Most books or articles written now about the news media emphasise a decline in authority, a fall in standards, or even a general crisis of the ability to represent the real world. This is true in every culture I know of: to write a sunny book about the media, now, would be regarded, especially by media people themselves, as ludicrous.
Since this essay will also claim there is something wrong with the news media, it is worth beginning by noting the fact that there is something perverse about this consensus on crisis. The news media, as the media in general, have never been more successful, on most conventional standards. They have expanded greatly in most advanced countries, and in many developing and post-communist ones too. News on radio and television is constantly available: in Britain there are three new round-the-clock television news stations and new channels, such as Channel 5 and BBC4, which offer news and current affairs programmes of markedly different kinds.
The assumption that journalists should be free to report what they witness and to hold power to account is much more widespread in this century than it was at any time in the past one. The power of the news media to report, to stir, to uncover and to rouse to compassion-though difficult to quantify-has probably never been so great. Two indications of this, from opposite sides of the old iron curtain: in the 1990s, the Russian media covered a war pursued by the Russian state in critical, even hyper-critical terms-a unique event in Russia's history. In the US, and more widely, the news media have made of 9/11 an event of vast proportions-to the point where the media have become major organisers and arbitrators of every facet of its various aftermaths, from the grief of the victims' relatives to the hunt for al Qaeda. The routine comment on the clip of the second airliner crashing into the World Trade Centre-that it seemed like a film-is recognition of the wholly media-ised nature of our perceptions.
Media power is two-fold. One is the increased size and scope of media corporations as businesses-the largest of which have become big multinational corporations that control chains of companies: newspapers, books, magazines, television and radio networks, films, internet companies and so on.
The other sort of power, with which this essay is more concerned, is that of the news gatherers and news transmitters themselves, and of the ethos which they cultivate. If it is agreed by almost everyone that those who head Bertelsmann and AOL Time Warner have huge power to influence, if not to dictate, cultural and political preferences, it is less often admitted that those who work for them in the news media have a partly-autonomous power to do the same. Indeed, the latter may have more direct power and influence on the public mood, on political behaviour and on civic life than their employers, or than they would like to admit. Pierre Bourdieu, the late French sociologist, said in an interview in 1997: "Media professionals live in a state of dual consciousness: a practical view which prompts them to get as much as they can-sometimes cynically-out of the possibilities offered by the media tool at their disposal... and a theoretical view, moralising and full of indulgence towards themselves, which leads them to deny what they do, to mask it even from themselves."
The charge sheet against the media is drawn up by both left and right-or by radical and conservative, since in this as in much else, left and right is only sometimes helpful as a describer of the divide. Bourdieu was, in fact, one of the most influential of the radical critics. He said in the same interview that "television, more than newspapers, offers an increasingly depoliticised, aseptic, bland view of the world, and it is increasingly dragging down the newspapers in its slide into demagogy and subordination to commercial values." Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and critic of US power, along with journalists such as John Pilger and Robert Fisk, argues that most western newspapers are at least as bad as television in presenting not just a bland, but a mendacious view of the world, presented to fool the people about the forces which govern them. Chomsky repeatedly compares the New York Times to (pre-glasnost) Pravda.
A related, if less directly leftist, critique comes from those who believe television and, to a degree, newspapers have lost their investigative function. The writer Tom Bower, a producer on Panorama for 12 years until 1987, recently mounted a slashing attack in the Guardian on the BBC's current affairs leadership brought in by, and moulded in the image of John Birt, the former director general. The Birt "Stalinists" imposed "Year Zero" on current affairs in general and Panorama in particular-which had been, when Bower was part of the team, "a programme of passion, pride and principle for which lives were risked and marriages destroyed to produce unwelcome but irrefutable truths." Under the Stalinists, Panorama was Birt-ised into banality. The same view is put (with less venom) about America by Carl Bernstein, of the Bernstein-Woodward duo who wrote the Watergate story for the Washington Post.
There is a connected debate here on war reporting and the effect of the media on communities who wage war or are the victims of conflict. The radical critics in this debate accuse journalists of being the creeps of the military or political authorities of the war- waging countries. Those who follow this line propose a nightmare vision of overt or even unconscious complicity between media and military which demonises the enemy, blanks out the suffering caused to enemy civilians and is as indifferent to postwar consequences as it is to pre-war causes.
