JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

‘Brian McNair deftly explores the currently much lamented malaise

of politics and journalism at the turn of the century in a book that is
as lively as it is thorough and judicious.’
Denis McQuail, University of Southampton

The public sphere is said to be in crisis. Dumbing down, tabloidisation,

infotainment and spin are alleged to contaminate it, adversely affecting the
quality of political journalism and of democracy itself. There is a pervasive
pessimism about the relationship between the media and democracy, and
widespread concern for the future of the political process.
Journalism and Democracy challenges this orthodoxy, arguing instead
for an alternative, more optimistic evaluation of the contemporary public
sphere and its contribution to the political process. Brian McNair argues not
only that the quantity of political information in mass circulation has
expanded hugely in the late twentieth century, but that political journalism
has become steadily more rigorous and effective in its criticism of elites,
more accessible to the public, and more thorough in its coverage of the
political process.
Journalism and Democracy combines textual analysis and extensive
indepth interviews with political journalists, editors, presenters and
documentary makers. In separate chapters devoted to the political news
agenda, the political interview, punditry, public access media and spin
doctoring, McNair considers whether dumbing down is a genuinely new
trend in political journalism, or an expression of moral panic, provoked by
suspicion of mass involvement in culture.
Brian McNair is Reader in the Department of Film and Media Studies at
Stirling University and a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute.
He is the author of News and Journalism in the UK (3rd edition, 1999), An
Introduction to Political Communication (2nd edition, 1999) and The
Sociology of Journalism (1998).
JOURNALISM AND
DEMOCRACY
An evaluation of
the political public sphere

Brian McNair

London and New York

 First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simutaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
© 2000 Brian McNair
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
McNair, Brian
Journalism and democracy/Brian McNair
Includes bibliographical references and index
1. Journalism–Political aspects–Great Britain. 2. Press and politics–
Great Britain. 3. Public interest–Great Britain. 4. Democracy. I. Title
PN5124.P6M38 2000
072'.09'045–dc21 99-35507

ISBN 0–415–21279–0 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–21280–4 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-02128-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-21226-6 (Glassbook Format)
 CONTENTS

List of tables and figures vii

Preface and acknowledgements ix

1 Journalism and democracy: the debate 1

2 The political public sphere: an anatomy 14

3 Policy, process, performance and sleaze: an evaluation

of the political news agenda 42

4 The interpretative moment: the journalism of commentary

and analysis 61

5 The interrogative moment: the British political interview 84

6 The sound of the crowd: access and the political media 105

7 ‘Spin, whores spin’: the demonisation of political public

relations 122

8 The media and politics, 1992–97 140

9 Political journalism and the crisis of mass representation 171

Notes 180
Bibliography 195
Index 199

v
 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Tables

Table 2.1 The political media market 15

Table 2.2 Political newsworthiness ratings in the British media,
November 1996 17
Table 3.1 The political news agenda 47
Table 8.1 Editorial allegiances in the 1997 general election 142

Figures
Figure 2.1 The public sphere: a model 30
Figure 2.2 Circulation of British national daily newspapers, 1992–99 34
Figure 8.1 The Conservative press surplus, 1970–97 155

vii
 PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The role of journalism in the political process has been a topic of public
debate – and a focus of political struggle – ever since there have been print
media in Britain. Depending on the nature of the prevailing political regime,
journalists and their editors have at various times in British history been
executed, imprisoned, deported and subject to punitive taxation. In the more
liberal times of the late twentieth century, as media coverage of politics has
expanded and the relationship of journalists to the democratic process been
transformed, the personal stakes for dissenters may not be so high as in the
past, but the debate about the media’s role in politics has continued, indeed
intensified. Few will deny that now, to a greater extent than ever before, the
media are politics, and politics are the media. The implications of this merg-
ing of the real and mediated accounts of the real are the principal subject of
this book.
While written with the widest possible readership in mind, it is directed
principally at two groups. The academic community, first – researchers,
teachers and students of political communication – will find it, I hope, a
useful addition to the rapidly expanding literature on ‘mediated democracy’.
Second, it is intended for the practitioners of political communication –
the political journalists themselves, some of whom have written and reported
nearly as much in recent years about the ‘mediatisation’ of the political
process as they have about policy; and also the public relations professionals,
the ‘spin doctors’ of current media demonology. These two groups –
academics, on the one hand, and makers of political communication on the
other – often speak in different languages, but they have in common an
interest in the state of our mass-mediated democracy; a form of polity, unique
to the age of mass communication and now the standard in all advanced
capitalist societies, over which journalists and their media organisations
stand not merely as reporters and analysts, but as participants in, and
producers of what we all – citizens, politicians and their communication
advisors, and journalists – experience as political reality.

