Abstract
Political journalists who have become players not spectators should get off the pitch, says the ex-Shadow Secretary of State for Wales
The experience of waking up in the morning in June 2003 and being blasted out of sight by broadcasters about my modest suggestion that the rich could pay a bit more to reduce tax on the squeezed middle made me even more focused than I had been before on the problem of political spin. Regardless of party, what I called “the political class” was in a real bind through our failure to communicate anything properly or intelligently via a rapacious media. Being at the top of government, it was striking how little anything in print or broadcast by political journalists resembled reality and how much spin there was on most of their stories. Even the most highly respected political editors were under tremendous pressure to get a story that would create a news item, hopefully be reported by the Today programme, be picked up by fellow journalists and help to shape the day's news agenda. The best would sometimes be exasperated that what they judged were genuinely important stories no longer made it into even quality broadsheets, such was the modern media fad for personality, tittle-tattle and internal party conflict in reporting politics.
Top journalists have become not spectators or observers, but players themselves. Instead of watching the game, they are on the pitch interfering and helping shape its direction and its outcome. Instead of following the agenda, the media are increasingly setting it. Instead of reporting, political journalists are increasingly spinning. Intense competition means even broadsheets hugely over-hype. As I consistently experienced, sub-editors often wrote headlines and introductions which bore little resemblance to quoted words — and then the BBC and Sky transmitted this hype or spin as fact. The media have become a 24-hour, rolling, non-stop machine, with producers and editors of broadcast bulletins or newspapers crying out for a new angle to “take the story on”.
Politicians respond with media grids, texts, tweets, emails and pre-briefings of announcements — anything to wrestle back control of the frenzied news agenda — so journalists respond in kind by running leaks of half-developed government policies. With a reputation from the outset for tight media control and spin — in contrast to John Major's failed administration — our government wanted both to announce our policies and control the reporting. As I saw at close quarters, Alastair Campbell was brilliant at this task. But he became so aggressively phobic about his former profession of journalists that he ceased to be as effective. I remember finding him in his office in No. 10 one day wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with “media scum”. “I hate the tossers,” he said cheerfully.
People want facts to make up their own minds
A “Westminster bubble” inhabited by the political class and Westminster journalists conducts debate in a way and on terms that have little relevance to the average citizen. What people want from the media are facts and views on which to make up their own minds, not to have to peer through the fog of spin by the political cognoscenti. Increasingly, highly intelligent people from outside politics told me they just do not believe anything that is being reported any more. They do not like the way every attempt at open debate is turned into a split, or the way every microscopically different ministerial word becomes a gaffe. They want to see, hear and read the merits of interesting ideas by ministers or shadow ministers instead of all sorts of angles and spin and process minutiae — endlessly fascinating and exciting to the incestuous Westminster bubble but boring and dull to everyone else. The truth is most voters are more interested in reading or hearing about how our policies are likely to affect their lives—for better or worse — than they are in reading about the latest story of a political aide of whom they have never previously heard or a bit of process to which they are indifferent.
The Westminster bubble is also obsessed with who's up and who's down — everything is interpreted as a personal rivalry, not because there could possibly be a genuine thought-through policy debate going on: even within the Cabinet. I was first in the media spotlight during anti-apartheid campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s. But I had never before experienced so much made-up journalism, invariably amazed at what I read about myself. As a Cabinet minister, I was known for plain, straight speaking, answering questions not ducking them. It got me into the odd scrape. But then even the most cautious, on-message politician has been there too: it comes with the job these days. The media cannot have it both ways — we cannot be both “control freaks” and then, when we loosen up, be accused of having “lost control”. When ministers all sang from the same hymn sheet we were accused of being boringly controlled by No. 10. Yet when we went “off script”, the government was “adrift” or “split”, the PM either too weak or too intolerant. The way the Westminster bubble behaves is insulting a public that wants intelligent debate. We need to tap into that evident appetite for grown-up political discussion.
On topical policy issues — like Europe, student fees or Iraq at the time — there was a real appetite for serious, intelligent information, debate and opposing views and tough questions asked of politicians. I never had any problem as a government minister being put on the spot by John Humphrys of Today or Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight. In a vibrant democracy, government ought to be challenged and scrutinised, especially by journalists. But we are now into an entirely different game where the media become part of the story they should be reporting objectively, completely alienated from, and alienating, the public, turning off viewers, listeners and readers from politics by the million, and spreading cynicism so corrosive to democracy.
I wrote an article about this for the Independent on Sunday at the end of July 2003 and gave a speech to a seminar at the Institute for Public Policy Research which provoked a lively interest from senior journalists present, reflecting a growing recognition of the problem among serious commentators and some broadsheet editors. Commentators, notably Nick Jones along with Steve Richards of The Independent, both formerly of the BBC, were also fiercely critical of the way that BBC journalism had developed, often on an unsourced basis and highly spun. That this was dangerous was revealed in the private polling that Philip Gould presented to a political cabinet that July. It showed there was a tremendous trust-gap between the government and the public, with the public turning off politics entirely. And this was not only to do with Iraq going sour at the time. Philip made the point that this was precisely the agenda of the right and would pave the way for a Tory return because if you could disillusion voters, the optimistic and progressive politics that Labour represented would be vanquished and the door would open to the right's cynical form of politics with progressive voters staying at home.
I was concerned that voter turnout was falling, voter distrust increasing, voter switch-off happening on a huge scale. It was, I felt, a complicated phenomenon, not only to do with the Westminster bubble and the way we operated, but that in advanced democracies, there did not seem space in people's lifestyles for the kind of political interest that is so vital. I always thought politicians exaggerated the extent to which the average person was interested in day-to-day politics. But this was something much more fundamental. We were part of a systematic turning off of a whole generation of people who once took an informed, if not active, interest in the political process. And this was six years before the MP expenses scandal which was massively damaging to the credibility of politics.
It is the way that we in the Westminster bubble engage with people that is the problem (and by “we” I mean politicians and the media). If we don't crack this then we will all go down together — politicians and political journalists alike. Because the lower voter turnout falls, the less editors are going to feel they have to cover politics at all. And that spells redundancy for all of us — democracy included. Most politicians of all parties are decent people motivated by a desire to do good. Equally, most journalists went into their profession to report, and often uncover, the truth. There is a fine tradition of investigative and campaigning journalism that must continue — including by broadcasters. Many genuine scandals have been exposed, and suffering and abuse ended, because of excellent journalism. But we can both contribute to a better balance. Government can do more to cut out the spin and cut down on the packaging. And the media can do more to report substance and content. It is high time politicians stopped trying to be journalists and journalists stopped trying to be politicians. We need a new deal.
This article is extracted from Peter Hain's book Outside In, published by Biteback or available as an ebook. A paperback will be available from August (£9.99).