The common assumption of these critics is that the truth is something which is hidden from view by private or public power. It is true in a banal sense that all organisations have commercial or operational information that they want to keep private. But it can also be wrong as a way of describing the world, if it is based on the assumption that the surface is generally false and the hidden is generally true. In a Guardian column in 1992, Martin Woollacott, reflecting on the coverage of the Gulf war but giving a general insight into reporting, wrote that "reporters often pose the wrong questions. Their concept of truth is that it is something that interested parties want to hide: if nothing dramatic or discreditable is coming out, it is only because it has been successfully concealed... the reality of war, even one with as little heavy fighting as the Gulf conflict, is its amorphous, dislocated, uncertain nature. The allied censors may have compounded this but they did not create it."
Much of what happens in British domestic politics is also dislocated and uncertain, if less lethally so than on a battlefield. Still, it is more coherent than it was before governments began to adopt systems of information management which allow a greater coordination among departments and between departments and the centre. Leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have used these systems to stamp more central authority on their governments-and have sought to make the message of these administrations more powerful and readily accepted. Journalists have assumed that they are being manipulated, that they operate in a world in which government is a collective Machiavelli, whose main impulse is to deceive.
In his 1993 book Out of Order, the American critic Thomas E Patterson wrote that he-and most people-believed that "politics in America is practised by a governing class whose members, within the normal limits of human behaviour, mean more or less what they say and more or less keep the promises they make." However, the media, Patterson said, sees politics as wholly what it only partly is-that is, as a strategic process for keeping power. Thus any declaration or policy is evaluated more for its political and strategic effect than for its economic or social one. On this view, lying or spinning about policies is naturally what politicians do to keep or acquire power. Since everything is part of a larger strategy of power, no discrete project, law or statement can be accepted as having an integrity of its own.
Naturally, the media are still blamed by the right for being left-liberal and by the left for being right-wing or "establishment." This is especially the case in the US, where a resurgent and self-confident intellectual right sees the cultural sphere as biased against them. (The popular text for this is Bias, by Bernard Goldberg, a news reporter for CBS for 28 years.) Though these right-left polemics are not absent in Britain, they no longer have the force they once had. Compare speeches by Brian Mawhinney, Conservative party chairman, in 1996 with one made earlier this year by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spokesman. Neither complained about right or left bias: both complained of superficiality, aggression and, above all, cynicism.
This may partly reflect the lack of energy on the right in Britain: for the left bias in the broadcast media-dominated as it is by the BBC, with some 40 per cent of market share in television and a much higher share of radio-is perfectly clear. At a formal level, the chairman of the board of governors and the director general, Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke, were both active Labour supporters and donors: though this is scandalous, it is doubtful whether either would seek to inject bias into the BBC's coverage. More germane is that the reflexes of the BBC, and of most broadcasters, are culturally and politically on the liberal-left, reflecting the leanings of the humanities-educated intelligentsia in most advanced states.
Yet that, too, although significant, is beside the more important point. The media have become startlingly uncivil-intrusive into private lives, scornful of all politics, hugely arrogant in their power-and then deny this, with a show of being "merely reporters" or "simply asking questions." In the Whig version of broadcasting history, the evil past is represented by cameos of deferential men in trenchcoats begging the favour of a word, the present by sturdily independent inquisitors determined to get at the truth for the public. One of the former stories concerns Harold Macmillan, when prime minister, returning from a trip abroad with Selwyn Lloyd, his foreign secretary. A reporter greets them at the airport and asks Macmillan "have you anything you wish to say to the BBC, prime minister?" Macmillan turns to Lloyd and asks "do you have anything you wish to say to the BBC?" Lloyd says "No." "No," says Macmillan. "Thank you, prime minister," says the reporter. Contrast that with the fabled repetition of the same question to then home secretary Michael Howard 14 times by Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman in 1997. It is not a different style, it is a different era.
Commenting on the "immense power of the electronic media and the press" in his extraordinary book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt observes that in today's advanced states, "journalists themselves soon become the important characters in the historical narrative portrayed by journalism; politicians and officials merely provide the props... whatever the individual aspirations of its reporters and editors, the ideology of media journalism is the ideology of consumerism, presentism, competition, hyperbole-as well as scepticism, envy and contempt."