ix
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The prevailing orthodoxy amongst both academic and journalistic writers

on British political culture – and this is true irrespective of their place on the
ideological spectrum – is that we are living in a time of crisis: the ‘crisis of
public communication’, according to Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch
(1995); ‘the death of news’, as the New Statesman put it in 1998;1 the era of
‘dumbing down’. All such phrases are intended to suggest that, though we
live amidst apparent communicative plenty, we are actually being starved
of information – starved, that is, of the right kind of information; the kind
that we require to function politically and to perform our civic duties. We
live in an era of proliferating media outlets, it is generally acknowledged,
but their content is increasingly shaped by the low, base needs of commerce
and profit rather than the higher motivations of culture and civic duty. In so
far as the media are concerned, more most definitely means less.
This book tests these views on the specific terrain of politics. Sir John
Birt, whose position as Director General of the BBC in the 1990s frequently
found him negotiating controversy between the media and the political system,
asked in a 1995 speech if ‘the modern media [are] a force for good or for ill’
in British politics.2 That is not a bad way of posing the question which this
book addresses. Unpacking it a little, I examine in the following chapters
the extent to which the modern political process, in its public, mass-mediated
manifestation, can be regarded as the degraded product of market-driven
journalistic practice on the one hand, and ever more sophisticated and sinister
news management by politicians on the other. Or, contrary to the prevailing
critical orthodoxy, are there grounds for claiming that the evolution of mass
media in the late twentieth century and into the new millennium has opened
up political affairs to the public in a way which is more than superficial?
Can we begin to picture, perhaps for the first time in British political history,
a truly democratic public sphere, accessible to more people than ever before,
uniquely expressive of popular concerns, and capable of watching over the
activities of our power elites? No one will dispute that political journalism
presents a mediated, manufactured version of political reality: of political
life and processes, issues and events. This book evaluates that version of the
real, and asks – what are its positive and negative characteristics? How
does it match up to what, in an ideal world, we would wish our journalists
to write and speak about politics?
I make three qualifications at the outset. First, this is a study of journalism
and democracy in a particular society (Britain) at a time of more than usually
rapid political, social and cultural change, symbolised most dramatically
by the end of Conservative government and the return of the Labour Party to
office in May 1997 after eighteen years in opposition. The political and
journalistic cultures it describes were and remain fluid and volatile, as one
political elite replaced another in government, and as the introduction of

x
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

new communication technologies has continued to revolutionise the processes

of journalistic production.
Secondly, the book appears at a time of fundamental change in the
constitution and shape of the political system itself, with Europeanisation on
the one hand, and devolution on the other, now fully institutionalised
processes. The concepts of Britain and of Britishness, of the United Kingdom
and the Englishness of its majority, are mutating in relation to Scottishness,
Europeanness, Northern Irishness, Welshness, all of which evolving identities
reverberate continually on the political media, both as topics of coverage
and as conditions of production. Underpinning constitutional change,
however, and for some time to come, there remains an unmistakeably British
political culture, centred on Westminster and mediated by a ‘national’
journalism which is consumed throughout the United Kingdom, alongside
whatever more local journalisms exist. This book, written by a Scotsman
working in a Scottish university, directly addresses the UK-level polity only,
and the media which support it.3
And third, anything said about the political media of the United Kingdom
in this book must be qualified with the recognition that we British are, as a
culture, relatively advantaged in the continuing strength and vitality of our
public service broadcasting system. After presenting a rather up-beat paper
on the future of British broadcast journalism to an academic gathering in
Boulder, Colorado,4 I was reminded by a colleague from New Zealand that
not every country had the luxury of a BBC, and could not benefit from the
‘levelling up’ effect on the quality of other media output which I had argued
a strong public service broadcaster to have. In this sense, my conclusions
about British political journalism apply in the first instance only to the
United Kingdom, and are not necessarily applicable to the political cultures
of advanced capitalism in general. Readers in other countries will determine
for themselves how relevant the British experience is to their own.
Some acknowledgements. The research and writing time without which
the book could not have been produced draw on the Political Communication
and Democracy project undertaken at the University of Stirling between
1996 and 1998, in collaboration with Philip Schlesinger and David Miller,
and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award reference
L126251022). The University of Stirling also contributed a semester of
sabbatical leave to the project, gratefully acknowledged here. Research
assistants Will Dinan and Deidre Kevin were crucial supports in the data-
gathering and preparation which the project required.
Many academics made helpful comments and suggestions at various points
in the gestation and writing of the book, and I would especially like to
mention in this context Jay Blumler, Denis McQuail, Ralph Negrine, Bob
Franklin, Denis Kavanagh and Alison Preston. The views of those practitioners

xi
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of political journalism who attended the ESRC-organised seminar on political

