The British election campaign has been, so far, an oddly muted affair. One of the loudest background noises has been a nagging complaint about "dumbing down," about the shrinkage of debate, about the tyranny of the soundbite-a nostalgia for a slower, more reflective, political culture. Part of the complaint is justified and part of the explanation is familiar enough: the growth in the power and aggression of the mass media in most western countries.
This was summed up in the New Yorker a few months ago by Adam Gopnik. He compared the deferential press treatment of the Roosevelts in the White House with the Clinton era. In Roosevelt's day political reporters physically prevented photographers from taking pictures of FDR in a wheelchair. Compare that with Maureen Dowd announcing on the front page of the New York Times that the president on a trip to Oxford had "returned for a sentimental journey to the university where he didn't inhale, didn't get drafted and didn't get a degree." This is a change, said Gopnik, not only in tone, or kind, but in worlds. Where the reporter used to gain status by dining with his subjects, now he gains status by dining on them. In Britain a similar trend is evident in the coverage of the royal family and politics.
But this change in the status and sheer ubiquity of the media is only half of the story. The power of the mass media is, after all, an old refrain. Something else is now shifting in the nature of democracy; it is a change which is most advanced in Britain and the US, but which may also be pulling continental Europe in its wake. To put it baldly, once we lived in representative democracies where the social and political elites in collaboration with what sociologists call "intermediate institutions" beneath the level of the state-churches, trade unions, voluntary associations of all kinds-had a free hand to govern and to represent public opinion between elections. Now we live in a raucous plebiscitary democracy in which the self-esteem and authority of those elites have declined and the only intermediate institution which touches most people's lives is the mass media.
Public opinion now speaks for itself, directly through opinion polls, focus groups and phone-in programmes, or indirectly through the daily plebiscite in the national newspapers and electronic media which both second-guesses and shapes opinion. The recent changes to the format of the BBC television programme Question Time encapsulate the new tone. Formerly the politicians spoke from the podium and the public were allowed to ask questions and to respond, very briefly. Now the studio audiences are central to the programme-they speak more and even vote on the issues.
Part of the political class complains bitterly about what it sees as the usurping of its own leadership role by the mass media. "The deterioration in the quality of the fourth estate is one of the main changes in our political system over recent years," says Douglas Hurd, the former foreign secretary. The left complains too, not so much about bias-after the Sun's decision to back Labour that would be churlish-but about the narrowing of the policy debate. Politicians of all parties lament the decline of parliamentary reporting and, most of all, their inability to get their arguments across on television and radio. Broadcasters regard themselves as sceptical representatives of the people contesting the statements of narrowly partisan politicians, while politicians see journalists turning political debate into a slanging match in their quest for stories. Cabinet ministers' memoirs are full of anguish about the destruction of political reason by an unrestrained media in alliance with an unreflective public opinion.
But this is not just a matter of politicians being hounded by a less deferential media. The point is that politicians are more directly beholden to public opinion than ever before. This is not necessarily to be regretted, but may carry with it a cost-nothing less than the systematic destabilisation of politics.
In the US this point has almost been reached-consider the swings in opinion implicit in Clinton's victory in 1992, followed by Gingrich's in 1994, followed by Clinton's re-election in 1996. In his recent book, Running Scared: Why America's Politicians Campaign Too Much and Govern Too Little, Professor Anthony King argues that Americans have a deep-seated belief in plebiscitary democracy-the view that legislators should directly reflect and implement the views of voters. This is why the US leads the world in the techniques of instant opinion sampling-polling, market research, focus groups. The memoirs of Clinton strategist Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office, reveal the slavish way in which short-term public opinion was followed by the president, and some of the unfortunate policy consequences.
In the US, majoritarian plebiscitary democracy takes official institutional form in local referendums. More importantly a significant section of elite opinion is unashamedly populist. In Europe neither of these factors yet apply. With our inheritance from feudal and class societies we are more sceptical about what we call populism. We still have a residual attachment to political leadership. In Britain, for example, it seems self-evidently right to most of the political class that parliament should ignore the views of a majority of the population and repeatedly vote against capital punishment. And while there is respectable academic interest in the "deliberative" direct democracy of citizens' juries or the implications for direct democracy of the internet, the idea that a phone-in to the Sun should shape public policy is anathema to most educated people.
Yet this is the direction in which we are now starting to move. At the end of January the cabinet decided to spend ?68m of public money on a new royal yacht. Labour leaders, remembering public hostility to the spending of public money on restoring Windsor Castle, cautiously rejected the idea. Two days later the Sun declared on its front page that its "You the Jury" telephone poll had come out five to one against the new yacht being paid for out of public funds-12,700 against, 2,700 for. At the same time the Daily Mirror published a poll which registered nine to one against.