Much more important than leftist leanings is this modern journalistic imperative, the opposite of the Hippocratic Oath-Do Harm. It is an aim shared by left and right. If some metaphorical blood is not drawn, the interview-whether written or broadcast-is a failure. This is quite openly discussed in newsrooms and editorial conferences. The language used betrays the aggressive urge-"the killer fact," "we can pin that on him." On one count, journalists claimed the scalp of 17 ministers from the various Thatcher administrations-all but two of them on sexual grounds, the rationale for the intrusiveness into private affairs being that these were members of a government which had proclaimed ethical standards. The Labour governments have also lost a few ministers to the media-Peter Mandelson went because he took money from a wealthy colleague to buy a house, then after reinstatement resigned again because he asked a colleague to consider speeding up a passport application for a Labour donor. Stephen Byers went because he shielded a colleague and told minor untruths in doing so. Others who passed a season in media hell include Derry Irvine, the lord chancellor, who now does not give interviews; Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, who was slowly roasted over his infidelity (most cruelly by his ex-wife, in alliance with newspapers); and Jack Straw, the former home secretary, whose son was found in possession of cannabis. In all cases, they were pursued not for large derelictions of duty, or crimes, or corruption-but essentially for being human. They were pursued by men and women who would deeply resent the same kind of "standards" being applied in this way to them.
In a deservedly famous New Yorker essay, Adam Gopnik noted that the transformation from an access culture of journalism-in which some journalists are brought into the confidence of politicians on the understanding that they will treat the information with care-has metamorphosed into an "aggression culture," in which the reporter should be willing "to stage visible, ritualised displays of aggression."
This culture, perhaps especially in Britain, has gone too far to be easily changed. The last person who tried was John Birt, whom Tom Bower-and almost every other BBC journalist of prominence-derided. Birt thought that a journalism which carefully peeled away layers of the onion was preferable to a journalism which depended on revelations, or on graphic pictures. His ideal interviewers were men like Peter Jay, Brian Walden and Matthew Parris (all presenters of Weekend World, the independent television current affairs programme which he created). They were courteous, well-briefed, intellectually able to unwind both the details and implications of a policy or a proposal with the minister responsible over at least half an hour, after the presentation of a narrative of high analytic rigour, driven not by pictures but by the facts. The underpinning assumption was that the politician knew best-not because he was brighter than the man questioning him, but because he was elected. In 1995, after some years in which it had been borne home to him that the journalistic culture of the BBC hated him, Birt gave a talk from the comparative safety of a foreign country (Ireland) to reassert the primacy of politicians-"they have a higher claim to speak for people than journalists"-and went on to complain that "some journalists, sometimes, forget that. Reporters who pretend that answers and remedies are obvious; that everyone in the world but them is an incompetent fool; overbearing interviewers who sneer disdainfully at their interviewees; the sub who composes a crass and unfair headline; the columnist at his or her desk pontificating arrogantly-all exhibit attitudes which are unattractive in a journalist, and rarely appropriate." The reaction to this speech was one of rage and scorn. Birt was assumed to be slamming his own people-which, of course, he was.
Journalists now pride themselves on their aggression and indeed it can require courage to put difficult questions to powerful people. The journalists see themselves as hacking their way through the obfuscations of "spin," used by public figures to protect themselves from the increased intrusiveness of journalists and proactively to market policies and initiatives to the media. Spin, which is real and can be misleading, is most of all misleading to journalists. They should, of course, seek to penetrate behind announcements to find out what the deeper content is (though in almost everything government does, the amount of analysis it would take to set a discrete act or law in a proper context is almost infinite). But in portraying themselves as modern versions of Ulysses battling against spinning Cyclops, journalists do society a self-serving disservice. The aggression is only partly in the service of the public right to know. It is more obviously in the service of the media's right to rule.
Collectively, the media are driven to challenge and replace politicians at least as much as to report on them. This is a shift which is still happening and, like all such movements in a democratic polity, it is highly complex, with large islands of "old-fashioned" journalism remaining, as in the Financial Times or parts of BBC Radio 4. But increasingly, the trend towards replacing politicians rather than questioning them-what Gopnik calls the change from dining with presidents to dining on them-continues, and deepens.