communication held at Stirling in November 1997 were also welcome.
I am particularly grateful to the many journalists, media managers and
political communication professionals who granted interviews for the research,
on or off the record. Whether they agree with my conclusions or not, I hope
they will find what I have made of their comments useful in the development
of their own thinking about the relationship between journalism and
democracy.
Many thanks also to Rebecca Barden and Chris Cudmore at Routledge,
who guided the book to swift and timely publication.
Brian McNair
September 1999

xii
 1
JOURNALISM AND
DEMOCRACY
The debate

Modern politics are largely mediated politics, experienced by the great majority
of citizens at one remove, through their print and broadcast media of choice.
Any study of democracy in contemporary conditions is therefore also a study
of how the media report and interpret political events and issues; of how they
facilitate the efforts of politicians to persuade their electorates of the correctness
of policies and programmes; of how they themselves (i.e., editorial staff,
management and proprietors) influence the political process and shape public
opinion. The political process, in its public manifestation, reaches citizens as
the product of a set of journalistic codes and practices (the prevailing system of
newsvalues, styles of interviewing, impartiality and objectivity guidelines),
which interact with and are shaped by politicians and their professional
communication advisors as they negotiate access to, or otherwise seek to
influence the output of, political media in ways favourable to themselves. The
accounts of political reality provided by the media are complex constructions
embodying the communicative work of both groups, which ideally should, but
need not always meet the standards of information accuracy and objectivity
expected of political communication in a liberal democracy.
The political media are important because, as Anthony Sampson puts it, ‘a
mature democracy depends on having an educated electorate, informed and
connected through parliament’ (1996, p. 47), and it is principally through the
media that such an electorate can be formed. That the actions of government
and the state, and the efforts of competing parties and interests to exercise
political power, should be underpinned and legitimised by critical scrutiny and
informed debate facilitated by the institutions of the media is a normative
assumption uniting the political spectrum from left to right. Analysts and critics
may dispute the extent to which Britain has a properly functioning ‘public
sphere’ – as Jurgen Habermas called that communal communicative space in
which ‘private people come together as a public’ (1989, p. 27) – but all agree
that such a space should exist, and that the media are at its core. Thus, in
debates about the state of the democratic polity journalists figure large, and

1
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

those who criticise the way in which the public sphere has actually developed
focus their attacks on the media.
The ‘crisis of public communication’ identified by Jay Blumler and Michael
Gurevitch in their book of the same name (1995)1 refers principally to two
phenomena: firstly, a decline in the quality of political journalism, driven by
what are variously described as processes of commercialisation, tabloidisation,
Americanisation and, in the currently fashionable vernacular, ‘dumbing down’
– in short, the ascendancy of ‘infotainment’ over ‘serious’ reportage and analysis
of politics. Nick Cohen typifies the argument when he writes of broadcast
journalism in the New Statesman that ‘liberal news – by which I mean impartial
coverage of issues of public importance – is in crisis. Its practitioners are nervous
and unloved. Its self-confidence has been undermined by the preposterous but
dominant intellectual fashion of postmodernism.’2
The assertion of crisis alludes, secondly, to a change for the worse in the
relationship between journalists and politicians; an unwelcome shift in the
balance of power between them, attributed in some variants of the thesis to the
rise of the professional political communication specialists – the media
consultants, communications managers and spin doctors who today inhabit
the corridors and committee rooms of power – and, in others, to the destabilising
effects of an overpowerful political media whose practitioners have gotten
above themselves.
This book tests these assertions, thus entering a debate which straddles the
sometimes separate worlds of the academic analyst and the journalistic
commentator, as it blurs the ideological polarities of left and right. One is just
as likely to encounter a lament for the decline of political journalism in the
pages of the right-wing Spectator magazine as in the left-of-centre New
Statesman, and in the Guardian as much as the Daily Telegraph. This book is
not about the relative merits of different political ideas, then, but rather the
capacity of our common media system – our public sphere – to service and
support the democratic process for the benefit of the people as a whole, in
accordance with the principles established to govern their operation at the
birth of liberal capitalism in Britain some four centuries ago, and still held to
be valid today. It is a debate which transcends politics and unites all species of
partisan, all varieties of ideological warrior, in common contemplation of
what the emergence of mass communication in the last century of the second
millenium means for the present and future quality of our democratic polity.
For that reason, the arguments draw on the widest possible range of academic
and non-academic sources, as presented in books, articles, speeches and lectures,
media interviews and analyses, and in interviews with practitioners of political
journalism (and political communication) conducted by the author over a period
of two years in 1997 and 1998.
Many significant voices are absent, nonetheless – most notably, those of the
public themselves: that great mass of ordinary citizens who comprise the greatest