On the basis of these unscientific tests of opinion it became almost universally accepted by opinion formers, and even by senior Conservative politicians, that the government had blundered on the Britannia issue. There had been virtually no debate on the issue. Labour had won, not the argument, but the opinion war-not by changing opinion but by reflecting it more accurately than its opponents.
There have been other recent examples of the media democracy usurping the authority of established elites. In January Carlton Television staged its monarchy debate. Although the shouting match was treated with disdain in the serious press, it attracted 8m viewers (and 2.5m people who voted for or against the monarchy) and was regarded as a success by Carlton, to be repeated on other issues.
Six weeks later the Daily Mail by-passed the judiciary when, on its front page, it accused five white youths of murdering a young black man in an unprovoked racist attack. "When the judicial system has failed so lamentably to deal with the killers, extraordinary measures are demanded," said the Mail.
Why has this happened? Cause and effect are difficult to disentangle, but the well documented decline in the standing of social and political institutions is significantly correlated in time with the rise of the media democracy. A survey by the Henley Centre found that the number of people who had confidence in parliament fell from 54 per cent to 10 per cent between 1983 and 1996. Over the same period the fall in the esteem of the legal system was from 58 per cent to 26 per cent and for the church from 52 per cent to 25 per cent. The only institutions which still scored over 50 per cent in 1996 were the armed forces and the police and the latter's standing has fallen sharply since 1983.
Did the mass media reflect or cause this decline? It scores extremely badly itself in the Henley survey, indeed it has the lowest rating of all at 7 per cent. But lack of respect for the media does not reduce people's dependence upon it, nor susceptibility to its populist iconoclasm towards established authority.
We live in a time of great social and geographical mobility and great ideological confusion. People have much less direct contact with intermediate institutions such as churches and political parties; there is less joining, life is more private. This lack of rootedness affects politicians too, who rely on the mass media and the focus groups to find out what people think. (Until recently they were dependent for this knowledge upon their increasingly unrepresentative activists, their casual contact with ordinary people, and their mail bags-which for many politicians have an almost mystical significance.)
One example illustrates the distance we have travelled. During the abdication crisis of 1936 prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously told Conservative MPs to return to their constituencies and consult with their local association leaders about whether Wallis Simpson could become Queen. They duly did so and reported back that she could not. The idea that John Major or Tony Blair would entrust a great constitutional decision to their local activists is laughable. It is now the reporters or the opinion pollsters who are sent out to discover what people think. This reveals how much political party culture has withered, but it also illustrates the fracturing of opinion formation and political communication in complex, opaque, societies. Separated from each other in our neighbourhoods we are "virtually" reconnected through the mass media.
This sociological background to the rise of the media democracy has been reinforced by momentous changes in the media itself. In the tabloid press, the broadsheet press and the electronic media there has been a significant shift in a popular and populist direction. Few media organisations give people what they suppose is good for them in preference to what they believe they want.
It is competition which has accelerated this change. In the case of the tabloid press the competition has come from radio and television, which in the 1960s began to undermine its basic news reporting function. Today most people get their headline news from television. More than 15m watch the main news every evening and unless something big happens overnight everybody knows what happened yesterday. This is less of a problem for the broadsheets which provide interpretation and analysis. But the tabloids had to find something which television and radio could not do. They thus rediscovered the commercial value of gossip and scandal. Tittle-tattle on the sex lives of pop stars, sportsmen and royalty is difficult to televise and delicious to print.
Competition has also hit the once sedate world of the broadsheets thanks to new technology and Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Times. There is now more opinion and less analysis in the serious press, there is also a sense of instant amnesia-who now remembers the Scott report? Television, too, has become radically more populist than it was even 20 years ago. Barry Cox illustrated this with one statistic in his recent Prospect essay (March 1997): the ITV current affairs series World in Action used to get a 50 per cent audience share in the late 1960s when it was up against its less punchy rival Panorama on BBC1. This January against Eastenders (and football on BSkyB) it had only 14 per cent.
None of these developments are as far advanced in continental Europe where the political and cultural elites retain greater authority. In Britain the trend is probably irreversible. But is it as undesirable as much commentary on the state of democracy supposes?
There are clear drawbacks with a media driven plebiscitary democracy. Britain's conversation with itself can, more easily than in the recent past, descend into a swirling lather of indignation. Where a significant section of public opinion is in alliance with a part of the political elite the populist trend can appear unstoppable. This applies to both left and right. Witness the crudity and violence of the arguments employed by the right on Europe and by the left over "fat cats." And despite politicians' complaints they happily collude with the media's narrow and episodic instincts (see Jane Robins p52). The decline of the great political speech, for example, has been caused as much by the politicians-with their pre-delivery briefings and eye on the news bulletins-as the media. You seldom hear a politician saying: "Give me time, I need to think about that."
