And so to Wortley Hall, the workers’ stately home in south Yorkshire, to a seminar for the Raymond Williams Foundation on “The Media, Communications and Democracy”. A rather portentous title, I know, but it’s quite fashionable these days for hacks to rabbit on about their trade (I refuse to call it a profession) in the big picture manner. On the same morning, I was seated at the conference table in the marvellous Sylvia Pankhurst Room, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, scourge of all things left, was on his hind legs giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. More of a lecture, a dressing-down even, but let that pass. Strangely, we came to some similar conclusions, from politically opposite directions. The press will not change, or not very much, and politicians will shrink from curbing us, which is quite a bad thing. And journalists will not change, which is a very good thing.
However, there are baleful forces at work. For one thing, the trade is becoming an exclusively middle-class zone. You have to have a degree to become a journalist, preferably an expensive postgraduate diploma (or whatever they give) from City or Cardiff. It is no longer possible to start as a copy boy in Fleet Street and work your way up into the editor’s chair. You can’t even get a job on a local paper without a 2:1. Gone are the days when a “Desmond” (a 2:2 – geddit?) was sufficient. It also helps if a parent was in the game. Dynasties are appearing in the Westminster lobby.
In the embourgeoisement of journalism, there is no place for the working-class boys or girls who bring with them some of the attitudes and politics of their class. Just as politics itself is now a largely prole-free zone, so is the world of scribblers and electronic hacks. The political by-product of this subtle encroachment is orthodoxy. They’re not anti-union, they’re simply non-union. They just don’t get the union frame of mind. And they quite liked New Labour, because it was a different story that chimed well with their essentially liberal, middle of the road outlook, but they don’t like Ed Miliband’s flashes of Old Labour (such as they are) because they conjure up images of trade union power, unburied corpses and all the other bogeymen of the 1970s, which they might – just might – have read about but didn’t experience.
But the essential questions I posed were these: if we accept that we have a flawed media in this country (as I do), is that the product of a flawed democracy? Or it is the other way round? Is a flawed democracy responsible for our flawed media? The late Raymond Williams himself, a gifted academic commentator on the media, has probably written a book on this subject, without coming to any firm conclusions.
I have a few thoughts. Since there are no state newspapers (thank goodness), written communication is entirely in the hands of the private sector. Most often, the proprietors are very rich men who have a social and political agenda to which their editors and staff are required to adhere – in print at least. Only a handful of newspapers, such as The Guardian, Daily Mirror and Morning Star, have a different, less ironclad, proprietorship. Papers have to make a profit to stay in existence, so anything that gets in the way of profit – trade unions, awkward hacks, weak rivals – must be eliminated, if at all possible.
Of course, we also have the BBC, the broadcasting arm of the Establishment, with its slavish adherence to “balance”. At elections, the law, and at other times, custom and practice, require the Beeb to be even-handed. But between what and by whom? The corporation is stuffed with eager young even-handers, yet you will never hear supportive coverage of, say, a strike. Orthodoxy says that strikes are disruptive of the social order, and orthodoxy rules.
Mail editor Dacre insisted that newspapers should be allowed to continue with self-regulation, although a beefed-up Complaints Commission, perhaps buttressed by a Press Ombudsman with reserve powers to fine offenders.
Whatever Lord Leveson and his high-profile media panel conclude, I suspect that that’s where it will all end up. Rupert Murdoch may, thankfully, have lost virtually all his political clout, but the rest of the media feel more confident that they will win this battle. There will be no French-style law of privacy, no licensing of journalists or newspapers and no all-powerful external supervision.
From where I sit, that’s less of an issue than the social shift in the body politic of political journalists. It’s not simply that there are no “characters” any more, grievous though that is. There’s very little thinking going on. The coalition mentality has spread wider than government. It’s a congenial space for the commentariat, but it’s bland and unthinking. To that degree, a flawed media is indeed responsible for a flawed democracy.
