Editorial
We’ll always have Paris
Truth and balance are being swamped by scandal and soundbites
Say what you like about Tony Blair’s glibness and insincerity, but in one of his last speeches as British Prime Minister he spoke with a depth of feeling it is hard to doubt. His subject: the changing relationship between politics and the media.
As cynics have already observed, that’s one thing Blair should know all about. His 10-year leadership of Britain became synonymous with PR spin and media manipulation. To his credit, he acknowledged some complicity in that, and insisted that he was not whingeing about the media. The speech, he said, was not a complaint – it was an argument.
In essence, the argument is that, with the explosive growth of electronic technology, the world of communications has radically altered. The news schedule is now 24/7 and the media, says Blair, are increasingly and to a dangerous degree driven by “impact”, as each channel or paper strives to stand out from the daily news pack. And politicians in turn feed the beast: a new backbench MP, says Blair, is more likely to issue a press release than make a speech in Parliament. In the process, truth and balance are being swamped by scandal and soundbites.
Convinced that the relationship between public life and media has been seriously damaged, the now ex-PM offers no specific solutions, other than saying that the regulatory framework supposedly governing the way the media operate will have to be re-addressed. But, for the issues it raises, his speech is worth reading.
So too is the rebuttal by British Sunday Times columnist Simon Jenkins, who witheringly takes Blair’s argument apart. There’s nothing new in fierce media competition, he says – no matter what the technology – and in any case, “It is not the press’s job to pick and choose which policy to approve, which minister to ‘lay off’ or which manifesto pledge quietly to bury. The press’s job is to be indiscriminate, hounding and muck-raking. Let these people out of your sight for a minute and they are behind the woodshed going through your wallet.”
Stirring stuff. But it doesn’t answer Blair’s points about balance being obliterated by shock-horror-crisis journalism, and stories distorted for the sake of lurid headlines. Blair is right, too, in this: the internet explosion (every day, he says, another 120,000 blogs are launched) has got traditional media scrambling to keep up. Stories break in seconds rather than hours. And this new dimension in the ether is far less regulated than the old. In fact, it’s not really regulated at all, other than by the market.
Our own traditional media have certainly come a long way, as the picture across pages 30-31 of this Listener shows. The parliamentary journalists in almost military formation at a prime ministerial press conference in 1957 look as though they were taking orders rather than asking penetrating questions.
No one would wish us back in that era, when the politicians had it pretty much all their own way. They still have enormous power to control the way an issue is spun. As Jenkins rightly says, “Politics does not give the press an inch except when trying to bribe it. Nor should the press give an inch in return.”
It’s a question of degree. Does every tiny bit of political dirt dug up by Investigate magazine have to spark a media feeding frenzy? Should the main TV news bulletins lead with the court appearance of Paul Holmes’s stepdaughter? Fair enough to cover the story, but the lead item? Ahead of the expulsion of New Zealand’s high commissioner from Fiji, a crash landing at Blenheim airport, a major political split in Palestine?
One can only salute American television newsreader Mika Brzezinski, who refused, on air, to lead her bulletin with the news of Paris Hilton’s release from jail. Again, she wasn’t objecting to the story being covered; just the weight given it. She felt strongly that the bulletin should have led with the news that Senator Richard Lugar, a longtime supporter of George W Bush, had called on the US to change course in Iraq: a development so significant that it could literally save lives.
People will probably always be fascinated, to one degree or another, by the lives of the powerful and famous. In that sense, we’ll always have Paris, or people like her, because the publicity about them satisfies a vicarious need. We as readers and viewers can still choose, however, the extent to which we have Paris, and Millie, and cheap headlines made out of hype and prurience.