2
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

part of the audience for political journalism, and for whose hypothetical
collective benefit the whole infernal machinery of political communication
functions. What do they think of the issues debated so intensely by academics,
journalists and politicians on their behalf? In this study I have not sought to
access their views directly. I have, however, devoted a chapter to ‘ the sound of
the crowd ’, by which I mean the noise emanating from those proliferating
spaces in the media given over to the facilitation of public access, such as
political talk shows, phone-ins and related programme formats. In that chapter,
and indeed whenever popular political culture is discussed, I have rejected the
assumption of many contributors to this debate that popular means irrational
and tabloid means trash; that entertainment cannot at the same time be
informative; that serious news cannot at the same time be of human interest.
Although my status as an academic defines me as a member of the elite group
whose collective criticisms of political journalism are often challenged in the
following pages, I am at the same time a fully paid-up member of the mass
audience whose democratic rights and civic responsibilities drive the work,
and I treat its patterns of media consumption with appropriate respect. I begin
from the assumption that today’s media audiences are, in historical and cross-
cultural perspective, relatively highly educated, well-informed, semiologically
sophisticated, active consumers of media.

The crisis of the political media

What, then, is the specific nature of the ‘crisis’? Reading the pages of academic
texts and newspaper articles in recent years, or listening to the reportage and
commentaries of the broadcasters, one would have noted at various times all of
the following criticisms being made of political journalism.

Dumbing down and the rise of infotainment

Firstly, the quantity of what is usually described as ‘serious’ political journalism

circulating in the public sphere has steadily declined, and its substantive political
content been diluted, to the detriment of the democratic process. The political
media have been dumbing down, to use the phrase which has now become a
routine element of British media commentary.3 German sociologist Jurgen
Habermas, whose considered views on these issues, developed over three decades,
underpin most variants of the dumbing down thesis, argues that the public
sphere, while it has expanded in the course of the twentieth century to include
the population as a whole (acknowledged by all but the most overtly reactionary
of commentators to be a positive development), has at the same time been
degraded by the growing influence of private, commercial interests on the output
of media organisations (1989). In the process, the pursuit of profit has replaced
that of serving the public interest as the driving force of journalism. News

3
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

producers – even those like the BBC which are free of direct commercial pressures
– have been required to become more and more oriented towards ratings,
subordinating the journalistic obligation to inform to the more audience-friendly
task of supplying entertainment. The result of these pressures has been an
explosion of infotainment – journalism in which entertainment values take
precedence over information content, presented at an intellectual level low
enough to appeal to the mass audiences which comprise the major media markets
(‘the lowest common denominator’, as critics frequently express it). Lower, too,
than a healthy democracy demands. Political journalism is said to be conforming
to the pressures of tabloidisation observed elsewhere in the media: a term which,
used interchangeably with dumbing down and infotainment, functions as
shorthand for the offence, as it is often characterised, of catering for popular
tastes.
One manifestation of this trend would be the media’s contemporary
fascination with elite deviance (sexual, financial or moral), as in the cases of
Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain throughout the 1990s, and of
course Bill Clinton, whose ‘sex addiction’ was a prominent theme of political
journalism in Britain as well as the United States during the 1990s, exemplified
by coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998–9. The ‘sleaze’ agenda
(see Chapter 3) which featured prominently in British and American political
news for most of that decade was alleged to be driven by market forces rather
than public interest, in so far as the relentless commodification of journalism
and the ever-increasing competitiveness of the media market put a commercial
premium on sensationalism and prurience in coverage of politics.

Political information overload

Another criticism, which at first sight appears to stand in contradiction to the

notion of dumbing down, asserts not that there is too little serious politics in the
media, but too much. All observers agree that the media – and news media in
particular – have expanded exponentially in the late twentieth century, and are
likely to continue doing so for some time to come. Coverage of politics has
always been at the heart of the British news agenda and, as the space available
to news media has increased, so too has coverage of politics. David Walker has
suggested that this amounts to a kind of political information overload and
that, by boring audiences to distraction, ‘the massive scale of coverage merely
diminishes public interest in politics’.4 During and after the 1997 general election,
the broadcasters, and the BBC in particular, were accused of overloading their
audiences with too much political coverage,5 resulting in the lower than usual
ratings achieved by news programmes during the campaign period (see Chapter
8).

4
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

Elitism

Associated with this criticism is the perception that a quantitatively excessive

political journalism has at the same time become too elitist or insider-oriented
in its subject-matter; too focused on what commentators often refer to as the
‘horse-race’ – the process of political competition, and the race for electoral
victory – and not enough on policy substance. Walker writes of the BBC’s
political journalism (and the charge would apply equally to most other news
organisations) that it suffers from ‘a fixation on party politics to the exclusion
of matters of power and policy’,6 deriving in large part from excessive journalistic
dependence on political sources.

