This is a condensed and edited version of a speech in October by Alastair Campbell, the Government's director of communications and strategy, at the inaugural meeting of the Media Correspondents Association.
I want to focus in my opening remarks on the relations between not just the
Government and the media, but between politics and the media and how
that impacts on the political and democratic process. And first of all, I want
to give you an assessment of where I think we are as a Government. Though
we have lots more to do, and many problems facing us, objectively we are in
a strong position. We’ve got a strong economy, we have record low
unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates. We’ve got public services
finally getting the investment that people have said for years that they need.
We’ve got big reform programmes for health, education and criminal
justice. We’ve got welfare reform progressing. There is a sense that the UK
is stronger in the world and we have a prime minister who is respected and
influential around the world. A strong economy, delivery and leadership are
the main prerequisites for a strong political position.
Yet despite this strong political position we have a problem – turnout was low at the last election and there is considerable disaffection with politicians and with the political process. There is a sense of cynicism and apathy. I don’t think we should overstate it. We still have a thriving democracy of which the media is a very important part. But there’s no doubt there is a problem and, as the Prime Minister said in his conference speech, anybody who has an interest in democracy has a need to think about his or her role within it. And I think it’s important to emphasise this isn’t a job just for government or just for politicians.
There are five factors that explain where we are. The first is just a response, if you like, to broader cultural change. There is less deference to authority now; less tradition, such as the tradition of voting. There’s a more prosperous, more informed public, making far more choices in their daily lives; and all the time people are more assertive, more demanding, more questioning. And I think this is reflected in the media’s more aggressive, more questioning stance. I also think people are less tribal in a party political sense than they were. Many young people, in particular, see their political objectives now being met through pressure groups every bit as much as through political parties. And pressure groups exist to attack governments, to try to bring pressure to bear upon governments, rather than promote government and politicians.
The second factor is obviously the changing nature of the media. There’s much more of it. Twenty-odd years ago, when I started out as a trainee journalist, the media largely meant newspapers plus three terrestrial TV channels. There was limited national TV news, and regional radio was still in its infancy. Now we have five terrestrial TV channels and 24-hour news coverage on CNN, BBC and ITN. Sky News is on in most newsrooms. There is also an ever-expanding number of local radio stations, plus a huge number of free newspapers, an expanding ethnic media, specialist journals for every subject under the sun, the Internet, and a wealth of IT-related news outlets.
But the change is not just in the scale of the media, but also its size within that. The Times on a Saturday 25 years ago would probably have been around about 30 pages. The Times on a Saturday now has probably 300 pages of editorial, and that’s without counting some of the magazine products. There’s something I read recently, which was, if true, stunning: on the eve of the contest for the Tory leadership between Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath, which was 27 years ago, the Today programme didn’t have a single interview with Margaret Thatcher or any of her supporters. There was no Opposition spokesman on the programme to give Labour’s perspective of the contest. All they had was a single, straight, very respectful interview with Ted Heath, explaining why he wanted to remain leader of the Conservative Party despite having lost three out of four previous general elections. These days you can have four, five or six government ministers on the Today programme alone.
These changes have taken place in one of the most competitive media marketplaces in the world. I think many journalists would agree that in our national newspapers in particular, this competition has eaten into standards of accuracy, fairness and judgment. There’s frankly not that much massive news around most days, so papers do best, or feel that they do best, to adopt positions and postures. And in a noisy competitive marketplace, it usually means that the noisiest is likely to get heard the most. I also think there’s been a breakdown of the barriers between broadcasters, broadsheets and tabloids. I think, again, back to my day when there was a sense of three very separate areas: tabloids, broadsheets, broadcasters. Now they’re very much in the same marketplace for news – for example, some of the memoirs published recently saw bidding wars between tabloid and broadsheet. And it used to be that the press saw its job to keep its front pages away from television and radio. Now, one of the first things editors do is try to get their front pages round to Newsnight, BBC World and Sky so that the broadcasters are talking about them.
All this has led to huge assumptions being made within the media about what the public knows and what the public is following. Most people in the political and media bubble have got some sort of news medium going on all the time – Sky, Radio 5, whatever it might be. They read several newspapers. Some read all the newspapers. Yet most people are just dipping in and out of the papers. A huge number of people now actually don’t read newspapers, and if they do, they’re not really interested in the news at all, which I think is a potential problem for your industry. Yet there are few places in newspapers for explanation.
