On the attack - Media, Politics and the Public Good
John Lloyd explains why the media no longer acts as an inquiring check on the excesses of the political class and how this affects public services
A new phrase was recently added to media demonology. In a speech for the Reuters Institute, Tony Blair, in one of his last public speeches, described the British news media as “feral beasts”. In the nature of the media, it is already an established truth that the Prime Minister leaves office whinging that journalism – all of it, all of the time – has become like a flesh-tearing beast. And so it is important to recall what he actually said: that is, what was the context – that underused practice in journalism.
In one passage in the speech, Blair said that today’s ferocious competitive pressure in the news media, coupled with the traditional oppositionist stance of the UK press, had produced a series of consequences: first, “scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down”; second, that “attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement”; and third, that “… the fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever before, hunt in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.” There was also a fourth. He said that “commentary had become more important than the news itself”.
The context is clear: the media do not tear flesh constantly. They are “feral” when a big scandal breaks, for example John Prescott’s affair with his diary secretary. They are feral because the news media are hunting desperately for meagre information which the people at the centre of the affair wish to keep hidden: and they swarm like hounds around the rabbit – giving no quarter, showing no pity, knowing no moderation. It was a deliberate phrase in the written version of the speech; but it carried more meaning than Blair could know. For it is a common view among journalists that the news media should be feral: that if anything, the media have been too soft on politicians and other public figures; that criticism and revelation should be constant and unremitting. Only thus, so the reasoning goes, can journalism retain its independence. Only if the media sinks their teeth into the ankles of public figures constantly can they avoid being led about on a leash.
Really? I want to question that. The assumption that press and politics are locked into a gladiatorial combat that only one can win probably has an intended consequence. It necessarily places the public in the position of spectators who, as did the Romans when watching the games in the Circus Maximus, are called on to applaud or boo – or signify their desire that the victim of the day finally be slaughtered, or let off. The theory is that, in aggressively challenging politicians, other leaders and those responsible for key public services, the journalist is acting in place of the public. That can be true: there is a public value, at times, in an aggressive challenge to those who would hide behind official position and obfuscation, even downright lies. But the moment must be chosen: an automatic assumption that the attack mode is the only one is a one-size fits all approach to a practice – journalism – that has many ways of making the public world comprehensible. It is also vital to consider how this dynamic impacts on public services, which has, after all, been at the centre of New Labour’s domestic concerns to date. And let’s not forget the people responsible for delivering public services. How does the relationship between politics and the media affect their morale?
Where is the public in all of this?
A fight to the death between public figures and journalists will often disempower more than it empowers – since the rules of the game and the grounds on which they fight are known intimately to the combatants but less well, or maybe not at all, to the readers and viewers. Stephen Coleman, professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, and the UK’s foremost authority on the internet, says: “I think we should move on from feral beasts, and think of the audience. Where is the public left in all of this? In part, what they do is either disengage from politics and the media or work their way round the media, using the internet, making up their own public universe.”
The news media, collectively, constitute less of a feral beast and more of a schizophrenia. They claim to be a pillar of democracy: but they are also a business. The first of these is what journalists appeal to when they define their social role; the second provides their living and profits (at times), or status and influence (at other times) for their owners. In a major speech on the issue two years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, put it this way: “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.”
When Blair gave his speech, the subsequent debate (in which he was savaged by most of the feral beasts) was a dialogue on two levels, which passed each other by. Blair spoke of the effect that commercial pressures had on media behaviour – treating the public as consumers and the information as a commodity; while most of the commentators thundered that he was seeking to weaken the pillar of democracy role.
For the latter role to be credible, the news media must do or be three things. They must provide the information that citizens need in order to understand the public world, which includes a strong dose of holding power of all kinds to account; they must provide a space for the free and robust circulation of differing points of view; and they must have some standard against which trust in their information and opinion can be measured.
Trust is at the heart of this. The Archbishop of Canterbury says that the current media enjoys “embarrassingly low levels of trust”, and argues that claims about what is in the public interest need closer scrutiny. “There is, ”he says, “a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable.”
How does this impact on what has been the centre of New Labour’s domestic concerns – public services? For if journalism is to claim to be an indispensable guide to the public sphere, it is that part of the public world which most touches most people – schools, hospitals, pensions, public infrastructure, social services – that most needs illuminating. In this instance, it seems to me the record is not outstanding, at least not in the national media.
What about government achievements?
One of the constant complaints of government – it tends to come, in different forms but with the same content, from all governments – is that it does not reflect sufficiently their achievements. In a talk with Philip Gould, the pollster and advisor to New Labour since the late 1980s, Gould told me that, “people have begun to see the results of [public] spending come through. But we’re having the worst press we’ve ever had. We’re supposed to be liars and bastards. The coverage bears no relation to reality”.
