Democracy under attack: How the media distort policy and politics

by Malcolm Dean

Malcolm Dean, The Guardian newspaper’s longstanding chief monitor of social affairs, expertly indicts his own trade through a series of seven case studies on the influence of media on social policy. Drawing on four decades of top-level Whitehall briefings, topped up by interviews with 150 policy-makers, the book is packed with insights, and colourful stories from events in Whitehall's corridors, culminating in a damning list detailing the seven deadly sins of the 'reptiles' (modern journalists). A new final chapter reports on the News International hacking scandal, and the subsequent Leveson Inquiry, prompting criminal and civil lawsuits and leading to a radical press regulator plan. Written in an engaging way, it offers a unique insider’s perspective and a detailed and valuable account of what goes on in news rooms, pressure groups, departmental policy divisions and Parliament.

Genres: Politics, Reference, Education

432 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2011

Reviews

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dean’s account of the place the media holds in the democratic governance of the UK ranges over a number of themes. These include the concentration of publishing and broadcast power into fewer hands; the ambition of owners to make their mark on the way the country is governed; the acquiescence of mainstream politicians to this situation; and the disreputable practices which have taken root within the industry and rival companies battle to stay afloat.

Yet the way the argument is put together gives the impression of a scrapbook of observations and experiences rather than deeper theorised reflections on what this all means for democracy in modern day Britain. This is a shame because the book gets off to a good start in the opening chapter, linking ‘the rise and fall of mainstream journalism’ to significant developments in the way in which government developed during the years of the New Labour government. Dean records the fact that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, had put relations with the press as one of the highest priorities of his administration. Whilst ‘old’ Labour had assumed that the traditional hostility of the Fleet Street media was firmly and irrevocably connected to its entrenched Tory bias, Blair had looked a little further and seen that the media barons were the type of business interest which he felt his government could placate and even bring on board.

This approach hinged on full use being made of the experience of Labour’s press Chief, Alastair Campbell, with whom Blair had worked in the preceding years on the assiduous task of crafting the New Labour image. Campbell was a newspaper man with his roots in the world of popular tabloid journalism. His brusque, if not brutal, approach to this job was driven by the view that the media was less interested in ideology than basic competence and as long as they could be sold the story that the government was orientated towards doing things that worked, then the worst of Labour’s rocky relationship with right wing press owners could be managed.

Under Blair and Campbell getting across ‘the message’ became as important as formulating policy itself. The work of ministries was constructed around this task with civil servants being instructed to write articles for newspapers and departments to blitz newsdesks with press releases – 32,000 in the first four years – giving the government ‘spin’ on what was being achieved with government policies. The civil service was inflated with a corps of press officers who had grown to over 3,000 in number by 2008. To supplement this work of managing communications the No 10 team had a budget of £230 million for advertising and ran 950 websites.

Yet it was not long before this approach began to reveal crucial contradictions. Journalists began to feel that they were being browbeaten into accepting the government line on all aspects of policy and the deluge of media statements became increasing thinner with regard to real substance. In a revealing comment, a Lance Price, who had once played a central role in directing the New Labour strategy, pointed to the direction in which things were heading: “Like candyfloss , stories spun from very little to appear larger and more eye catching than they really are. Along the way the distinction between the public interest and what interests the public is quickly forgotten.”

The ire of the news media grew once this lack of substance had been twigged. By the turn of the millennium the big story was that of the cynicism of the doctors of spin who were attempting to set things up in ways which caste themselves in a permanent rose-tinted good light. Clever journalists had cottoned onto the fact that the most riveting news would be the exposés of these efforts, and they set about writing them.

Dean chronicles the way the relationship between government and the press grew worse, with the much-prized endorsement of the Sun newspaper being withdrawn as the Murdoch clan returned to their allegiances with the right wing of the Conservative party. By 2007, on the tenth anniversary of his premiership, Blair hit back with his ‘feral beast’ speech. He set out bitter complaints that the business of government was now so heavily taken up with management of news stories and the risks that this exposed it to. Scandal and controversy beat ordinary informed reporting of progress; journalists saw conspiracy behind every action of government; reporters hunted in packs to bring down ministers who they saw as weak or wounded; the real news had become the way in which the news reported on itself.

