Politics and the media - A Fatal Embrace?

Politics and the media - A Fatal Embrace?

Professor Tim Bale is one of the panelists who will be talking at the Sussex Salon event at Brighton Dome on Tuesday 6 December.

Here, he outlines some of the general issues informing the debate on whether journalists and politicians should be friends.

’Dealing with the media’, said Mother Teresa, ’is more difficult that bathing a leper’. No doubt there are many politicians who would agree. But in their heart of hearts many know that they need journalists as much as the journalists need them. This co-dependence is both good and bad for democracy.

Last year the media went one-up with the MPs’ expenses scandal. This year, the phone hacking scandal allowed the political class to draw level. In the process both were badly damaged but can also claim to have done their job. Just as we needed to know that some of our elected representatives had been on the take for years, we also needed to know that some papers were willing to go way beyond what was decent or fair.

The dictionary defines the word symbiosis as ’a close, prolonged association between two or more different organisms of different species that may, but does not necessarily, benefit each member.’ Arguably, this sums up the relationship between politicians and the media perfectly. Maybe, though, it understates just how close the relationship really is.

Perhaps one of the most worrying things to emerge from ’hackgate’ was the extent to which politicians and newspaper editors and proprietors were not merely on friendly but intimate terms. Quite what they talked about at those dinner parties, country walks, weddings and christenings, we will probably never know. But one can’t help but recall that there were MPs at the top of both parties whose expenses claims looked just as dodgy as some of those submitted by their colleagues lower down the food-chain yet somehow their sins were more easily forgiven.

Just as important, some would say, is the more mundane familiarity that inevitably builds up between people who are thrown together day after day even if, strictly speaking, they are supposed to be on different sides of the fence - the hunters and the hunted, if you like.

The positive side of that familiarity is the ability of well-connected reporters and pundits to tell us what it’s really like on the inside. The negative side is that by being on first-name terms and perhaps sharing the same ideology (be it left or right) they risk getting sucked so far into the same world as those they write about that they lose the ability to interpret that world to people on the outside - the job that ultimately they are paid (though not always half as fantastically as some imagine) to do.

Most jobbing journalists, of course, ply their trade outside London. But there is presumably just as much risk of their getting drawn into a Birmingham, or a Manchester, or for that matter a Brighton, ’bubble’ as there is of their counterparts in the capital getting trapped in its more famous equivalent in Westminster.

Whatever, you would have to be sub- or super-human not to find it harder to write something that might terminate the career of someone with whom you occasionally share a drink or two than someone you deliberately keep (and who deliberately keeps you) at a distance. Is a watchdog really a watchdog if he barks but never bites - or is obviously only willing to bite some people but not others?

Many - perhaps most journalists - are fully aware of this risk and conscious of the compromises they are sometimes forced to make. Some, however, would hotly deny the reality of the picture just painted, preferring to think of themselves as the kind of hero who’ll stop at nothing to get a scoop. Many politicians, too, would greet the idea that journalists pull their punches with a hollow laugh, particularly those who’ve recently been on the receiving end of a media mauling. ’You think, we have it easy?’ they cry, ’Just you try getting a grilling from Paxo or Humphreys. See how you’d like it.’

They’re not wrong, of course. There are one or two so-called ’attack dogs’ around. Whether, though, they do us any more favours than their less yappy-snappy colleagues is a moot point. ’Always ask yourself’, advised the legendary Times journalist Louis Heren, ’"Why is this lying bastard lying to me?".’ Funny? Sure. But it also risks pushing healthy scepticism so far that it slides into chronic cynicism - and cynicism, even though it’s sometimes warranted, is ultimately corrosive of democracy.

Just as only a tiny minority of journalists live up to (or should that be down to?) the sleazy stereotype, so do only a tiny minority of politicians. Most of those who stand for office are, believe it or not, genuinely committed to making the world (or a small part of it) a better place. Blaming them for everything - which attack-dog journalism sometimes seems to - does only one thing: it stops us remembering that, in the end, we get the politicians (and, indeed, the journalists) that we deserve.

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex and author of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. He is one of the guest speakers at the latest Sussex Salon event - ’A Fatal Embrace? Politics and the Media in 2011’ - at the Pavilion Theatre, New Road, Brighton on Tuesday 6 December.


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