Any journalist must treat such claims with scepticism: blaming the messenger is a strategy always popular, and it is as old as the exercise of authority. But a chief information officer in a government department (who would not be named) told me that, as a broadcast journalist, she had been sent out with the order to “get a bad story on the National Health Service” – preferably in Tony Blair’s constituency, or that of the then Health Secretary, Alan Milburn. The former journalist had got the story – but only, she said, at the cost of considerable distortion of the facts. “I found, in the end, a senior nurse willing to talk, with a complaint about some supplies in the hospital she worked”.
These conversations took place before the last general election: since then, the torrent of criticism unleashed upon the government has meant that there is no longer any need to look hard to have someone in the NHS voice criticism on the airwaves. Senior managers in the service, however, continue to believe that the negative coverage – of such difficult issues as the new computer systems – have made their jobs much harder and that the complaints of doctors and staff, mostly about pay and conditions, have been inflated. It is certainly the case that waiting times for operations have greatly shortened, that pay in the Health Service has greatly increased, that many new hospitals and schools have been or are being built and that exam results are improving. Yet it is hard to find a narrative in the news media.
In a conversation with a leading health professional, I was told that the effect of negative headlines on NHS staff is two fold. First, it demoralises by making it appear as if improvements were not worth making. And second, it encourages some to join in the denigration and complaint – on the assumption that the more complaint, the more money will come from the state. At worst, it forces out talent: Richard Granger, the Deloitte’s consultant who ran the vast NHS information technology programme – the biggest in the world – has said he will be retiring later this year, complaining that, “The things that are going well are the things you don’t hear about”.
Celebrity endorsement
Politicians and managers, who say they despair of getting fair coverage, resort to the well-tested strategies of the entertainment business: they enlist celebrities to dramatise the issue. This route has been trodden by NGOs working in foreign aid: many have “ambassadors”, film or rock stars who benefit in publicity from being sent to do good, and in so doing assist the cause of the NGOs with which they are associated. Jamie Oliver’s campaign to raise the standard of school dinners was a rare foray into the domestic arena: there will be more.
Celebrities are now – it seems – an inevitable part of large projects: they can attract attention, but may also, in the longer term, excite cynicism because their aim is largely to attract attention to themselves, and their tendency is to move on to another high point in their career once the attention wanes. Gordon Brown’s hope before he became Prime Minister – that the celebrity culture was beginning to fade – may mean a lesser emphasis on this on the government’s part in the future.
The influence of the internet
The emerging world of the internet is at once antidote and complication. In his “feral beasts” speech, Blair said that “it used to be thought – I include myself in this – that help [to redress the balance of a media thought to be unfair] was on the horizon. New forms of media would provide outlets to bypass the increasingly shrill tenor of the existing media. In fact, the new outlets have proved to be even more pernicious”.
Here is a politician looking for the internet to allow more space for the messages he wishes the media to carry – to find that the messages they carry, which include gossip, character assassination and uninhibited and often vicious criticism, are worse than the old: less inhibited, more personal, more ugly. The internet, in part because it is unregulated, reflects more closely than the mass media the state of humanity itself: that is, it can be both kind and cruel, generous and mean spirited, trading in hot scandal and in cool analysis. Blair’s lament is heartfelt but futile: in a free society, a medium like the internet will not be guided – instead it explodes in every direction made possible by the human mind.
Tim Gardam, the former director of programmes at Channel Four, believes that “the internet has destroyed the old certainties. Its communication trajectory is not vertical but horizontal – networks of conversation threading their way through loosely configured arguments where anyone can have their say. This is a different paradigm, where communication depends not on the power of the message or the charisma of the deliverer but on how one manages the conversation that flows from it”.
A talk while writing this article with Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for Grimsby and once a TV journalist, revealed something of the same disappointment. Mitchell said that when the BBC launched a parliamentary channel, broadcasting in real time, he had thought this would return parliamentary debates and committee hearings to the centre of national life. “Now nobody watches: a high audience is 50,000. People, given the choice, don’t want to watch politics: there is so much else that’s more fun”.
Mitchell summarises the challenge now facing the news media. Is the public becoming more and more disengaged from the public agenda? Is it now less informed, as a whole, about the nature of the governance of the country? How much is the fault of the media? And if it is their “fault, what can they do about it?
For me, the answer is relatively straightforward. We in the media arrogate to ourselves the position of a guardian of the public good – since we hold power to account. In many ways, we are doing that less well – less as the world becomes more complex. Our task, if we are to continue to claim status as a pillar of democracy, is to find ways of reconnecting. Or we become simply a market – like that for chocolate bars.
JOHN LLOYD is director of Journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. He is also a contributing editor at the Financial Times.