But even at this moment of supposed truth-saying, Blair chickened out to confine his examples of unfairness to the weakest of the national papers, the Independent. Its strap-line, that it was a ‘viewspaper, not just a newspaper’, was supposed to summarise the worst of what was on offer; an incredible claim given the tone being taken by such bigger and more feral beasts like the Mail and the Sun. Even in his moment of standing up to the press Blair showed himself to have a cowardly streak in avoiding a fight by directing his criticism directly to the worst culprits.

All of this is well presented by Dean. The book then goes into an extended middle section in which he illustrates his arguments by looking at the way specific items of public policy news reporting developed during the New Labour years. His examples cover law and order, drugs, asylum, child poverty, vocational education, health and social care, and housing. Across all of these areas he makes the case that the print media in particular had changed its reporting style, downplaying insight and expertise with regard to the issues being discussed, and concentrating instead on their capacity to scandalise and derail government strategy. Interestingly he makes the point that this did not always go in predictable ways. On drugs policy the government appears to have assumed that they would be given credit for a hard-line policy favouring punishment over treatment only to find that even papers like the Daily Mail were prepared to concede that this ‘war on drugs’ approach wasn’t working. Nothing was simple in a world in which the mass media saw itself and operated as an independent factor in the political life of the country, shaping agendas and making and breaking the politicians who were prepared to adhere to them.

All of this is good stuff, and told well by an industry insider with strong views about what has been happening to his craft during the forty-odd years he has practised it. But it seems to me that there is still a lot of the big picture left out in this account. In concentrating on media-government relations during the Blair period (only peripherally drawing in the subsequent premierships of Brown and Cameron), he skews his explanation in the direction of it all being a product of the personalities who ruled the roost during this time – Blair and Campbell on one hand, the Murdochs and Dacres on the other. What is left out is the longer-term trends in the evolution of parliamentary democracy itself, as it moved on from the class-based, mass parties which set agendas during the post-war period and up to the late-1970s, which brought to an end channels of dialogue and communication mediated by the special interests of civil society groupings, and started to shape up in more authoritarian and populist forms.

As ever, the key period here is Mrs Thatcher’s governments from 1979 to 1990. Waging war on both the trade unions and the established interests which had accommodated them for decades, Thatcher had taken on not just old fashioned unionism, but some of the central tenets of the parliamentary system itself. Her conviction-style of politics marginalised the self-proclaimed, and often self-interested expertise of all the intermediaries of power across the UK, from the TUC through to the civil service, the Bar Council, local government, the public services, and the scientific establishment. Thatcher’s audience was not those interests which had to be jostled and persuaded to settle differences and do deals in the old-fashioned way, but public opinion itself, with its imaginaries of a British nation which had been put-upon for too long and which needed to find its voice so she could converse directly with it, without the interference of busybodies to clutter up the dialogue.

Even her own party fell victim to this style of operating. She was rewarded with the outcome that it, as well as her Labour opponent, simply hollowed out into the empty husks they largely are today. Unable to sustain the platform on which she could stand to harangue her audiences, the mass media began to play the role of a surrogate party, amplifying her voice where necessary, and reporting back the views of her people in the proliferation of columnists and commentators who dealt in politics rather than policy.

That was the system which was bequeathed to New Labour and the real story that has to be told was how easily they adapted themselves to it, believing that it would serve the purpose of progressive reform as well as it had Tory-inspired class warfare. But Blair’s problem was that he could never make the technocrats and the experts into the enemy which Thatcher had done, since his approach to government revolved around their deeper incorporation and the dilution of politics in support of ideology-free solutions which simply worked. This proved too thin a programme to carry though the revolution intended by Blair. The channels which were expected to communicate the good news to the people surprised him by showing their continued attachment to ideology and cynicism towards the vision of a de-politicised meritocracy which was the heart of his approach to the world.

The sum of all this is has to be the need to acknowledge that the old way is broken and will not be put back together again. Populism, with all its dangers, is now the beating heart of a contemporary form of politics which holds out the hope for revolutionary change as well as the dire threat of deep reaction. The left needs new ideas on how the task of communicating with millions of people can be undertaken not just as a news management technique, but a methodology that aims for mobilisation into mass movements capable to acting in support of class interests. Dean has contributed some interesting insights as to the challenges that will arise from the mainstream mass media for this strategy, not least of which the sense of deepening crisis that threatens this form of communication. A way forward will require building on knowledge of these tensions and frictions, but also striking out to forge new ways of communicating with millions that looks forward to seeing their entry into politics and action in ways which challenge all the interests which Thatcher, and New Labour, in the final analysis, sought to defend.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Democracy under attack' looks at the role of the media in driving social policy. It accuses journalists of distortion, dumbing down, hunting in packs and several other sins. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think, except that the author is a journalist – Malcolm Dean, until 2006 the editor of the Guardian ‘Society’ section and one of the paper’s leader writers. The book is a fascinating interweaving of government policy decisions – especially in the Labour years – with the media’s treatment of the same issues and how one shaped the other.

