Hinduism, or ostentatious wealth, or western values. "They were striking at a place that symbolises former British power."

Strangely, the one link with Britain that did exist was quickly denied by the Foreign Office. It was reported that the attackers in the Taj Hotel had asked guests at gunpoint, not if they were Hindu or Muslim, but if they were British or American, a significant fact because it demonstrated the anti-Western nature of the attacks. Not so, said the Foreign Office.

But I personally saw a guest from the Taj, an Italian, interviewed on TV and he said the attackers had specifically asked him this question. When he replied that he was Italian, he was told, "OK, then you can go." The British reporting of the financial crisis has shown a failure to keep the public informed. Headlines have been alarmist, to say the least. "Terror Stalks the Stock Markets", "Collapse Costs London Councils £200m" and "Billions Lost in Crash" can, according to media commentator Peter Wilby, risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

But Wilby would rather risk this than for the press to behave as it did when there was a financial crisis thirty years ago. The "The British banking system was close to systemic failure. Then, as now, NatWest was in dire straits. Then, as now, the Bank of England poured in public money.

But the drama was almost entirely behind closed doors. NatWest simply denied it was in trouble, and it was believed. To this day no one knows for sure how much the crisis cost the taxpayer."

In other words, in those days, Northern Rock would have been sorted out before the public - and particularly the depositors - knew a thing about it.

My third example of what is happening to English-language journalism is from the United States. Pasadena Now, a website in Pasadena, California, sacked five staff journalists and outsourced their jobs to six people in India. The US journalists were earning £400 a week. The Indian journalists doing the Americans' jobs will be paid £5 per thousand words.

The publisher and editor of the website, James MacPherson, said the American staff had sat at their desks typing on a keyboard made in China and looking at a monitor made in Malaysia and still didn't understand outsourcing journalism. The Indian journalists write features and news from information they are sent, or get off the web. They even report Pasadena Council meetings via video stream but this has had its drawbacks - the Indian reporters missed two council members walking out in a protest; the video camera did not face that way.

MacPherson added, "Journalists seem to believe that their job is alchemy, that it has some mystical element to it. The truth is that it is a process, that can be broken down and re-engineered."

Dean Singleton, the head of Media New Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers across America, said his company was considering outsourcing everything, including one Indian news desk for all its papers. He said most pre-production work was already carried out in India, which had cut costs by 65 per cent. Is this the future?