June 13, 2007
Is Blair right about the press?
Tony Blair’s attack on the media may or may not be fair. But it does illustrate an iron law of British politics. All prime ministers end up fearing and hating the press.
The first time I interviewed Blair - shortly after he became PM in 1997 - he made rather a point of underlining that he was going to avoid this particular pitfall. I remember him saying with a laugh that his predecessor - John Major - had been so obsessive about the newspapers that he had anxiously checked the first editions at 11 at night. "I don’t bother with all that," said Blair with an airy laugh.
Things had definitely changed ten years on. Some FT colleagues and I visited the prime minister earlier this year. Before we got onto the formal bit of the interview, Blair vented in an agitated fashion about a particular newspaper that he felt was careering down market.
(He was also absolutely right about John Major, incidentally. I once interviewed him and I’ve never met a man who was more obviously suspicious of me - and journalists in general. And all we were talking about was cricket.)
But back to Blair - what happened? I think the first thing to say is that his protestations in 1997 were a little disingenuous. The very fact that he was willing to spend an hour in an off-the-record chat with me and a colleague from The Economist suggested that Blair was in fact extremely interested in cultivating the press. Other journalists from publications with bigger circulations or more perceived influence spent far, far more time with the prime minister. In fact, I was always amazed by how much time Blair was prepared to waste in off-the-record conversations with newspaper columnists and editors. Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, (nickname - Piers Moron) crows in his diaries about how much time he spent talking to Blair - I think he records some 80 meetings. If you had to spend that amount of time with Piers Morgan, you might also end up despising the press.
Perhaps Blair and future prime ministers should think of the press as like a pit bull dog. You can spend hours stroking it, but eventually it’s going to turn around and bite you.
The pitbull description of the press seems quite fair.
Blair has certainly been a very skilled politician in all things related to the media - and he has had some very talented and influential aides in that matter. It helps to be naturally gifted at the exercise. The likes of Clinton, Blair or even Bush and Chirac in their own particular ways have demonstrated how crucial the media is and how important it is to pay close attention to media. In 2003 during the build up to the war, hardly any media was questioning Blair nor contesting, arguing with the plans for invasion of Iraq. That is both a failure of the media (not all) and evidence that the 2media relations” capital Blair had carefully nurtured paid off. I can’t imagine Gordon Brown having such an easy ride had he been PM and taken the same decision!
Overall though, the British press is rather good. Definitely among the best in the world. I remember a few years back in the annual presidential address for Bastille Day when French president Chirac was asked by France’s top newsreader to comment on allegations of past impropriety in party financing - Chirac duely told him off for his arrogance and of course didn’t answer. This was a moment when you wish Paxman had been the interviewer…
Politicians are mostly given a tougher ride in the UK by the media than in other countries and it’s mostly a good thing. They have no god-given rights to govern us and just like they are elected by us to govern us on our behalf, the media has a duty to question and challenge politians when necessary on our behalf.
The recent BAE-Saudi Arabia situation is another example of the British media (bbc and guardian) uncovering facts that the government had decided to bury. Sure BAE might lose the next contract, and jobs might have to go as a result, and maybe competing companies offered similar bribes (the defense industry is certainly no stranger to controversies) but overall i am thankful the media did the very pitbull thing of biting onto the bone and not letting go.
The only thing to be careful of is that just like people journalists tend to victim to herd behviour. Which is why expressions such as “media love affair” and “media backlash” exists. Almost virtually nobody wrote against the war in Iraq at the time. Currently, nobody is challenging the Green agenda - it’s after all the only thing all politicians seem to agree on. Or in finance (this is the FT afterall), the journalists seem in love with “activists hedge funds” - never really questioning how a bunch of traders with PHD in maths and MBAs know what is best for a $50bn business (in which they’ve owned shares for the grand total of a couple weeks)run by managers that have worked there all their lives.
And of course, there’s the dot.com bubble…
Maybe most of this herd behaviour is due to an asymmetry of information between the PRs that feed the stories and the journalists. The new pressures on the media to keep churning out stories might also explained the increasing mistakes of over-worked journalists.
Posted by: a | June 13th, 2007 at 11:35 am | Report this commentBlair’s comments are yet another example of his unwillingness to except responsibility for his own folly. With everything that has surfaced with respect to the decision to go to war in Iraq it is undeniable that the case for war was “Sexed Up”!! Yet he has neither accepted responsibility for the misinformation given to the public or apologised. While it would be clever to point out that those that live by spin die by spin, but the truth is that the Independent is not spinning it is just providing independent coverage that Blair does not like. If any news organization is guilty of “more view than news” it is Murdoch’s News Corporation, which have been Bush and Blair’s staunchest supporter.
Posted by: Rick James | June 13th, 2007 at 12:35 pm | Report this commentIn 1999 the Dutch queen in an informal discussion with editors in chief of several Dutch newspapers qualified the very same issue as ‘the lie rules’ (de leugen regeert). According to her, the quality of the press had plummeted over the last two decades and she attributed this popularization to the increasing influence of commercial interests.