An excess of interpretation

Another trend identified by critics is the tendency towards more interpretation

and commentary as a proportion of total output, and the relative decline of
straight reportage. Bob Franklin asserts that ‘the gallery tradition of reporting
parliament is dead’ (1997, p. 232), adding his voice to those who interpret this
as part of the wider process of tabloidisation/ dumbing down of the British
media. Ralph Negrine, too, sees the decline of straight parliamentary reporting
as evidence of ‘the dangers of commercialisation’ (1996, p. 76). Media pundit
Roy Greenslade suggests that the excessive quantity of political journalism now
in circulation has resulted in a tendency to empty pontification,7 caused by the
need to fill the space created for politics in the news and current affairs schedules.
Columnist Iain MacWhirter argues that ‘the growth of the commentary industry
is another manifestation of our degenerating political culture’.8

Hyperadversarialism

Degeneration of the political culture is also alleged in the trend towards more
adversarial techniques of political interviewing seen in broadcast journalism.
Writing of America, but in terms which apply with no less force to the United
Kingdom, James Fallows accuses political journalism of hyperadversarialism –
a combative style in which coverage of politics begins to resemble that sub-
genre of natural history broadcasting where the harsh and unending struggle
for survival is portrayed as the only point of existence. Journalists, he argues,
now place ‘a relentless emphasis’ on ‘the cynical game of politics’, undermining
the integrity of public life by ‘implying day after day that the political sphere is
mainly an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather
than a structure in which citizens can deal with wearisome collective problems’
(1996, p. 31). Where Habermas identified the deradicalising impact of
commercialisation on the late nineteenth century press, Fallows has argued in
turn that late twentieth century broadcasting was effectively depoliticised, the

5
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

substance of political debate gradually being replaced by the superficial,

entertainment-led spectacle of adversarial game-playing. Political journalism,
he argues, has become excessively gladiatorial.

Excessive balance and outmoded impartiality

At other times, however, and in other contexts, political journalism is said to be

not opinionated or gladiatorial enough, constrained instead by too much balance,
artificial notions of neutrality, too-rigidly defined impartiality. During the 1997
general election, for example, critics including the future prime minister Tony
Blair accused the BBC’s political journalists of sticking too closely to the balance
guidelines,9 and of producing unengaging, formulaic, ‘tit-for-tat’ news which
failed to involve audiences in the democratic process. These criticisms
encouraged both of the main British broadcast news providers, the BBC and
ITN, to undertake far-reaching post-election reviews of how political journalism
should be produced and packaged (see Chapter 8).

Political public relations and the rise of spin

Last, but by no means least of the criticisms of political journalism currently in

the public domain is the impact upon its content of public relations in its various
forms, such as governmental information management, issues and image
management, lobbying, and ‘spin’. Post-WWII, writes Habermas in the classic
statement of the problem, ‘in the advanced countries of the West, they [public
relations] have come to dominate the public sphere’, and have become ‘a key
phenomenon for the diagnosis of that realm’ (1989, p. 192). The methods and
practices of public relations are said to subvert the normative integrity of the
public sphere by transforming it into a vehicle for the pursuit of vested interests,
and the subordination of the public interest. In America, says Fallows, public
relations has moved to ‘the centre’ of the presidency, and thus to the centre of
political journalism (1996).10 Journalists have become dependent, or at the very
least over-reliant, on the professional managers of information and image, to
the detriment of the quality of their output, and of the citizens’ access to rational
information.
Similar criticisms are frequently heard in relation to the United Kingdom,
where the professionalisation of political advocacy is almost universally viewed
as a negative trend, articulated through what I call in Chapter 7 ‘the demonology
of spin’, denounced as another manifestation of Americanisation, to be
condemned not only for the way in which spin doctors and other communication
professionals seek to massage the news agenda on behalf of political clients,
but for the reaction they have provoked from journalists who (as was noted
above) are alleged to spend more and more time covering the process of political
advocacy – ‘the game’ – than they do the ‘real issues’ of political life. Since

6
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

New Labour’s election in May 1997 (and indeed for some time before that
when it was re-emerging as an electable force) the British media have been
engaged in more or less continuous commentary and speculation about the
party’s information management system, and its adverse impact on journalists’
ability to report politics objectively.

