Curly’s Corner Shop, the blog!

Complaining about the media? Get it under control!

Now wasn’t Tony Blair’s speech about the changing nature of the relationship between politics and the media interesting, well I thought so. A little confused in places and a little hypocritical in others, but even I have to admit there are some grains of truth in his text, and a barbed threat towards the end. There are no surprises that he has received the mixed reception that he deserves this morning, particularly after the years spent grooming the press and “sexing up” the presentation with Alastair Campbell pulling his strings. How on earth he can say

“that we need, at the least, a proper and considered debate about how we manage the future, in which it is in all our interests that the public is properly and accurately informed”

is beyond me, Blair and the Labour Party have spent ten years trying to “manage” the news and ensure that the spin and bluster is maintained we are properly and accurately informed. But at least he admits his complicity in these affairs

“I first acknowledge my own complicity. We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.”

Then he goes on to lambaste the modern media for it’s obsession with “impact”, and it’s here that we see the grain of truth, but surely it was Blair and Campbell who introduced this concept in the first place, with their managed news content.

“The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by “impact”. Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.”

A good example of this “impact” journalism would be this story in the Shields Gazette yesterday which could quite simply have been an inside page story telling us that Ryan Burn had been arrested for smuggling knuckle dusters into the U.K., but no, it needed to be highlighted with a sensational headline and slapped on the front page for “impact”, the fact that he is related to the Gazette’s posthumous story maker should be neither here nor there, but apparently someone thinks that this is what “sells”. Blair gets it right here, too;

“Something that is interesting is less powerful than something that makes you angry or shocked. The consequences of this are acute. First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down.”

Blair then went on to try and blur the distinctions between factual reporting and commentary, and it is here that most people might take issue with him;

“Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism. But it is supposed to be separate. Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course. In other words, this is not exceptional. It is routine……It used to be thought – and I include myself in this – that help was on the horizon. New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five. But here is also the opportunity. At present, we are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact.”

It is here that he is eluding to the “new media”, citizen journalism, blogging, Comment is Free, and other online newspapers that allow interaction. I’m sorry Tony this is what we call freedom of speech and thought! He then allows himself to reach the intention of his speech and deliver the barbed threat of state control;

“As the technology blurs the distinction between papers and television, it becomes increasingly irrational to have different systems of accountability based on technology that no longer can be differentiated in the old way. How this is done is an open question and, of course, the distinction between balance required of broadcasters but not of papers remains valid. But at some point the system is going to change and the importance of accuracy will not diminish, whilst the freedom to comment remains. It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers. That is true up to a point. But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told. In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself.”

So that’s it then, it’s all about accountability and the “news” and “new media” reflecting the required accuracy to be measured by some yardstick. So after years of reading about items such as Bernie Ecclestone’s donation to the Labour Party, the so-called 45 minute warning on W.M.D’s, the Hutton whitewash Enquiry, and the alleged selling of peerages to favoured Labour Party donors Tony wants to see some new sorts of regulators to ensure we tell it as it is with the required accuracy. In other words let’s control the media (newspapers, broadcasters, and the new media) and ensure that all voices of dissent are well controlled, it’s the New Labour way isn’t it, just ask any party member!

I hardly think it’s the media that’s soured the relationship between politicians and the public Tony, if you had not have spent so many years creating spin, lies, and deception, you wouldn’t have needed to make that speech yesterday.

Luckily The Shields Gazette will be safe from the hands of Blair’s new Press Commissariat, they already conform perfectly well without dissenting politically, they just need to stop the “impact” headlines.

Sorry about the picture (click to enlarge) it’s my own spoof made under the auspices of my own freedom of expression, before Brown takes the reigns and slaps my wrist!

Update

Guido Fawkes seems to have come to the same conclusion about the PM.