I think there is an inaccurate assumption within the media that there is a base knowledge of what stories are about in the first place. The separation of news and comment has effectively gone in most newspapers. News is now largely comment and agenda in the press. And on TV and radio, far more time is now being given to mediated “commentary by experts”, and far less to politicians, who are, in any event, deemed by the broadcasters just to be toeing their party line. So, again without overstating it, I’d say there is more media and there is a lot more noise, but that there is less understanding by the public of what’s actually happening within the political debate. And that inevitably, I think, leads to more cynicism.
The third fact is the changing nature of politics. The end of the Cold War meant an end to the superpower balance and I think a lot of old divisions and assumptions died with that. At home, left/right-wing divisions are far less clear than they were. New Labour is, in part, about that. There are people who have found it difficult to adapt to that and what it means for a new kind of debate. If you actually look at the recent party conferences, all of them in their own way were about trying to bring some sort of sense to the definition of a changing relationship between the state and the individual. The political terrain has changed. And there is a second element to the change in politics in that we became far more professional in adapting to the demands of the media. As we got more professional, at first the media liked it and thought it was a good thing. But subsequently, it led to alienation between the media and us. I think they were irritated by our professionalism – trying to get simple messages heard in a complex, noisy media environment was difficult for us, and our professionalism and success as a political party led to considerable media alienation. They used to love our “branding” of New Labour. Now they profess to hate it and, for some, their view of it contaminates their view of everything we do.
The fifth factor in our role is this, and here it is important to give just a sense of the history of Labour Party and media relations. I think it is fair to say that if you were Nye Bevan or Neil Kinnock, or other historical figures in the Labour Party, you would think you had a very, very rough deal from the press – I don’t think any objective analyst would say otherwise. And it’s fair to say we were determined not to let Tony Blair get the same treatment as they did. So we did make a concerted effort to get a better dialogue with some parts of the media where before there had been pretty much none. This was of course about reaching their readers. It was also about preventing destruction by a hostile press. Competence with the media conveyed a general competence that was important to us in establishing ourselves as a competent Government. Without it, we could have been heavily undermined from the start. In the event, we had what was described as the longest honeymoon in history. I would argue that what we were doing was the basics needed for a professional media operation for a major organisation. But therein lay the seeds of spin.
The consequences were greater than we anticipated. We appeared, and perhaps we were, over-controlling, manipulative. People stopped trusting what we had to say. I think what we underestimated was the extent to which the changes we made in our relationships with the media, and in getting our media act together, would itself become an issue and a story. That’s in part because we carried on for too long in Government with some of the tactics of opposition. When you’ve got parts of the media that are, I’m afraid, more interested in process than they are in policy and outcomes, that gave them an excuse to focus on that. The centre of gravity moved from a position of basic support for the dynamic of New Labour to basic hostility, or at best, grudging recognition. I think this was due in part to a large section of the media post-1997 feeling there was no opposition, that the Tories for whatever reasons had just become useless. There was a growing sense that it was their [the media’s] job actually to stand up and try to do the job the Opposition was failing to do – conveniently overlooking the fact that you are supposed to get elected to do that. That has become a problem, not only for us, but for all people with an interest in the democratic process.
That said two things. One, media self-obsession. Secondly, our failings in adapting to this new discourse. There was a sense that politics and the media were involved in a dialogue from which the public was becoming excluded. It was as if something was going on that had absolutely nothing to do with them and with their lives. While I am willing to accept our share of the blame for this situation, it is not unreasonable to point out these other important factors responsible for this disconnection: a hostile and cynical media, a more demanding public living in a culture of immediacy, and less trust in established institutions. But whoever or whatever is responsible for getting us to where we are, in the end we have to take lead responsibility for getting us out of here. For if the public comes to believe all communication is spin, no matter how much we may want to blame the media, it is ultimately our problem, a problem for our political culture.
Just as with the creation of New Labour, our answer lay in change and modernisation. Part of the answer lies in far more direct communication by the Prime Minister and other ministers, and both us and the media being more relaxed about having a range of style and voices, a more grown-up, more honest dialogue that encourages greater accessibility, accountability and interaction. And that’s not just about going on television and radio, but also about the conduct of politics itself. The Prime Minister does a lot of regional visits, and every single one he does now will build in private sessions with public service professionals to go through the whole public service agenda. Sometimes it will be a small gathering and you could say to me, well, what’s the point of just taking to, say, 16 people? But in fact, applied across government, across a parliament, it’s amazing actually how many people you can reach. We shouldn’t think of communications as going only through the media. Also, if a minister is engaging with the public about some of the difficult choices we face, or admitting difficulties and shortcomings, the media should be able to hear that debate without every slight difference of emphasis leading to headlines proclaiming splits, gaffes and fiascos.