Causes of the crisis

The above criticisms of political media are usually linked to two sets of causes.
Advocates of economic causation, on the one hand, argue that as political media
have become more audience-led they have been subject to processes of
marketisation, commercialisation and commodification. All these terms suggest,
accurately enough, that contemporary journalism exists primarily in commodity
form, to be sold in a media marketplace alongside other cultural products.
Journalists and their editors must therefore compete for market share (as reflected
in TV and radio ratings, newspaper and periodical circulations, and shares of
advertising revenue). They are inclined to prioritise the popular over the pertinent,
the racy over the relevant, the weird over the worthy. Commodification has
been accompanied by the proliferation of news ‘brands’, as competing
organisations employ ever more sophisticated marketing techniques to target
specific audiences of differing demographic profiles. The emergence of
professional news management at the heart of the political process is also seen
from this perspective as economically driven, parallelling as it does the expansion
of political advertising, value research, and other business techniques which
originated as means of influencing, through the media, public opinion about
private interests in turn of the century America, and were then exported to the
rest of the capitalist world as the twentieth century progressed.
The substantive information content of political journalism is said to be
diluted not only by market-driven commercialisation, however (and the implied
ascendancy of consumer-friendly style over substance), but by a second group
of causes: the negative impact of new technologies on news-gathering and
presentation. News is faster, more immediate, more ‘live’ than ever before, it
is commonly agreed. But not necessarily more informative. On the contrary,
as one senior broadcast journalist puts it: ‘the technology [of news production]
enables us to package, graphicise and meld five minutes of old TV information
into sixty seconds of new TV time – the whizz and bang of such presentation
may be enticing but the content reduction is so acute that normal debate is in
danger of being reduced to the absurd.’11 There is a crisis, then, caused not just
by the impact of commercialisation on journalistic style and content, but by
the demands of televisual form itself, arising from the constraints which
everfaster, evermore ‘real-time’ newsgathering possibilities place on the ability
of journalists to analyse and explain complex political reality.

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 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

Technological evolution is also causally implicated in the rise of public

relations and spin. The rapid growth since the early twentieth century of
communication consultancy, media advisors and spin doctors to fill what Jay
Blumler calls the ‘news holes’ (1997) created by the technology-driven expansion
of journalistic outlets has made the media highly dependent on and thus more
vulnerable to manipulation by the spin doctors and the seductions of
manufactured political news – those political pseudo-events designed expressly
to attract media attention and maximise the favourable publicity received by
political actors. Journalistic dependence on political sources for raw material
to make into news is identified by many observers as a key element in the
contemporary crisis of political communication.

Journalism and the degeneration of the public sphere

From the identification of the above trends and their causes is derived the
conclusion that rather than support the democratic process as, in the ideal scheme
of things, it should be doing, journalism has become an alienating, cynicism-
inducing, narcoticising force in our political culture, turning people off citizenship
rather than equipping them to fulfil their democratic potential. Diminishing
rates of electoral participation and increasing voter volatility are among the
consequences often alleged of this trend. Others include the undermining of
democracy through the strengthening of the power of political elites, as when
Mannheim asserts of the United States that the rise of television in the latter half
of the twentieth century has produced ‘a continuing qualitative reduction of the
intellectual content of political discourse among the mass of American citizens’
(quoted in Denton, 1998, p. 31). This ‘may enable an elite which preserves the
requisite knowledge, skills, and resources more effectively to manipulate the
polity’. American political scientist Doris Graber states that ‘the news product
has deteriorated when judged as a resource for public opinion formation’ (quoted
in Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995, p. 66), while Blumler and Gurevitch believe
that in Britain ‘the political communication process now tends to strain against,
rather than with the grain of citizenship’ (Ibid., p. 203). Also writing of the UK
(and with reference to approximately the same period as is covered in this
book) Stephen Coleman suggests that ‘designer politics’ and ‘electoral
consumerism’ have ‘diminished the health of democratic culture, introducing
the ethos (and the absence of ethics) of commerce rather than community into
the battle for political success’ (1998, p. 687).
Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television and Journalism adds to the critical ranks
with the argument (derived from French examples but applicable in most respects
to the British case) that entertainment-driven tendencies in political coverage
produce ‘a cynical view’ (1998, p. 5) amongst electors, while Anthony Sampson
has written that the role of political journalism in ‘providing the chief context
for information and understanding for the public’ is being undermined by ‘the