In an essay on populism (Prospect, May 1997), David Goodhart, linked the power of the mass media to the "lack of rootedness" in contemporary politics. He charted the change by noting that Stanley Baldwin, Conservative prime minister during the 1936 abdication crisis, told Tory MPs to go back to their constituencies and consult their local association leaders about whether Wallis Simpson, the King's mistress, should become Queen. "The idea," Goodhart wrote, "that John Major or Tony Blair would entrust a great constitutional decision to their activists is laughable. It is now the reporters or the opinion pollsters who are sent out to discover what the people think... divided from each other in our actual neighbourhoods we are 'virtually' re-connected through the mass media."
Populism of this kind is not a simple top-down process, driven by cynical elites: this is the fantasy of radicals like Chomsky. Indeed, those who aspire to shape mass opinion are sometimes more responsive than manipulative. In an interview in the British Journalism Review, the Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, admitted that if opinion swung towards the euro, he would sooner or later do so too. (But the people can sometimes be resisted. It is 21 years since the abolition of the death penalty in France and public opinion in favour of its restoration has steadily risen. This is a populism of the people that will continue to be ignored by the French and British political classes.)
But if populism is bottom up as well as top down, it is also a deliberate media strategy, designed to organise audiences and evoke certain emotions. Few things are more sobering than to hear the shapers of the most mass of the media, television, revealing their plans. At the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge last year, Peter Bazalgette, one of the creators of Big Brother, lauded his creation by saying it had turned the passive viewer into an active voter-"the simple act of voting is going to have a profound effect on television... I believe we are on the verge of a new relationship with the winking box in the corner."
What is wrong with that? Why should not the unmediated voice of the people be heard? Why should not media executives act as the medium through which it is heard, rather than as the anxious, manipulators of their opinion, allowing through only these defined as "rational" or "liberal."
One answer to the question is that free expression of opinion is insufficient for a democracy. The "new relationship" of which Bazalgette speaks is the occasional spasm of an inactive-that is, passively watching-mass. Television loses its point, as well as its revenue, if the mass is disaggregated and active.
In "Sovereignty and the Media," the media scholar Jean Seaton notes that "in US and European politics, television has shifted the locus of political happenings from legislatures and conference halls to where television discussions and interviews take place." Media executives celebrate this trend; Seaton questions whether it assists the democratic process. The philosopher of free expression John Stuart Mill, was, she says, not only concerned with the freedom to express views, but with the process of opinion formation. Mill wrote, in On Liberty, that "very few facts are able to tell their own story without comments to bring out their meaning." Mill, Seaton writes, maintains that "argument is necessary... as the only way of checking against the possibility of error, or if there is error, correcting it. We need argument because most opinions are neither totally true nor wholly false, and disputation is likely to bring about the best of both, producing a superior view."
Seaton is expressing in a different way some of the anxieties which J?rgen Habermas has expressed, especially in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere-in which he holds that that sphere has been "re-feudalised" by the mass media in alliance with populist politicians, and turned into an area from which the media and politicians garner managed assent. This view is echoed in polemicised form by Chomsky and others. But like too many radical intellectuals their insights are undermined by an apocalyptic pessimism whose largest use is to reflect well on the sensitivity and insight of the pessimist.
The point is not to bemoan the end of democracy, or of rational discourse, but to recognise that the media, especially television, has the means to reshape it. We are not helpless: we have civil society and responsible leaders; we are not like serfs, in Habermas's dystopian fantasy, being marshalled to watch the occasional joust, cheer the lord and his lady before being herded back into our hovels. Life is not lived, or experienced, like that. The challenge, as John B Thompson writes in his Media and Modernity, is to "find ways of deepening the democratic stake by enlarging the scope of the deliberative processes."
I have suggested that the news media are generally opposed to the deepening of the democratic stake-or rather, replacing the mechanisms of deliberative democracy with a media-managed expression of choice. The complaints-of dumbing down, cynicism, the narrowing of political coverage, aggression and scorn towards elected representatives, withdrawal from coverage of parliament and other deliberative assemblies-can be exaggerated, but cumulatively these changes are pushing us in the direction of acclamatory "for/against" forms of democracy.
