Tag: Flat Earth News

The invisible election. Or, if all politics is local how do I find out what’s going on?

Trying to remember the last time I read a local newspaper.  The headline in the local paper the day we moved in was Poplar Gang in Meatcleaver Bloodbath – which you’d think would be enticing enough to make me take out a lifetime subscription.  But I don’t think I’ve  looked at the Advertiser since.  There are lots of reasons why.  I live in the East End, but generally work and socialise elsewhere, and as I didn’t grow up round here my sense of belonging to a local community is pretty shaky.  (As a side issue,  I wonder if I’m unusual in not being locally engaged?  And, if I’m not,  does this make community action as a way of running public services look particularly flaky in London and other big cities?)

A lack of information becomes an issue when  there are local elections being fought.  I’ve seen  no campaigning going on round here apart from a Respect battlebus which occasionally thunders along the Mile End Road.  I haven’t been canvassed by anyone, there are few leaflets for the general election never mind the local  one.  There are lots of  don’t-vote-for-Gordon-Brown-he’s-got-a-silly-grin posters, but they don’t help with local issues.  There’s a referendum going on in Tower Hamlets to install a directly elected mayor that I didn’t even know was happening.

I’ll accept that my ignorance is  my own fault,  but having realised the problem I’m at a loss to know how to put it right.  I can follow Tim Donovan’s  BBC London blog, but he’s really writing about how national policy from the big three parties will affect London.   The same is true for the Standard.  London’s too big and too complex for even the BBC to get down to really local detail.   Which is why I looked at today’s East London Advertiser and found, well, not much.  There is  – shiver me timbers! – a pirate standing at the general election, but  nothing about the local poll.  It’s completely unfair to judge the paper on one edition, but it’s hard not to think of Nick Davies‘ warning of the decline of local newspapers and the sense that as they decline so  does local democracy.  The local papers are also under attack from local authority freesheets pumped out by councils wanting to show what a good job they do.  So, I suppose I do see a local paper every week – East End Life –  where the idea of great headline is something like Council Achieves Record Levels of Satisfaction.  I’m  just not sure I want to base my vote on it.

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.