Journal of Communication Management

What the media are doing to our politics

John Lloyd
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 Opinion Pieces
What the media are doing
to our politics
Received: 25th October, 2004

John Lloyd
is Editor of FT Magazine: formerly Industrial Editor, East European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, Financial Times. He also
writes for Prospect, Toronto Globe and Mail and Les Echos. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies. Books
he has written are ‘Loss without limit: The British miners strike’ (1985), ‘Rebirth of a nation: An anatomy of Russia’ (1998) and
‘What the media do to our politics’ (2004).

Abstract This paper describes the role of the media in a free society and their impact on
civic life. Intellectual rigour in journalism is required to assist media to develop and
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understand itself.

KEYWORDS: media, journalism, standards, ethics, politics

I think there is a particular kind of to their contexts and their limitations, to

John Lloyd
E-mail: john.lloyd@bt.com
dilemma for what Andrew Marr calls ‘my
trade’, that is, the trade of news
journalism: the communication of current
events to audiences and readers. And we
can put the dilemma, or dilemmas, like
this
—there is a dilemma of complexity
—there is a dilemma of entertainment
—and there is a dilemma of effect.
There never were simple explanations for
current events; it is now more clearly so.
And because we cannot know outcomes,
we should not, if we are trying to do
proper journalism — that is, a journalism
which gives people facts and analysis and
impressions and leaves it up to them to
judge what opinions they form of these —
suffuse our reportage with an implicit
knowledge of the finite pattern of the
events we describe, a knowledge which is
often based on the assumption that it will
all go badly.
An exploration of complexity demands
a steady and close attention to the content
of events and the people who drive them,
their antecedents and their influences.
Increasingly, as you talk to politicians and
officials and executives about how their
trades and the journalism about them meet
each other, they talk of parallel universes.
That is, there is what they do and how
they do it: and then there is the journalism
about what they do and how they do it:
and they exist quite separately from each
other. The journalism partakes of the field
of action apparently described: and some
of the characters exist and some of the
events are recognisable. But as a
description of what really happens, it is
deeply inadequate.
Is that what they would say — the
cover-all excuse given to us more than 40
years ago by Mandy Rice Davies? Of
course one on whom the whistle has been
blown will blame the whistler: but that is
wearing threadbare.
The dilemma is this. The world is very
complex. It takes a lot of understanding.
We are citizens, who have the right to
vote for or against governments and
councils and thus need to be informed of

# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005) Vol. 9, 3 209–214 Journal of Communication Management 209
 Lloyd
the choices we make. But mass journalism
— on television and in mass newspapers
— inform us less than they used to do. All
of our broadcasters have cut back on the
time given to news and current affairs: and
mass circulation papers have certainly
given no more time. There are fewer
correspondents abroad: more is written in
offices; opinion columns, often by people
who have little or no experience of
reporting the fields about which they
write but are hired for being ‘edgy’ or
‘radical’ or ‘fearless’, now crowd out
reporting. Reporting itself, like the front
pages of The Independent, is
indistinguishable from comment: is
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comment. Thus more complexity meets
less explanation. And the answer to this
from journalists, or at least editors and
managers, is: who wants to read or look at
it? Look at what happens when we put
this stuff on! Viewing falls over the cliff.
Circulations fall. And indeed, what
happens when you put on soaps and Big
Brother, or tabloidise your paper and
make it more opinionated and edgy:
audience figures rise, and so does the
circulation. There is no quick fix out of
this.
The second dilemma is entertainment.
We cannot say that news and
entertainment live in two separate spheres
any more: the line has been and is still
being blurred between the two. This began
happening when television began to come
of age, in the early sixties. One of the
reasons President Kennedy is still regarded
with such favour by the sixties generation,
which now runs things, is because he was
the first television president: in his
marvellous book, ‘The powers that be’,
David Halberstam writes of him that ‘in
no way could Kennedy have been elected
without television. It was that simple. He
meshed politics and television with such
charm and style and despatch that the
intellectual elite of the country. Which
might normally have regarded the cross
210 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 9, 3 209–214
blend with trepidation, rich as it was in the
potential for demagoguery, enthusiastically
applauded him (in large part because the
alternative to Kennedy was Richard M
Nixon). Television loved him, he and the
camera were born for each other, he was
the first great political superstar; as he
made television bigger, it made him
bigger. Everyone using everyone. The
media using the President, the President
using the media’.1
Kennedy made the first Faustian bargain
of the television age in politics. He
brought television in to take the place of
parties and smoke filled rooms and deals
and compromises among the old powers
that were. And he made it for all other
politicians who aspired to high office after
him: he made performance on television
the standard of future politicians, whether
they liked it or not. His celebrated debate
with Nixon helped establish him not just
as the leading politician of his age, but
establish television as the leading political
arbiter of the age.
As the television age has gone on, we
have remarked that, at least in the USA,
the actor as politician has become more
prominent — Ronald Reagan and Arnold
Schwarzenegger to mention only two
governors of California. The politician as
actor is also remarked: the mastery of
television which Tony Blair was once said
to have; the inability to master it which
Iain Duncan Smith displayed. Iain Duncan
Smith was a kind of throwback to the pre-
television age: a man elected by and
popular with his party. One of the reasons
why the Tories have attracted so much
scorn — including from within their own
party — is that they should be so foolish as
to think that someone whom the party
liked but the media did not should be
elected its leader. He simply did not
produce the kind of level of television
performance that is acceptable.
Something else is now happening. The
fictionalisation of the public sphere is well
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005)