Just yesterday, the conquest of the Gaza Strip by Hamas armed groups during which some 50 people many of whome were civilians were killed has been inserted by the Guardian newspaper into a story titled “Secret UN report condemns US for Middle East failures”. The consequence is that people associate the civil war in Gaza with a failure of the US. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2101677,00.html )
The British government and the EU, after weighing the evidence, consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization. That organization in a battle that has up to now taken 50 lives has almost conquered a piece of land on which 1.2 million people live next doors to two very important allies who both are virtually at war with Hamas and its Brotherhood sponsors. That is a very important story in its own right and however it is interpreted it deserves to be the headline item.
I believe a paper such as the Guardian is intelligent enough to realize that it is abusing it’s power when it creates slanted representations of reality in which the focus is not on the consequences of events but on trying to score political points and influence the opinion of its readers in this case by associating the failure of US policies with a civil war for which the armed groups doing the fighting should be held accountable and the threat to our allies and interests discussed. But at the Guardian, if not the lie then at least the twist and the spin seems to rule.
For most people the news creates a world of fragments in which the most potent fragments survive. The media compete in who can serve most of these fragments; people’s minds then reassemble these fragments into a collage of potent imagery around an issue or person, the end result is more a caricature than an actual representation. Culture then shares these caricatures also often through the media and at a certain point you arrive at the current situation where a vast number of people believe the Prime Minster of the UK is its Steve Bell cartoon: a power mad machiavellian puppet of some undefined (or to some people not so undefined) sinister agency.
Is Blair right? Yes, and it is good that he said it, but nothing can really be done about it. On television the shows that are watched most are voyeuristic peeks into the lives of other people; this is the mass populist culture that we’ve helped create in our societies and we are slowly surrendering our politics and policies to it.
Posted by: Felix Drost, Amsterdam | June 13th, 2007 at 1:06 pm | Report this commentBlair is largely correct in his assessment of the British press. They are sensationalist, devious and generally devoid of scruples. There is very little reporting anymore, and far, far too much “opinion” (a media code word for old-school brain-washing). So much of what we read, see and hear in the press is dictated by the (barely) hidden agendas of those in charge, and much of that is tit-for-tat, schoolyard pettifoggery. No wonder the youth are consumed by “reality” and “celebrity” guff, when every time we pick up a paper or turn on the news it’s filled with the self-centred, egomaniacal, media-centric swiping (which is about as far removed from real reality as the peddled ‘reality’ on TV, really).
Posted by: Colin | June 13th, 2007 at 1:38 pm | Report this commentIt’s arguably the only thing about which Blair has been correct for a very, very long time. But there’s an element of irony in there somewhere, that the media loving PM blasts the media on the way out, just as the media moguls are pumping out lots of their own self-indulgent hot air. One wonders whether Blair may end up having the last laugh.
Felix,
You have gone off at amazing tangent to discuss Blair but frankly the treatment of Hamas, who won a democratic election, by the West in general and US/K in particular is a very clear example of the West’s hypocrisy about wanting democracy in the Middle East.
Compare and contrast the above with the non-reaction to the fascist, racist Avigdor Lieberman joining the Israeli cabinet.
P
Posted by: Pacifist | June 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm | Report this commentPacifist, germans ones elected Hitler. Elections have consequences. If palestinians elected government that wants war (getting rid of Israel for now is realistically impossible) not peace with Israel, then they get what they want.
Posted by: John | June 13th, 2007 at 7:47 pm | Report this commentJews lived in Israel 2000 years ago and then they were exiled. If you say its too long, then lets wait for 500 years and say ‘forget about palestineans, 500 years time is too long’.
They both have right to live peacefully, but they get what they elected.
Indigengious tribes in America are now happy to live in the USA.
Blair is right of course. As usual most of the reactions to Blair have been fallacious:argument against the man/ad hominem. I used to live in London until recently and for the final year I could not bear to read British newspapers. And I work in communication! The issue is: does the current media system help or hinder democracy? It harms public life. How should it be improved? That is what all men and women of goodwill should focus on.
Posted by: Sina Odugbemi | June 13th, 2007 at 7:53 pm | Report this commentBlair is wrong of course. The press in the UK, or any other so-called democratic nation, has not been free for a very long time. The power of advertisers and the financial leverage they hold over the press is enough to ensure a permanently biased and mainly pointless level of communication.
Blair attacked the internet. Silly man. It is in fact the only place where any semblance of truth can be found. Yes, there is much mis and disinformation out there, but that gives us all the opportunity to improve our bullsh*t detectors and ascertain truth on our own terms. Which in turn breeds a more vibrant, democratic thinking place for all of us.
Independent bloggers and the like, not beholden to the advertising pound/dollar/euro, are cutting a swathe through the communications arena. No wonder Blair dislikes it. No wonder the mass of internet thinkers and communicators dislike Blair’s behaviour in return. Pots and kettles.
The truth is no respecter of persons and Mr Blair is not exempt from this.
Posted by: Edwin Turner | June 19th, 2007 at 9:33 am | Report this comment