In her final Reith Lecture of this year, the philosopher Onora O'Neill said that the media were the only unregulated great power left, and that they used that power to abuse public trust. "We are now perilously close to a world in which media conglomerates act as if they... had unrestricted rights of free expression, and therefore a licence to subject positions for which they don't care to caricature and derision, misrepresentation or silence." The most potentially damaging consequence of this free expression is the belief that there can be no grounds for trust in political institutions and representatives-not as a result of specific malfeasance, but as an a priori assumption. The famous advice of then Sunday Times editor Harry Evans to his journalists: "Always ask yourself, when interviewing a politician-why is that bastard lying to me?" has passed from radical fearlessness to a commercial strategy with big implications for the health of our public life.
In an essay on "The News Media and the Democratic Process," the US media scholar Michael Schudson proposes that "if journalists begin to ask seriously the question... what can the media do to improve the American democratic process-assuming an intelligent and interested electorate-they will find ways... to make a difference." One can think of many such ways in Britain: of using the extraordinary presentational skills of contemporary television to deepen and enliven the democratic process. Parliaments and assemblies, political meetings and rallies, trade union conferences, companies' annual meetings, think tanks, professional associations, senior citizens' groups, school and university debating societies, even editorial meetings-could all be made a distinctive part of the media diet. Why, for example, is there no regular programme about parliament which attempts to connect what happens in the chamber or a select committee to what happens in schools, offices or hospitals? To show how people deliberate, dispute and decide in their own time and in their own places about public matters: that would be a project worthy of the talent which is found in television, a kind of anti-Big Brother project in both Orwellian and Bazalgettian senses.
For that, those working in the media need to take responsibility for how central they have become to our public life. The "I only work/ask the questions here" position which journalists, including those who are household names, tend to adopt should no longer be available. Media people matter, because they intentionally shape our public lives; they spend large amounts of intelligence, time and money in doing so. But they do so behind a veil: so that, in the extreme, events which are wholly media-ised, as the memorials of 9/11 were, are said to be merely representations of a public or institutional grief, or respect. In reality, the emotions which they describe are to a substantial degree created in the forms they take by those who are describing them-a perfectly circular event. Even more clearly, the British media tore away existing royal funereal customs in order to substitute their own obsequies for the death of Diana, trumpeting it as a victory for the "people." Claiming to be passive narrators of reality while in fact being extraordinarily active in shaping that reality is a large-if partly unconscious-abuse of trust.
We question-through journalism, but also in policy institutes and academic departments-political, economic, military and social power. But we rarely interrogate one of the greatest powers in the modern world, the media. The coverage of the media by the media (beyond industry news and gossip) veers between a self-indulgent irony-"aren't we a bunch of drunken hacks?"-and a hyperbolic indignation directed at politicians or cowardly media executives. In Britain, only a few commentators, such as Roy Greenslade of the Guardian and Stephen Glover of the Spectator, attempt a regular account of the content of the media, and how it is created-though they concentrate largely on newspapers, no longer the most powerful medium. Academic media studies can be very good (as some of the voices quoted here are); but they are scorned by the media in Britain and can sometimes be their own worst enemy in the development of a self-referential, defensive discourse.
There are, in Europe, no policy institutes which have as their brief an understanding of and challenge to the power of the media. We have too few levers for questioning the questioners, of making an account of what effect they have on the democratic processes which they are, willy-nilly, reshaping. I use "we" in the European sense, for the US, in which the media are taken more seriously and take themselves more seriously (often to the derision of British journalists), has a number of institutes-cum-academic centres where media policy is discussed in depth (the Shorenstein Centre at Harvard, the Annenberg Centre at USC, the Columbia and NYU schools of journalism).
We need to make sure that the media take themselves seriously as social actors, because they have a lead part. Not only that, they direct other parts, and demand the right to do so. They write large parts of the script. They tell the audience when to laugh, cry and applaud. And then they say: we're only telling your stories. But societies live and die on stories. We need to develop mechanisms for interrogating the interrogators, and of challenging them to widen the arena for deliberation which they may-even without being conscious of doing so-now be closing.
