In ‘The Power and the Story’, John Lloyd shows how an embattled profession is fighting back.

In 2003, the Southern Metropolitan Daily in Guangzhou, China, published a daring investigation into the death of Sun Zhigang, a migrant worker picked up by police for lacking proper documents and then dumped into a detention centre. The Daily’s revelations triggered popular outrage that resulted in significant systemic reform. It was a time of rising confidence and achievement for independent investigative reporting in China, a risky endeavour for editors who must continually test the state’s tolerance. Since then, however, the space for such journalism has narrowed greatly, as President Xi Jinping has consolidated power and pressured civil society. These days, as John Lloyd writes in The Power and the Story, Chinese reporters have learnt that they can occasionally “swat flies” with their investigative work, but not “beat tigers” such as security services or leaders of the Communist party.

The regression is in line with worldwide trends. During the 1990s and mid-2000s, Lloyd reminds us, professional and independent journalism expanded in the developing world and formerly communist states, even under authoritarian regimes. Yet during the past five years, with strongmen and populism on the march, that progress has been reversed.

The Power and the Story presents an intelligent, nuanced and well-documented survey of global public interest reporting under pressure from dictatorships, desperate market competition and technological disruption. Lloyd is interested more in traditional, professional journalism than in media or communication theory, a welcome emphasis at a time when so much media criticism seems infatuated with the transformational potential of social media and new technologies. Of course, we truly are in the midst of another transformational period in the structure of communication. Yet Lloyd recognises that journalism’s claims on democratic legitimacy as a check on state and corporate power transcend the technology of the day.

Lloyd is a longtime contributor to the Financial Times and co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford. He declares his clear if qualified support for the centuries-old Anglo-American inheritance of independent fact-based reporting and truth-seeking, however imperfect and constrained by human fallibility these endeavours may be. Yet he also accounts for the many failures of American and British journalism and reviews the strengths of other traditions, such as the European continent’s more explicitly ideological news reporting. He writes with sophistication about recent struggles to advance serious public interest journalism in such diverse places as Egypt, Ethiopia, Italy, India and China.

The book includes a chapter on Donald Trump but was largely reported before his norm-shattering Tweetstorms and continuous rhetorical assaults on the integrity of American media became a presidential reality. The big question in this time of “alternative facts” is what sort of future lies ahead for the very idea of professional, evidence-based news and investigative reporting. There are economic pressures, of course; in many industrialised democracies, the advertising-based model that made robust professional reporting viable for so long has all but collapsed. Televised or video news is now entering its own existential disruption, caused by the spread of mobile devices and the decline of appointment viewing. Yet the picture is not all bleak, as Lloyd’s spirited, convincing defence of public broadcasting in Britain, Germany and other countries reminds us. Paying audiences of serious commercial news outlets are growing, offering a new foundation for sustainable, professional newsrooms such as the ones that produce this newspaper, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In the medium run, perhaps more worrisome than economics is the assault on journalism’s legitimacy and constitutional protections. If feckless American courts and legislatures follow Trump’s urgings and roll back press protections, in particular as they apply to journalists who report on classified information, this will only encourage despots abroad to suppress their own media further.

In many ways, Trump’s attacks on the press have served to strengthen American newsrooms, clarifying why their reporting on conflicts of interest or the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election are vital to the country’s constitutional design. Stories about the Russia probe, for example, that Trump may denounce as “fake news” or as illegal leaks, are no doubt seen by some FBI agents as necessary to protect the integrity of their work, by making some of their findings transparent as they go along, even as the president threatens to shut them down. The sense of clear mission for journalists in the Trump era is welcome after a decade of confusion caused by digital disruption and the decline of newspapers.

Yet there is no ground for complacency. America’s celebrated First Amendment jurisprudence is relatively young. It was only in 1964, in Times v. Sullivan, that the US Supreme Court laid out a libel standard for public figures that remains the world’s most press-friendly. It was only in 1971, in the Pentagon Papers case, that the Supreme Court set a standard making it very difficult for the government to stop a news organisation from publishing stories on national security grounds. State laws that allow journalists to protect sources or resist government subpoenas can be rolled back by local populists mimicking Trump. In the end, as The Power and the Story describes so well in diverse national settings, the health of an independent press is inseparable from the state of all democratic and civil rights.