For me his analysis of one story stands out, because it says so much about how policy on asylum and migration has been driven by the press. First, Dean reminds us that before 1997 Labour had said little about these issues: its manifesto in 1997 covered them in only six lines. Within six years, Tony Blair would (in Dean’s words) be ‘openly admitting he was intending to breach the founding principles of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees’. How did this happen?

The story is familiar but it is painful to see it summarised in one place. Numbers of asylum seekers had risen rapidly, as a result of turmoil in places such as Iraq, Zimbabwe and Somalia. Applications peaked in 2002. Both the Star and the News of the World began to refer to asylum seekers as ‘this scum’. The Sun was a shade more polite with its ‘asylum cheats’ and ‘illegals’. A particular focus of attention was the French asylum centre at Sangatte, run by the Red Cross, but often referred to (wrongly) as a ‘detention centre’ and its occupants as ‘inmates’.

Several classic stories date from this period. The Sun devoted three pages to
‘the Queen’s swans’ being killed, cooked and eaten by asylum seekers. The Star trumped this by alleging that nine donkeys from Greenwich Park had been stolen and eaten. And the Express reported the arrest of two Lithuanian asylum seekers involved in a plot to kill Tony Blair. None of these stores were true.

Complaints to the Press Complaints Commission were routinely rejected on the basis that the complaints (even, on one occasion, from disaffected journalists from the Express) did not come from the direct victims of the story. Yet how could they, when the stories were invented? The fact that the PCC’s own guidelines on writing about asylum were consistently ignored was, well… consistently ignored.

Labour’s response to the media deluge was to make what – at the time – appeared to be one of the most daring promises of Blair’s term of office. In February 2003 he announced on Newsnight that asylum numbers would be cut by half by that September, compared to the previous year. At the time the Sun was in the middle of its ‘Stop Asylum Madness’ campaign which had attracted one million signatures. Yet David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, was reportedly ‘incandescent’ at being bounced by Blair into a target which he thought was hopeless. But, as it turned out, No.10 had done their maths. Michael Barber, head of the delivery unit, had projected the figures based on the much tougher rules just introduced by the 2002 Asylum Act and the expected closure of Sangatte. He turned out to be right: when the September 2003 figures were eventually published, they had indeed been halved.

The remarkable thing is that, despite the growing numbers of asylum cases, the opinion polls showed little public concern before the tabloids got to work. Before 2000, when figures were already rising fast, the percentage of people who put it as one of their three main political concerns remained in single figures. This was before a ‘press campaign of vilification’ which ‘legitimised public hostility’ (according to Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Mirror, quoted by Dean):

‘If the only information provided to readers is hostile, one-sided, lacking in context and often wildly inaccurate, how can they be expected to see through the distorted media narrative?’

Of course, Labour could and should have resisted this pressure. Instead the 2002 Act (one of six pieces of asylum legislation introduced by Blair) was the one that effectively made a legal entry to Britain to claim asylum impossible. Consciously or unconsciously, Blair legitimised the Sun’s description of asylum seekers as ‘illegals’. The 2002 Act and the press campaign that provoked it set the tone for the debate and the policy-making on asylum and migration which we still have to endure and which shows no signs of ending. Democracy had been successfully attacked. As Malcolm Dean concludes:

‘The degree to which an already coercive system of control over asylum-seekers was tightened and made more intimidating demeaned the Labour government.’

[Bookie Monster · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. Anyone with an interest in British politics and journalism between 1979 and 2014 will find this book interesting.

It is detailed, it is well researched, it is readable. It speaks truth to power and brings into sharp focus the relationship between newspapers and politics. It is very very interesting.

However, in places it structure is a bit messy, flipping between anecdote, narrative and analysis with dizzying frequency. A good read.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

[Meaghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A wealth of information throughout but would have been better suited to my studies if it had continued in the spirit of Chapter One. (This is not the fault of the author but remains my personal experience with the book).