advanced. ‘West Wing’ is a post 9/11
version of politics as it really is played —
by professionals , un-illusioned, quick
witted, sardonic but never cynical, good
hearted, loyal, devoted to public service:
politics without party, where aides who
know the media count for everything and
senators and congressmen and governors
lurch in occasionally like creatures from
olden times, to be patronised and ushered
out. The BBC tried a pilot of its own
‘West Wing’ in a piece of work called
‘The Deputy’: it had at its centre a
character so like a version of John Prescott
cooked up by someone fed on the vast
library of caricatures about him as to be
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suable. Luckily, it did not survive the
pilot: but both the US and the British
programmes showed the way in which
fiction has moved in to the same arena as
news: it is creating an environment, a
context, a received opinion — and the
fictional and the real words bounce off
each other, both using stereotypes and
caricatures, until the line between them
may, for most people, no longer properly
exist.
The BBC more recently did a
programme called ‘Dirty Bomb’ — about
the effects on London of a bomb which
released radioactive material over the City
of London. It was a dramatic film showing
dedicated and courageous police and fire
officers coping with a disaster while
inadequately equipped by a government
which was concerned more with bright
spin than with grim reality. Every care
was taken to make it seem as realistic as
possible — down to naming the fictional
Minister for London as Nicola Painswick,
while the real one is called Nicholas
Raynsford. The problem was not its
production quality: the problem was for
the audience. Had the BBC got a very
large story — which was that, in the event
of a serious terrorist attack, we were
woefully unprepared? If so, shouldn’t it
have put on a two hour ‘Panorama’ in the
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005) Vol. 9, 3 209–214
What the media are doing to our politics
same prime time slot as the fiction film
saying so — and publicising it hugely?
The viewer, or at least this viewer, was
left wondering whether he should pursue
the issue as a citizen or enjoy its tension
and drama as a spectator, on the same level
as a Hollywood thriller. It was evidently
not a problem for the BBC, which
promoted the film as a serious bit of
deeply researched public interest film
while insisting on its fictional status — a
sign that the most serious broadcaster in
the world had lost interest in separating
the two — because it had lost interest in
judging the effect on its audience, who it
presumably believed did not care, or
accepted that fiction could tell the truth as
well as documentary. Fiction can, of
course, tell some truths better than
journalism can: but at the level of Anna
Karenina, not at that of ‘Dirty Bomb’.
The dilemma of effects is precisely that
we do not know what we are doing to the
people who read and, above all, who view
— though Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling
alone’, published four years ago, argued
that television was the largest single cause
of civic disengagement, writing that ‘it is
precisely those Americans most marked by
their dependence on televised
entertainment who were most likely to
have dropped out of civic and social life —
who spent less time with friends, were less
involved in community organisations and
were less likely to participate in public
affairs’. Putnam made an important
distinction here — between watching news
television, where viewers were more likely
to be civically engaged, and watching
entertainment television. But there is less
and less news television: and as we saw,
what there is, is more like entertainment
— as he writes, ‘modern media . . .
increasingly blur the line between the
two’.2 As far as I am aware, no serious
study has been done in this country of
how far this applies to the British.
The media broadcast and write
