For over 25 years, perhaps dating back to News International's acquisition of The Times in 1981, two distinct sensibilities have been competing for authority and attention in Britain: the enlightenment state, and the republic of entertainment. The former reigns in the quality press, the civil service, the judiciary, science, medicine and, to some extent, the church and the military. The latter is most commonly embodied by the mainstream media, but is increasingly apparent in politics and other spheres.
In the enlightenment state, reason triumphs over emotion, experts matter, elected politicians are legitimate, facts are the enemy of cynicism, means are often as important as ends, and the innocent remain so until convicted. In the republic, feelings take precedence, experts are treated with caution (if not contempt), politicians are in-it-for-themselves, cynicism is sophisticated; ends justify means, and people are generally guilty until proved innocent.
This tension looks, at first glance, like an old conflict between public and private, or between upstarts like Rupert Murdoch and the liberal establishment. But it isn't just that. Instead, we are increasingly divided over two sets of principles: about what really matters in the world, and how it should be reported.
For the last two decades, it is the republican attitudes that have been on the rise, dominating the mainstream and edging into the sensibilities of previously immune institutions in politics, medicine, and the law. The American writers Neal Gabler and Geoffrey O'Brien have characterised the United States, as a whole, as such a republic. Yet the republic is not so much a place as a series of attitudes that exercise an increasingly pervasive influence on our national culture.
It is in the media that this tension is most visible, for it is here that the fight for market share has triggered the import of tropes from tabloids and soap operas into the mainstream—ones that support the narrative element of news, but that also make it more like entertainment.
Media representatives of the republic have often (and often rightly) derided the claims of those they have replaced. The old ways, they argue, were slow, mildly corrupt, residually ideological and too readily influenced by interest groups.
By the same token, though, claims by the same republican representatives that the media successfully holds authority to account—as it did during the second war in Iraq—are undermined by its parlous daily coverage of the law, science and medicine. Think of the scandalous reporting of the non-link between MMR vaccinations and autism, the weak analysis of GM food trials, or the limited coverage on the dangers of nanotechnology, to name but a few examples.
This tension extends well beyond newspapers. It is, for example, an increasingly important political divide. The classic example of republican politics was Tony Blair's reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Blair, always a brilliant political ventriloquist, turned Diana into "the people's princess" and provided an intoxicating mix of sentiment and authentic emotion.
This, increasingly, is the political model of choice. Successful political communication—be it David Cameron's faux-authentic online Webcameron video diary, or Bill Clinton's saxophone playing—aspires to be part of the republic of entertainment, and shares its values. It is no coincidence that employing former tabloid journalists, as Blair did with Alastair Campbell, and as Cameron does now with ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson, is now seen as crucial to electoral success. Without such figures, politicians might struggle to speak the republican language.
Back in media-land, the oddity is that the enlightenment crowd both scorn the republic and see it is as their saviour. Looking to save themselves from crumbling business models and the recession, the enlightened see tabloid sensibilities as a route to safety. In doing so, the media have gained an audience and lost trust in equal measure. Yet the audience they have gained is increasingly online, where viewers are unwilling to pay for anything.
Whatever it has done for politics, then, the increasing absorption of republican values has done the media little good. Independent truth tellers, who believe that facts are more important than feelings, have for two decades been on the run.
Might the recession change this picture? Many will see it as the last scene in a tragedy: the final collapse of the old business models and aspirations. But I am not so sure. So far, the recession has meant something of a resurgence for serious news media, as people look to publications like the Economist and the FT to make sense of a rapidly changing world.
After the recession, fewer quality news outlets are likely to exist in Britain. And yet it is now possible, for the first time, to image the emergence of a new, credible and unregulated news media, alongside a reformed BBC, some owned privately, some run as not-for-profit, or funded by endowments or even, as in France, bailed out by the government.
In such a brave new world, very few of these quality outlets will want, or need, to promote republican values with quite the enthusiasm they once did. And if this happens, a new tide of seriousness might just roll back the republic elsewhere too.
