Tag: Digby Jones

You cannot hope to bribe or twist…

I’m currently part way through Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News,  which highlights what he describes as a crisis in journalism, and the role that  PR and political manoeuvering plays in it.  So I was  interested to read the report in today’s PR Week about a Reuters Institute study on the same subject, What’s Happening to Our News, which decides that, all things considered,  PR isn’t a cancer eating at the heart of journalism (so that’s alright then…).

I recognise a lot of what Davies says about a crisis in journalism, driven by cost-cutting and staff shortages, and the demands of  a 24-hour news machine.    I think his section laying into  PR is  actually pretty weak.   He’s much stronger on the evils of political manipulation of news and in particular the role of the CIA and the Bush administration’s machinations in the  ‘war on terror’.

What Davies doesn’t touch on (unless it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet) is the  effect the media has on politics.    Outside Whitehall it might appear that the politicos are pulling all the strings.  Inside it often feels quite different (this was touched on in Digby Jones’ evidence to the select committee.  A second  name check in a week for Lord Jones!)   Far too often serious political issues are reduced to their simplest possible essence – who’s “in” and who’s “out” ? Was that a gaffe? Who’s been disloyal to the leader?  Who’s making a leadership bid?  I can’t think of anything less likely to encourage intelligent  debate than the Today programme’s habit (thankfully ended) of wheeling in Nick Robinson to deconstruct political interviews immediately they’ve happened, to decode what the politician actually meant when he said X (Nick usually thought he meant Y, but sometimes he grudgingly agreed that he meant X but that X wasn’t what the Party needed to hear)  The issue of the damage caused by a cynical, confrontational media constantly trying to find out “why is that lying bastard lying to me?” was explored in John Lloyd’s book What the Media is Doing to Our Politics , which makes a good companion piece to Davies.

The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of a ditty I used to mutter to myself after a particularly difficult call:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,                                                                         thank God, the British journalist.                                                                                   But seeing what the man unbribed will do,                                                       There’s really no occasion to.

Does he mean us?

Digby Jones’ comments about the need to sack half of the British civil service raised a wry cheer in our house, where for once I found that I agreed with  bits of what the noble Lord Jones had to say.  Anyone who has worked in the public sector – I suspect particularly those who’ve worked in  Whitehall departments  – will recognise his description of the jobsworth civil servant who is shunted around from department to department when his line manager should really just offer a bottle of brandy and a pearl- handled revolver.  And I’ve  always  thought that the  misery that goes with  being a junior Minister can’t possbly be worth the remote possibility that one day you could be elevated to the cabinet and have a limo with a driver and a regular slot on Question Time.

There is, of course, another side to this.  Without naming names or specific departments (I want to keep working), I’ve seen more bullying behaviour, bad management, poor decision-making and futile work commissioned by Ministers than I could shake a stick at.  When all decisions, no matter how small, have to be taken by Ministers the decision making process becomes choked and inefficient.  When civil servants know that large chunks of the work they are being asked to prepare will never be acted upon, perhaps it’s no wonder that they aren’t as mustard-keen to complete it at breakneck speed as Digby might like (not that I’m suggesting that he was anything other than a beacon of good practice in his own dealings with the service).

The truly excellent people there are on both sides of the Minister/Official divide are battling daily against business processes which don’t work efficiently for either side – and more importantly don’t deliver best value for the public.  Whose fault that is, and what’s to be done about it are two questions that Digby didn’t really address.

Taking pot-shots from the sidelines won’t really change anything (and can seriously damage your career as the Civil Serf found out last year).  But open debate about the issue and floating some ideas for change can’t hurt.  A number of public sector blogs wrestled with this at the time and there’s a lot of public sector blogging still going on.  Perhaps new media can help let in some light on this one – and for those concerned about propriety here are the Civil Service guidelines on  blogging.   So join the debate –  we have nothing to lose but our inner-Sir Humphrey!