Of course nothing matters more than delivery in all this, and that matters to our communications strategy too. Gerald Kaufman has this line: “In government, you wake up and say: ‘What am I going to do today?’; in opposition, you wake up and say: ‘What am I going to say today?’” There’s a big difference. In opposition, what you say is actually all you’ve got. In government, you can communicate through change, through policy. The economy, the reality of public services, foreign policy, these are the issues on which, ultimately, the Government is going to be judged. That means you can worry far less about day-to-day media presentation. We reached a point where Number 10 briefings – especially a lot of the briefings I was doing – were becoming news items in their own right, partly because it was me who was doing them. That’s why I pulled out and I think that was the right thing to do.
Another aspect of change is the Government’s relations to Parliament. I always suspected that the line was going to be run at us that we didn’t take Parliament seriously. That was inevitable given that we had a media that for some time had been able to live off knife-edge votes in the House of Commons and then suddenly had a government with a majority of 179. Parliament wasn’t going to make news in the same way it had previously. I think something we should have recognised earlier was that a majority of that size gives you, if anything, a greater sense of responsibility to be trying to do more to generate coverage of Parliament and coverage of the debates within Parliament. So the PM is doing more statements, as well as appearing before the Liaison Committee. We’ve also been looking for more depth and engagement in his interview programme, which is why he spent 70 minutes with Jeremy Paxman, for example.
Perhaps the most important change is the Prime Minister’s press conferences. He has always done lots of media, but to have one per month, with questions on anything, should allow a better dialogue. There has already been a good public response and – famous last words – the word spin has featured less in recent weeks and months. We have supplemented these press conferences with ministers doing more on-camera briefings. Some [media] people complained in the first instance that there was no need for a spokesman to be at these briefings at all, given that we now had a minister. Then you had others asking questions either about the size of the room not being big enough for their needs, or saying they’d rather go back to the days when you could just sort of have a bit of a laugh. So we are in something of a no-win situation. But I think this idea of twice daily, on-the-record briefings with the prime minister’s spokesman, plus ministers out there doing briefings and taking questions, hopefully will have real impact. It was wrong that only a very small number of overseas journalists could come, and that specialist writers didn’t, and with a bit of give and take the new system should work for both of us. The change in our communications, contrary to media spin, is not simply the New Spin. The changes have been made because unless we raise the levels of political debate, it will be harder to change Britain and that, in the end, is why we all work the hours we do and take the pressures we take. Good communication is central to any programme of progressive change.
When I was at the Mirror – I won’t make any bones about it now and I didn’t then – I was a committed political journalist. But I felt I was practising a minority sport. On most days, the Thatcher Government could count on The Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and The Times and I don’t think that was healthy. I also felt I had a sort of respect for politics and the political process and I felt there was an alternative that I’d speak up for. Today there is just a fostering of cynicism and disillusion about politics, and in some quarters, I think, about pretty much everything else as well. And all the time the right wing, which has always in the media shouted louder than the left, continues to pump out this nonsense that somehow we’ve got the media in our pocket. Journalists are an absolutely vital bridge between politicians and the public, and if journalists see their role as simply presenting the negative, that a story’s only a decent story if it’s a bad story, then that bridge exists only to be blown up. People begin to lose faith in politics. But while it’s true that respect for politics is lower, it is worth just bearing in mind that government and politicians remain more trusted to tell the truth than the press. The last Euro Monitor survey asked the public whether it trusts the press or doesn’t. The UK distrust level is way, way, higher than anywhere else in the EU.
So there are issues for the media as well as for us – and this applies particularly to the press. TV and the radio, by and large, still remain reasonably trusted, certainly on a par with and superior to most European countries, though like the press they struggle to hold people’s attention. Perhaps it is time for the press to think seriously about how it should address the problems and for the debate within the media about the media to become less superficial, less defensive, less clubbish. We both have a problem with trust and turnout. I have tried to give you a flavour of the selfcritical appraisal we’ve taken in trying to address it. But it’s something that would benefit from the media looking honestly at its role, too.