THE GUARDIAN

Intense circulation wars have created a vicious press pack which ultimately might make the country ungovernable

Polly Toynbee
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

Downing Street has fallen on its sword. The mortal combat with the press that led to the Hutton courtroom has produced a small earthquake of a shake-up inside No 10. It's a remarkable act of unilateral disarmament, for there is no sign of reciprocal disarmament from the enemy press.

The government's most lethal weapon, Alastair Campbell, has gone, with a clean sweep of the whole communications operation. The prime minister has accepted in full the Phillis report on how government communicates with the public, not a jot or tittle changed. Whitehall mandarins will deliver government communications with an iron curtain separating them from the nefarious political machine. Nothing but transparency and blue skies from now on. How easy it sounds.

Responding to Phillis, at yesterday's press conference, the prime minister said it was a "two-way responsibility" for the press. "Both of us have an interest in the public being less cynical and more open to the political argument." If only. Fostering cynicism and prejudice sells papers. So does selling fairytale politics - better services with lower taxes.

Maybe, Canute-like, he was making a point: the waves of press hostility, with their flotsam of knaves and liars, are unlikely to desist. Much of this high-minded debate on spin is happening somewhere between planet Zog and never-never land. There is no press "responsibility". To whom? Why should the Mail and the rest beat their swords into ploughshares? As for the end of "spin", all government communications always included private briefings. Phillis's distinction between what "government" does and what "politicians" do will be a vanishingly difficult line to police.

Will peace break out? Phillis rightly describes how the "adversarial relationship between government and the media has resulted in all information being mistrusted". Indeed there can hardly be a baby in a pram that if polled now wouldn't burble that it has lost all trust in politicians. (Quite when was the golden age of trust? Politicians always scored as low as debt collectors and journalists at the bottom of public trust polls.) So who's really to blame? Who started it? Phillis chooses his words with great diplomacy: "The response of the media to a rigorous and proactive government and news management strategy has been to match claim with counter-claim in a challenging and adversarial way, making it difficult for any accurate communication of real achievement to pass unchallenged." But which was challenge, which response? Who was the chicken, who the egg?

Think back to the deep scars of the 1992 election that gave birth to New Labour's hypersensitivity to the press. Remember the Sun on election day 1992 - "If Kinnock wins, will the last one left please turn out the lights" - followed the next day triumphantly by "It's the Sun wot won it". Maybe they didn't, but what mattered is that they thought they did. That taste of blood began a new era of attack-journalism, where the game was to kill politicians. Major felt the full force of it once Murdoch fired the starting pistol on his demise. There was a brief ceasefire after 1997 in the press, but the boredom of peacetime was unbearable for long in newsrooms thirsting for blood.

This now spreads far beyond the politics of proprietors: their age-old malice has leaked over to become the prevailing style, habit and mindset of much British journalism, left and right. Get the politicians, catch the government lying, denigrate, mock, kill. Never mind the substance of a policy - that's boring and time-consuming. The fun is targeting the next minister who might be knocked off his or her perch - will Hoon be the next Byers? (The public barely heard of either dull fellow until they came under fire.) This is political decadence, games filling the vacancy in ideals and ideas.

Journalism has become obsessed with the processes of government, but incurious about any complex problem that cannot be blamed upon some hapless minister. What drove Downing Street mad was when it saw this start to leak into corners of the BBC too. The trouble is that a generation of young journalists now know nothing else, bred on the idea that attack is the only sign of journalistic integrity - all politicians are villains, all journalists their natural predators, or else toadies and lackeys. Speaking at a rather gentle literary festival recently, a young chap asked me a particularly aggressive question. Afterwards he came and apologised, explaining he was a trainee journalist learning to ask rude questions: he intuited nastiness is what it takes. In some newsrooms he's probably right.

This approach is in danger of making the country nearly ungovernable: were Iain Duncan Smith to win power, his government would get barely more respite these days. Journalism of left and right converges in an anarchic zone of vitriol where elected politicians are always contemptible, their policies not just wrong but their motives all self-interest. Those on the left should take this very seriously indeed. The right is individualist, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-collective provision. Undermining the idea that government is a force for good is its ideological aim, alongside the mad militias of Idaho. But the left, which purports to believe in government, should be wary of joining the same all-governments-are-rubbish camp. This anarcho-individualism is a very British mindset - and it is not compatible with social democracy.

There are hard commercial reasons why the British press is extreme, shocking visitors from most other democracies. Labour governments always suffered under Tory press dominance, but since 1979 competition for a diminishing readership and viewership has hugely intensified. Need to be noticed has grown when TV news has multiplied many-fold. In 1979 newspapers had a quarter the number of pages to fill. The lobby had 120 political correspondents; now the pack is 250, all wanting scoops and private briefings. Meanwhile newspaper sales have been in continuous decline for 50 years. Competition in the media is pernicious: shrieking headlines fighting for fickle readers on newsstands drive out thoughtfulness and balance. The famous US papers are monopolies in their cities and calmly balanced as a result.

So, if the government does genuinely disarm its own attack-dogs, what chance that the press will repent? Close to zero. Daily grotesqueries will continue to decorate the front page of the Mail and others.

So what should the government do next? Understand that this heartless, motiveless attack-journalism is partly Labour's fault - not because of "spin" but because it fills a vacuum in political idealism. In the shake-up, a new policy team has a chance to inject new energy and direction into the lost muddle at the top. It is time to shed the third way triangulation that strangles clarity of message. Trust comes with a sense of purpose, direction and clear belief, unmuffled by trying to please the enemy. So when some newspapers continue to distort, cut them off and denounce them bravely. Making enemies also makes friends.

p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

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