Blair's analysis of our post-modern media

Tony Blair made some very interesting observations in a speech yesterday about the changing nature of the relationship between the media and politicians.

Calling for more joined-up regulation, he branded the media "a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits", driven by "impact" more than accuracy which is "driving down standards" as it seeks to sensationalise events.

Blair said, "News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light. Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial." He went on to single out political blogs as being as bad, if not worse, than the mainstream media at seeing the worst in every situation: "the new forms [of media] can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five."

The Telegraph prints the full text of his speech here and compares Blair's complaints in it's leader to those of Stanley Baldwin who in 1931 asserted that the press excercised the "prerogative of the harlot - power without responsibility".

In contrast, however, Blair admitted the complicity of his government in bringing about the excessively adversarial relationship that currently exists between the press and politicians, saying that they "paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging and persuading the media".

As the The Financial Times notes, the government now has 3,200 press officers!

The best comment comes, as is often the case, from The Times leader:

"Mr Blair’s wider critique ... has much to commend it. The scale of change within the media over the past few years has been extraordinary. This has been positive in many but not all respects. It has hardly prompted a culture of humility. There has been a democratisation of content but this has come with a hint of the mess of postmodernism. It can lead to a collective stampede that is frequently an unattractive spectacle. The press should be more willing to admit that most politicians enter public life out of a sincere desire to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and that they often have to make decisions with less time and less information than they would wish. None of us is perfect in this respect."

"Mr Blair is on his strongest ground when asserting that news and views are too regularly cross-fertilised. Objectivity should always be the ambition of news even if the meaning of objectivity is inevitably subjective. The tendency of some so-called serious newspapers to act as viewspapers would have profoundly negative effects if universally followed. Journalists are right to hold politicians and companies to account, but journalists should not be afraid of being held to account themselves. Readers are intelligent and thoughtful, and hardly able to be fooled by an individual article or an individual politician, but if the traditional media exist as a separate, self-serving universe, then the distance from readers will grow and the size of the audience will shrink."

>The Times also includes a poll of media opinion on Blair's speech which includes this wise comment from Alistair Campbell:

"The question at the heart of all this is whether the public get the media they deserve? In increasing numbers, the public seem to think not. The politicians almost all think not. The media seem unable to see it."

Picture Credit: The Sun