Journal of Communication Management 211
 Lloyd
continually on voter apathy, the collapse
of parties and the disengagement of,
especially, the young from politics and
public life: we do not know how much
we cause it. We know that public figures
complain constantly that good people are
not coming forward to take public jobs
because of what they see will be pressure
from the media, and fear of the media: but
we do not know if this is true. If it is true
it is a dramatic story: but we have not
looked into it. We know that news and
current affairs play a much smaller role in
broadcasting than they used to: we do not
know if that means that people are less
interested in current events than they used
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to be — know less, reflect less, are less
good at being citizens. Broadcasters know
they are the most powerful show on earth
— and they have apparently no interest in
knowing what effect they have on the
audience, as long as they keep on
watching. And to keep them watching,
they will — as Peter Finch’s demented
newscaster, Howard Beale, said in the
movie ‘Network’ — ‘do any damn thing
you want’ — including dropping news
and current affairs, and justifying it by
reference to ratings.
Even those who blow the whistle most
now feel worried. Kevin Marsh, the editor
of the ‘Today’ programme with whom I
have argued on this publicly, and who was
the programme’s editor during the
Andrew Gilligan affair almost a year and a
half ago, told the Society of Editors in
October that ‘we’ve [in the media] got to
a position where a free press, ostensibly
underpinned by tried and tested principles
is, at best, failing to support public
institutions. At worst undermining them’.3
There is, said Marsh, a ‘hypocrisy in much
of the press, that wants a scalp — a result
— while at the same time denying the
press should be concerned about its effect
on public life — or even acknowledge it
had one’.
There is much disagreement among
212 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 9, 3 209–214
journalists about these matters, and I am
pleased to say that some of the things I
have written have caused some of that.
Greg Dyke, the former director general of
the BBC, used the James Cameron
Memorial lecture to criticise a book I had
written, ‘What the media do to our
politics’. He argued that I was entirely
wrong to say that Andrew Gilligan had
been mistaken in its famous story of the
29th of May last year, and that he, Dyke,
had behaved with great principle in
refusing to retract or apologise: the BBC
Board of Governors were wrong in
forcing him to resign, and in grovelling to
the government with an apology issued by
the acting chairman after the chairman,
Gavyn Davies, had resigned.4
This is not the place to respond to Greg
Dyke in any detail. I would note that he
has, by his going, and by his recent book
and in that speech (which will not be his
last on the subject), defined a particular
kind of struggle. He is championing the
broadcast, and even more his attitude to
the broadcast, on the grounds that it told
the deep truth about a hidden and terrible
state of affairs — the manipulation of
secret information by the government.
But that was not what it did. Others
had written about the unhappiness in the
British secret services before Gilligan. His
story used an un-named source to say —
insofar as the broadcast was coherent —
that the Prime Minister lied to persuade
the country to agree with his war. There
was and is no evidence that was the case.
The late David Kelly did not provide that
evidence. The BBC broadcast a story of
immense gravity: had it demonstrated its
truth, Tony Blair could not have stayed in
office. But having said that, it then
immediately and without explanation
changed it to something vaguer: and then
refused to apologise for getting wrong a
story which it implicitly admitted was
wrong by taking it off the air — but
continuing to air a charge that the
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005)

