The press is suffering a major crisis of trust, and continues to draw into that crisis the institutions we use to govern ourselves and to scrutinise the way power is used on our behalf. Government ministers and MPs share the lowly standing of the press — we don’t trust those we’ve chosen to exercise power for us; and we don’t trust those who tell us how the chosen are doing it. That cannot be good. And while many factors, commercial, political and social, have helped bring it about, it’s for the press to decide whether it acknowledges the crisis, and if it does, what it will do about it. History tells us that, collectively, it is likely to do little — which, if the press is to reestablish trust, throws the responsibility on individual members of the profession to re-think and re-state what makes a good journalist.

This crisis of trust cannot be any great surprise to anyone. Why should anyone trust a practitioner of any craft or profession who doesn’t seem to know and is unable or unwilling to articulate what that craft or profession is for? Or who wears indifference to the effects of that craft as a badge of honour? Or who seems to relish denial of responsibility, playing the romantic maverick, happy to be identified only as someone who kicks against authority, just out to make trouble and get up people’s noses?

Journalists will never be trusted to the same degree as doctors. But sections of the British press don’t even aspire to the least demanding Hippocratic dictum: “Do no harm”. The good journalist could once be defined in full by excellence in the skills of the craft. News-sense. Curiosity. Persistence. Toughness. A nose for a fib. The ability to grasp the big truths and the humility to let them go again when the facts don’t fit. Ruthlessness with fact. Accuracy and the skills to deliver it. And contacts: the ability to make and keep the best ones, even when you’re sceptical of his or her motives. Excellence in all these craft skills remains necessary for a good journalist. But they’re no longer sufficient — not if the press is to play any role in resolving the crisis.

In truth, craft skills alone never were sufficient — though that was when most of the British press took it for granted that there was a serious and honest purpose to their craft. They believed in the purpose to which their craft was applied, and were able to articulate that purpose without pomposity, embarrassment or irony. Once, the greater part of the press wouldn’t have dissented from the proposition that it had a political, social and even moral purpose. And once, it didn’t stretch the principles and beliefs on which a free press is founded beyond the limits of what those principles and beliefs could ever truly mean.

Too many journalists and too much of the press are now unable to articulate a purpose and, worse, they demonstrate a wilful disregard of their responsibility for the dysfunction of public life. At best, they decline to acknowledge any role at all in contributing to public good. At worst, they undermine the institutions by which the public makes decisions about itself to achieve that good. The paradox is that the institution it has most undermined is itself.

Suffocated by spin

Where news journalism hasn’t been marginalised, public policy and political reporting have, for much of the past decade, been suffocated by spin and counter-spin. For the most part, such journalism has become an exercise in cheerleading. Where it is not, it’s an exercise in deconstruction — where the assumption is that the truth is hidden by the words, not revealed by them. Readers have caught the mood; nothing is to be trusted. No political party or leader, nor any one newspaper, has been the single focus of that mistrust. The whole network of press and politics has become increasingly remote and removed. A system peopled by self-referential cynics who are too clever by half.

The main players have engaged in a debate of sorts — but one that’s had much in common with a street brawl. Soon after he left Downing Street in late 2003, Alastair Campbell, speaking at a Foreign Press Association event, accused the press of:

“...turning people’s natural and healthy scepticism into a near phobia of politics driven by ... relentless negativity”.

“You’ve put newspaper propagandists in charge of the press machine. You shouldn’t appoint red-top political editors to be in charge of civil service press machines.”

But there are few things that make British journalists more uneasy — and more inclined to pomposity — than talking about their craft in terms that relate it to the public good. The American press, while not free of a similar crisis, is in a different place, with bodies such as the Committee for Concerned Journalists, and the Public Journalism movement — as well as journalism departments that link the study of journalism to that of philosophy and politics — ensuring an extended debate.

One reason for this is that a free American press is — like the American Constitution and in contrast to the British constitution — a deliberate act. It’s a quasi-constitutional counter-weight in a balanced system of selfgovernment. In 1822, James Madison, one of the founding fathers and a former President of the United States, wrote:

“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power.”

The debate here is shaped differently. When Charles Clarke was Labour Party chairman, his view of the press was that parts of it:

“...have done their best to bring democratic politics into disrepute”.

“...too many politicians are sad, sordid, pathetic inadequate wimps with private lives that make ordinary people’s stomachs churn”.

Whether the press likes it or not, its future, as a serious journalistic enterprise, is chained to the health of our representative democracy and our public institutions. The danger for journalists should be clear: if interest and participation in self-government and effective institutions become a minority activity, then so does journalism.

Earlier this year, the Government paused and re-thought its role in its relationship with the public and the press. The Phillis Report set out what an impartial, information-based government communication machine should look like. At about the same time, though for different reasons, the BBC paused and re-thought, too. Ron Neil’s report, in part a response to Lord Hutton’s criticisms of the BBC, refined and re-stated what public service news broadcasting should look like. The British press has done nothing similar, in spite of its far greater crisis of trust. If and when it does so, the answer won’t lie in regulation, nor interference in the newspaper market, but in an understanding that craft skills alone and a “nose for a story” are no longer enough to make a good journalist. A solipsistic disregard for the effects of the craft will not be part of the answer.

Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at New York University and one of the high priests of the Public Journalism movement, puts it like this:

“Journalists are members of the political community, citizens themselves, and not bystanders to our public life... journalism is about recognising this truth, and trying to tell the truth at the same time.”

Britain needs journalists who read from both sides of every balance sheet and who know that a partial truth — in both senses of the word — is more lethal than a blatant untruth. Above all, it needs a press that is not stubbornly indifferent to the power it wields over the public sphere and one that chooses to exercise that power for the common good.