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media’s ability to confuse news with entertainment’ (1996, p. 42). ‘As the media
have become more pervasive and entertaining’, he argues, connecting this
trend to the wider crisis of democracy, ‘parliament itself is being marginalised
in the national debate’ (ibid., p. 47). Ex-BBC journalist John Cole writes in his
memoirs that the growing emphasis on entertainment in political journalism
has ‘created a public reluctance to make the effort that is needed for a worthwhile
understanding of politics’ (1996, p. 450).
Others, by contrast, argue not that contemporary political journalism creates
a lazy citizenry and an excessively powerful elite but, on the contrary, an
excessively unruly mass and a correspondingly weak governing class – that
journalists have become too subversive of authority, too demagogic, too
powerful and pro-active in setting agendas over the heads of elected politicians.
Political elites are not being shored up in this line of reasoning but are being
destabilised, and their authority undermined, to the detriment of good
government. David Goodhart, for example, asserts that the political media are
‘usurping’ the authority of government in Britain.12 The intense media coverage
of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 and 1999 has been argued by some to
show that similar processes are evident in the United States (although, of course,
President Clinton bounced back from several media-generated ordeals, up to
and including his Senate trial for impeachment, and was able to complete his
second term of office).
Broadcast journalist Nik Gowing has argued that the ‘liveness’ and
immediacy of foreign news in the era of twenty-four hour ‘rolling’ coverage
presents political decision-makers with a qualitatively new dilemma. Politicians,
he writes, ‘fear that emotive pictures provided by real-time TV coverage forces
them into an impulsive policy response when the reality on the ground is
different’ (1994, p. 76). Although foreign news coverage ‘does not necessarily
dictate policy responses’ (his emphasis), he finds that it can be ‘a powerful
influence in problem recognition, which in turn helps to shape the foreign
policy agenda’ (ibid., p. 18). Applying Gowing’s analysis to the field of political
journalism, and assuming that domestic policy-making and decision-taking
are not immune to the impact of these media-generated perceptions and pressures
(and there is no reason why they should be), the rationality which normative
theory insists should drive public policy debate is potentially undermined by
an evolving media environment which places ever-increasing value on the
speed and ubiquity of news coverage.
Although they are often in rather dramatic opposition to each other (the
media, one might think, cannot be destabilising political elites at one moment,
and strengthening their power at the expense of an apathetic, cynical citizenry
in another), a number of common assumptions link the approaches underpinning
these critical perspectives – approaches which are pessimistic in so far as they
amount to the argument that the more political journalism we get, the less
democratic our society becomes. Those assumptions are:

9
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

• that there was in the past some system of democratic government, and of
political communication to support it, which was superior to what we now
enjoy, and that we are moving away from rather than toward the normative,
ideal-type public sphere described in the work of Habermas and other theorists.
In this sense, the theses of dumbing down/tabloidisation/Americanisation can
be characterised as narratives of decline;
• that some modes of political discourse, some styles of journalistic output –
usually, it turns out, those favoured and largely monopolised by political
and cultural elites (politicians, journalists and academics in particular) – are
inherently more rational, and thus more useful to democracy than those now
present in much of the media;
• that reason and rationality are terms applying to the substantive content of
political debates and their coverage in the media, rather than the modes of
their discussion (so that the discussion of a politician’s personality, public
speaking style or poor taste in haircuts cannot be rational, whereas the
discussion of interest rate policy can be nothing but).

If these assumptions are valid, then Britain’s political culture is unquestionably

undergoing a crisis to which politicians and their communication advisers
(who provide the raw materials with which political news is made), journalists
(who refine and process those materials for public consumption), and audiences
(who buy the newspapers and watch or listen to the broadcasts) have all
contributed. If, on the other hand, they are unfounded, or if the evolving
economic, social and cultural conditions of turn-of-the-millenium British
capitalism make them outmoded, the grounds for pessimism (in so far as the
media are concerned, at least) about the health of our democracy may be less
firmly based.13
Not all critics of the public sphere share the assumptions listed above, it
should be said. An alternative approach – nihilistic rather than pessimistic – is
provided by Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts from 1983 on the predicament of ‘the
silent majority’ (a term signifying the widespread perception, if not the empirical
fact14) that rates of democratic participation have steadily fallen in most liberal
democracies. The public sphere, he argues (in a variant of the traditional
materialist denunciation of liberal democracy as a sham) is and always has
been an elitist bourgeois construct, as are its ideal characteristics of rationality
and truth. Designed and built by the radical bourgeoisie of late feudal and
early modern Europe (in the course of its political struggle with the feudal
aristocracy) to provide democratic participation for its own members in the
first instance, it reflects essentially bourgeois values and conditions of existence,
and can thus never serve the genuine interests of the people as a whole. Mass
apathy and cynicism about politics are, for Baudrillard, a rational response to
the fact that the people as a whole feel no real involvement in a process which
appears to give them power but in reality does not. They therefore resist elite

10
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

efforts to incorporate them into the process of democratic legitimation. The

intellectuals in turn respond to this ‘silence’ by blaming it on the decline of
‘rational’ political communication in the system. Criticising those who wish
always to ‘keep the masses within reason’ (his emphasis), who wish always to
‘moralise information: to better inform, to better socialise, to raise the cultural
level of the masses’, he asserts that ‘the masses scandalously resist this
imperative of rational communication’ (1983, p. 10).