document was sexed up which in the
context — as Lord Hutton explained —
could only be reasonably held to mean
‘that the dossier had been embellished with
intelligence known or believed to be false
or unreliable, which was not the case’.
I believe that the story, and the reaction
to it and debate about it, reveal a situation
which demands a different approach to
that we have now. Journalism is terribly
important: more important, ironically,
than we have allowed. It is part of a great
power, which is the media: and they make
up, below the state, the greatest
aggregation of power in the land. When
Anthony Sampson published his ‘Who
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runs this place’ earlier this year — a
revisiting, 40 years on, from his first
‘Anatomy of Britain’ — he remarked that
of all the powers which had waxed and
waned in the close to half century between
the first book and the most recent, that
which had waxed everyone else off the
map was the power of the media. He
wrote — ‘the masters of the media are the
new aristocracy, demanding and receiving
homage from politicians, big businessmen
and the aristocracy. . .columnists and
broadcasters are more famous than the
politicians or public figures they interview;
they know they can make or break
reputations and ruin political careers.’5
Media’s proudest boast, and indeed their
main reason for being considered
indispensable to a free society, is usually
said to be to hold power to account. I
think we should consider a change in that
formula, to make it clearer what should be
the role of media in a genuinely free
society. It is to assist the people of that
society to understand all kinds of powers
— state, corporate, associative, cultural,
foreign — so they, the people, can hold
them to account through their actions,
chief among which must be voting and
other participation in civic life. Such a
huge power must itself be understood, and
held to account.
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005) Vol. 9, 3 209–214
What the media are doing to our politics
In this we need the academy, as well as
broader civil society, to be engaged. The
academy and the media are often awkward
together; media studies are often regarded
as not quite the thing. There may be, in
academic terms, justification for this: but I
think it essential that the academy extend
its skills and status more decisively into the
area of the media, and that the media
partake of some of the independence
and rigour of the best of the academy in
order to assist it develop and understand
itself.
The academy is or should be a place
where independence of thought and
judgment is unquestioned; and in the
USA, large and well-funded departments
and institutes within or close to universities
provide an intellectual rigour and even a
moral spine to journalism, which helps
keep at least some of it faithful to a
discussion and illumination of public affairs
far beyond what we have. In the
Committee for Concerned Journalists and
the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
run by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, it
has produced from within the profession
the most serious effort to regenerate
journalism I have seen, one we could do
much worse than to adapt for our culture.
US newspapers, including those people
here do not read — big city papers like
those in Pittsburg or Cleveland or Miami
or Dallas — have a culture of explanation
and investigation which our nationals have
often lost. Even the relentlessly
commercial networks and new digital
channels are capable of probing and
occasionally analytical journalism: it was
CBS, after all, which broke the Abu
Ghraib horror. If we cite Fox as a disgrace
— and in terms of journalism it is — it has
at least put before us the need to either
accept that news and current affairs will
now be politicised to the left and right, a
trend Fox did not begin: or, as I believe
better, to redefine more robustly the
duties, scope and limits of a public service
Journal of Communication Management 213
 Lloyd
in news and current affairs which can
aspire to give a version of the truth.
Above all, I think of magazine
journalism like that of the New Yorker,
New Republic, Atlantic, NY Review of
Books, Harpers, Vanity Fair, American
Prospect, the Nation, the Weekly Standard
and many more. The debasement of our
political weeklies, once prides of the
world, is shown in the absurdity that the
editor of The Spectator, having published
an editorial critical of Liverpool (a city
about which the Spectator knows much
from years of on-site reporting) is then
forced to make a florid apology by the
leader of the main opposition party in
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which he is a front bench spokesman.
Serious political journalism, whatever its
opinions, should be independent:
especially in a magazine which insists so
often on its ability to unmask New
Labour lies. If it is seen to denounce one
week an opinion which it has pronounced
trenchantly the previous one, how to
evaluate everything else? What to make of
its editor’s opinions — and the opinions
he allows in his paper?
We need the academy and journalism to
collaborate in an examination, independent
but deeply and daily engaged, of media
power and effect. We need a place —
more than a few committed people
struggling on inadequate funds, as the
brave MediaWise has done in seeking to
call attention to the damaging effects
media can have on ordinary people — in
which research, and investigation, and
information, and analysis, and discussion,
and argument are all possible and are
constantly being provided. We need a
place dedicated to raising journalism’s
game by examining journalism’s power
within media power. We need to see what
the media are doing to journalism, and
how far the two can happily co-exist —
214 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 9, 3 209–214
and if this sounds like saying that one
might blame the media for the state of
journalism, that may not be as absurd as it
presently sounds. We need above all to
take seriously a craft and a practice which
remains the first recourse for most people
when they wish to understand the world
beyond their own horizons: must take
seriously its own protestations of freedom
and democracy; must take serious its own
claim to be at once above power in its
ability to analyse it, and below it in its
refusal to be part of it.
There is, the media tell us, a crisis in
society: a crisis of withdrawal of
engagement and of trust. Implicitly and
explicitly, we in the media put the
responsibility for that on public figures;
usually politicians. We should, in the
pursuit of our own ideals, look at ourselves
as actors, as well as continue to act as
investigators. The development of such a
centre or centres, and with it the
development of a journalism which was
analytical of itself as well as of other
powers, would be a large contribution
to the continued freedom of a society
which cannot be free without free
media, who wish to understand, and
assist the rest of us to understand, what
freedom is.
References
1. Halberstam, D. (2000) ’The powers that be’,
University of Illinois Press, Champaign.
2. Putnam, R. (2001) ’Bowling alone: The collapse and
revival of American community’, Simon and Schuster
(Trade Division), London.
3. Marsh, K. (2004) ’Speech given to the Society of
Editors — What makes a good journalist?’, http://
www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/
marsh_editors.shtml.
4. Dyke, G. (2004) ’James Cameron memorial lecture’,
http://www.city.ac.uk/journalism/misc/cameron2004.
html.
5. Sampson, A. (2004) ’Who runs this place? An
anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century’, John Murray,
London.
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2005)