Media & Government - a bickering marriage of convenience

Ministers and civil servants often complain about the media - their intrusiveness, sensationalism, inaccuracy and lack of proportion. At the same time, the media complain about government secrecy, distortions and manipulation. There is nothing new in this - read John Wilkes or The Times at its most thundering in the mid-19th century. Media and government have inherently different interests but remain locked in mutual dependence. Journalists live by disclosing what is happening, while governments survive by trying to win over public opinion, mainly through the media of various kinds. Yet a new bout of soul-searching about the relationship has now started following the phone hacking scandal and the Wikileaks revelations. How close should leading politicians be to media proprietors? And should there be restraints on media disclosure if it threatens national security and relations between countries, let alone personal privacy? What ethical rules should the media follow and what form of regulation is desirable or workable? All this will be discussed in public at the hearings of the Leveson inquiry which start next month. My own experience - from 40 years as a journalist including 19 years on The Times until mid-2010 - is that politicians exaggerate the influence of newspapers and spend too much time courting owners and editors. The phone hacking scandal has exposed, and exploded, the myth of the power of Rupert Murdoch. The emperor has fewer clothes than he claimed, or politicians feared. The dominant media outlets of 30 years and more ago - newspapers and terrestrial broadcasters - have lost market share to the internet (in some cases their own online sites), and to a multitude of broadcast channels. Social media, blogging and twitter provide other ways to express opinions. Anyone seriously interested in politics will now read half-a-dozen websites each day as well as the main national papers. This fragmentation has made it much harder for politicians to set, let alone dominate, public debate. At a time when membership of political parties has been in decline (see Making parties more popular) and tribal loyalties to parties are weaker, there is more scope for single issue campaigners to mobilise support on social media sites. Yet politicians and civil servants still pay attention - often too much - to what newspapers and the Today programme and Newsnight say. They believe that the media affects and changes the public mood, and the Daily Mail is mentioned in hushed, and often horrified, terms in Whitehall. This influence is much less about voting preferences - where newspapers generally follow rather than lead their readers - and more about reinforcing public views, some would say prejudices, on issues such as Europe, GM goods, etc. Media campaigns- and the threat of ‘who is to blame’ headlines - foster a risk averse culture. Ministers and civil servants face a genuine problem in trying to communicate the complicated trade-offs involved in most policy decisions against parts of the media which too often treat any mistake or change as a scandal or an invariably humiliating U-turn. However, talk of ‘responsible’ journalism easily slides into self-serving pomposity. It also ignores the fact that the media’s job is to expose information which ministers and civil servants would rather keep secret, often mainly to spare their embarrassment rather than because it would endanger the proper workings of government. The Government needs to be more robust in its dealings with the media - not trying to get too close but being open, rather than defensive, about decisions, and willing to challenge ill-founded prejudices. Many of these issues will be explored in Media & Government, a series of seminars which the Institute for Government and Fishburn Hedges are jointly holding over the winter, starting next month.