One November night the Prime Minister summoned his press secretary to
the Cabinet Room, demanding to know how an evening paper had been able
to reveal some of the contents of the Budget speech before the Chancellor
had told the Commons. Reluctantly, the advisor – Francis Williams, a former
editor of the Daily Herald – said it seemed that the Chancellor had
talked to the press. “Talked to the Press?” said the astounded Prime
Minister. “Why on earth did he want to talk to the press?” The incident, in
1947, cost Hugh Dalton his career in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour
government.
A new millennium is under way, but the Prime Minister and his close colleagues are as distrustful of the media as Attlee ever was. Much criticism of the Government, said Party chairman Charles Clarke recently, “is pious and hypocritical, sometimes entirely manufactured, coming from parts of the media which themselves have done their best to bring democratic politics into disrepute. The persistent demeaning of politics and diminishing of those engaged in politics inevitably has the effect of reducing support for democratic politics.”
It is tempting to dismiss Clarke’s article in The Times as expressing the paranoia which overcomes administrations at mid-term, to insist that it is not part of the media’s role to support a government, to point out that a press more concerned with democratic processes would have not so easily allowed Clarke to forget that although Tony Blair was within his rights to bring him into the Cabinet, as Minister without Portfolio, the title of Labour Party Chair was not in the Prime Minister’s giving. But Clarke’s broadside is almost certainly a pre-emptive strike in a government campaign to curb what it sees as the excesses of the press. It is a campaign Downing Street believes may have to be fought right up to the next General Election (and certainly throughout the run-up to the referendum on the euro, when the hostile parts of the press will deploy their big batteries).
During the summer it became obvious that No.10’s media strategy for the conflict would be a two-pronged attack: on one hand the old lobby system being eroded by media briefings, with the Prime Minister on the podium facing a mixed bag of specialist reporters, provincial press and foreign corespondents; on the other, the Prime Minister in the witness’s chair in front of the massed ranks of select committee chairmen, the majority of them, naturally, New Labour. The Prime Minister’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, insists that these initiatives have been introduced to achieve greater transparency. But they smack of the Government using Tony Blair, its greatest asset, to talk over the heads of the press directly to the public, by way of sound-bites transmitted through the reformed, but, we are assured, not at all dumbed-down, BBC of Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies and other TV and radio outlets. Thus the press, the Government presumably hopes, will be to a certain extent neutered and therefore, as The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh argued in the last issue of this journal, less of a thorn in its side.
It is worth noting at this point that the public mistrust of the press is currently matched only by its disparaging view of politicians and politics. The House, as well as the Government, perhaps, should consider putting itself in order – Alastair Campbell has in the past said he believes the Government is more spinned against than spinning, but he should reflect that the Westminster game has become stultified since 1997 by the constant use of spin by both sides. A change of bowling at both ends could be the answer and, indeed, there are those within Parliament who are anxious about the unsavoury reputation of politicians, as well as the low esteem in which the press is held, and are actively examining ways in which both situations can be addressed.
Yet what cannot be denied is that the public image of the press is comparable to that of an itinerant card sharp with considerably more up his sleeves than his elbows. In an interview in this issue of the BJR, the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre comments that national newspaper journalism has its faults: it is sometimes vulgar and intrusive, often inaccurate and frequently unfair, he concedes. He might have added that on occasion the press is terrifyingly irresponsible, but the condemnation of one of Fleet Street’s most successful editors is good enough to be going on with.
Away from the public eye, a number of senior Fleet Street figures are considering how best the press can come to its own rescue – a plan infinitely preferable to Parliament becoming involved in an across-the-board wash and brush-up for politics and the media combined. In his valedictory article in this special Editors and Editing issue, retiring editor Geoffrey Goodman points out that in editorials over the years he has argued that the response to criticism of the press can be answered only by journalists themselves being prepared to stand up and be counted.
If the pollsters have it right, only 20 per cent of people trust the written press, a smaller proportion than in any other European country. It is – at the risk of sounding pious – an essential part of a journalist’s duty to inform readers accurately, whether or not that suits the prejudices and policies of his proprietor, editor or even those same readers. Failure to give fair and accurate reports of politics will simply encourage a government, even in a non-repressive society such as Britain, to excesses of news management and help to push its own communication inadequacies into the sidelines of the debate.
The British Journalism Review, as an independent chronicler of the media, its strengths and its foibles, will continue stridently to urge the press to address the issue, following the long-ignored wisdom of Geoffrey Goodman. But we also call upon Parliament in general, and 10 Downing Street in particular, to realise that both great estates are suffering from neglect clearly evident to the naked eye of the country – and that a truce should be called while attempts are made to repair the damage.