THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry”. He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation”.

In a lecture to media professionals, politicians and church leaders at Lambeth Palace in London last night, Dr Williams wondered whether a balance could be struck between the professionalism of the classical media and the relative disorder of online communication.

Dr Williams also extended his wide-ranging critique of journalistic practice to the traditional media, arguing that there are “embarrassingly low levels of trust” in the profession and that claims about what is in the public interest need closer scrutiny. He called for a “more realistic, less fevered” approach to stories by journalists and added: “There is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable.”

He attacked the “high levels of adversarial and suspicious probing” that send the clear message that any kind of concealment means “guilty until proved innocent”, and he challenged journalists and broadcasters to attempt to regain lost public confidence.

Dr Williams said that the way news is packaged inhibits the public from becoming engaged with issues and understanding them.

He added: “There is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can’t — information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity.”

He conceded that journalism has its own pressures that help to determine the way stories emerge and added: “Journalistic communication is bound to a market model, whose ambiguities we have looked at; it is not going to change overnight by moral exhortation.” But he still called for a reassessment of news values. He said: “There are undoubtedly facts which would be of huge interest to a certain sort of public, but are not by any stretch of the imagination matters of public interest in the sense that not knowing them creates or prolongs a seriously unjust situation.”

The way most news is packaged and marketed tends to work against real engagement and deeper public understanding, creating a parallel universe remote from most people’s real experience, he said.

He added: “The assumptions of the way public interest is often appealed to in the present climate look less impressive under scrutiny. “If the profession is to perform its necessary job, some aspects of current practice are lethally damaging to it, and contribute to the embarrassingly low level of trust in the profession, especially in the UK, shown in most opinion polls.”

He recommended a greater willingness to correct mistakes in order to offset “the deep cynicism that is generated by a marked habit of reluctance to apologise or explain”. Dr Williams said that it was important not to scapegoat the media and praised the courage of journalists such as Frank Gardner of the BBC who have promoted “moral change and vision”.

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