They are given meaning: they want spectacle. No effort has been able to
convert them to the seriousness of the content, nor even to the seriousness
of the code. Messages are given to them, [but] they only want some sign,
they idolise the play of signs and stereotypes, they idolise any content so
long as it resolves itself into a spectacular sequence.

In Baudrillard’s hyper-real world, we can infer, the popular political culture of

spectacle and drama is not a pacifying entertainment so much as the occasion
for resistance to a system which remains, despite its democratic facade, bourgeois
and exclusive. The liberal intelligentsia’s ambition to make the silent majority
politically active, by ‘injecting them with information’ (ibid., p. 25) of a
‘rational’, ‘serious’ type , is doomed to failure. By remaining silent, passive,
mocking, suggests Baudrillard, in choosing to prefer spectacle over substance,
the masses subvert a system which they have no interest in legitimising, since
legitimation merely leads to perpetuation. Baudrillard’s analysis leads to the
fatalistic conclusion (and the political dead-end) that there can in the final
analysis be no authentically democratic public sphere within capitalism, merely
a democratic illusion before which the people stand as a sullen, silent majority,
participating only when the spectacle and the drama – like the football or the
soaps on the other channel – are sufficiently entertaining to keep them interested.
The evaluation of the public sphere presented in this book argues that neither
pessimistic notions of crisis, nor the bleak and depressing nihilism of Baudrillard’s
writings on the subject (albeit two decades old, and thus not necessarily
representative of his current thinking on the subject of mediated democracy),
satisfactorily reflect the complexity, unpredictability and frequently
contradictory nature of the political media as they function in our time. Where
the pessimists see absolute virtue in an ideal public sphere which has never
existed – and may never exist outside of the intellectual imagination –
Baudrillard raises the couch potato to the status of political radical, and cultural
slobbery to that of noble, if passive resistance to bourgeois efforts at
incorporation of the masses. The public sphere described in this book is one
which, for all its weaknesses, has evolved over time into something altogether
more interesting, from the sociological perspective, and more useful as a
democratic resource than either variety of critique allows.

11
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

The book

The following chapters go on to assess the political public sphere against four
criteria, beginning in the next chapter with features which can be classed as
quantitative, in so far as they address the dimensions of the public sphere as an
information resource, measured in numbers of information outlets, size of
audiences, and quantities of information in circulation. In subsequent chapters,
an attempt is made to assess the quality of the information circulated. What is
political journalism about? What are its priorities (newsvalues), and what – in
its form, content and style – does it tell us about politics? What messages does
it convey?15
The third criteria of evaluation is the degree of critical scrutiny which the
public sphere permits to be directed towards political elites; the extent to which
the classic ‘watchdog’ role of the media in liberal democracy is realised.
And the fourth criteria of evaluation, finally, concerns access. One of the
conditions specified by Habermas for a properly functioning public sphere –
and one generally accepted by political scientists – is ‘universal access’ to the
(mainly media) institutions through which politically important information is
disseminated, discussed and analysed.16 Access in this context I take to mean
both access to information and accessability of information. Political information
should of course be available to those who want it (the traditional universality
of the British public service model being the exemplar), but availability only
has value if its content is at the same time comprehensible to those who may
wish to make use of it in political decision-making. In this respect access is a
product of the form of journalistic discourse, as well as the extent of its
availability to the public. Journalist Andrew Marr puts it well when he observes
that:

Good political prose is democratic in effect because it alerts, provoking a

response. It wakens us up and engages us in the arguments … Democracy
cannot exist without a common culture … If political communication
becomes over-specialised, or jargon-ridden, it becomes the enemy of that
common culture, and the enemy of democratic politics.17

In evaluating the political media against these criteria this book sets out to
‘map’ the public sphere – to identify and describe the various regions of mediated
space in which political affairs are reported, analysed, interpreted and discussed;
to identify the political media and their audiences, specifying their objectives
in relation to their target markets (and how these are expressed in output), and
assessing the resources provided for these objectives to be met; to present a
political economy of the political media, and to give concrete form to the
abstract notion of the public sphere.

12
 JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY

The political public sphere does not, of course, comprise a set of institutions
and organisations existing in isolation from one another. Print and audiovisual
media interact with each other in ways which allow us to think of them as
interconnected elements of an organic structure, reproducing over time, adapting
to the environmental conditions of their existence in ways which cannot be
predicted or pre-planned with any certainty by political actors or media
professionals. So the following account is not just a map, but an anatomy,
addressing how the various journalistic forms which fill the public sphere18 –
the political interview, for example, or the commentary column – originated
and have evolved; how political journalism is sourced, and why some events
and issues rather than others become news; how frameworks of journalistic
interpretation develop and are ‘spun’; how the different, often competing
elements of the journalistic process relate to each other in all of the above.

13
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