As Anthony King says, governments campaign and react too much, and govern too little. We are familiar enough with this at the international level in what has become known as the "CNN syndrome." But it happens too at the domestic level. Ministers feel impelled to do something in response to an outcry-often over a health scare. What they do is often then hurried and misconceived. Remember Margaret Thatcher's flawed plans to stamp out football hooliganism? More recent examples include the Dangerous Dogs Act, gun control after Dunblane and much of the policy reaction to BSE and E. coli. And Derek Lewis, the former head of the prison service, describes in his book Hidden Agenda how policy on crime and prisons was often driven by Michael Howard's need to talk tough on the evening news.
But perhaps there is something to be said for the new populism, too. The elite domination of the European debate in France and Germany is not a good advertisement for the old way of doing things. With most people now far better educated than 50 years ago, why should we not evolve from an elite dominated democracy to a more popular form? Politicians and members of the liberal professions experience this as a loss in prestige and influence, but why should we be impressed by their distress? It is easy to forget how young democracy is, and therefore how necessarily unpopulist it has been. The universal franchise has existed for only 70 years, and that period included many years when the country was recovering from war, preparing for war or actually fighting a war. The first phase of democracy was always likely to be dominated by pre-democratic values of deference and authoritarianism. The generations born after the second world war are the first to be raised in a society in which democratic and individualistic values are properly rooted.
It is often claimed that the new plebiscitary democracy is merely a populist mantle for the growing power of the media barons. The opposite may also be true. If raw public opinion impinges more directly on politicians than it once did, the same might also be said for the barons themselves. Of course there is manipulation to serve political and corporate purposes. Public opinion polls can be given huge prominence if the results are pleasing to a powerful media organisation; they can also be ignored entirely. But the public opinion poll is more than ever the guiding light, and the Sun was surely following, not leading its readers in backing Labour. Popular newspapers can generate public opinion, but only when there is some real basis for the amplification. It is unlikely that a popular newspaper could, or would, successfully challenge majority public opinion on a significant issue.
The effects of the new populism are real enough, but they can also be exaggerated. Several of my earlier examples concerned the royal family. The monarchy is an emotive yes/no issue which lends itself to plebiscitary treatment. On more complex matters, say the disposal of nuclear waste, public opinion has less purchase than the "policy community." Most legislation is still far more influenced by civil servants and expert pressure groups than by opinion polls or tabloid newspaper editors.
And intelligent life in the media has not disappeared. Current affairs programming on BBC and ITV has increased in the past 10 years, and more people buy books and visit the theatre. The mainstream mass media has shifted down-market leaving too much expert debate in areas like foreign policy behind closed doors, but elite publications such as the Financial Times and The Economist flourish. There has been a polarisation not merely a dumbing down. The US itself is the home both of the soundbite and the well argued, authoritative, essay.
The vulnerability of government to populist media onslaught in Britain may also have been contingent on a political fact which will soon disappear-John Major's tiny parliamentary majority. Margaret Thatcher armed with strong convictions and a big parliamentary majority reshaped Britain, often against majority public opinion.
Another reason why the fourth estate has been roaring so aggressively at the governing class in recent years is simple enough-one party has been in power for an unusual length of time. Our lack of constitutional checks and balances, and the supposed weakness of parliament, has stimulated the media's constitutional self-importance-look at the Guardian in recent months, and the trend to "go after" particular politicians. Giving new institutional form to the popular will through constitutional reform, referendums (accepted by all parties on the single currency) or even citizens' juries, could relieve the worst of the populist rancour.
A new party in power may, briefly, reduce the media's destabilising appetite for novelty. But it may not; a new tone may have been set. Rather than the longevity of Tory ministers it could soon be the inexperience of Labour ones which will inspire belligerence. Who can be sure that in 18 months time Tony Blair will not be judged the most unpopular leader since records began? He must have watched the crucifixion of John Major with trepidation.
The apparent interweaving of the political and media elite will not prevent the coming conflict between them. Whoever governs, the next few years will see a new version of Edward Heath's question "Who governs Britain?" being posed. It will pit several desirable principles against one another: freedom of expression against the legitimacy of the ballot box; freedom of information against the right to privacy; vox populi against political rationality; protest against leadership. Just as George Soros and others have asked whether markets can be too free for the health of capitalism, soon it will be asked whether an untrammelled, populist media is too free for the health of an intelligent democracy.
