Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
This article, from a right of centre blogger, make a few good points but it is principally aimed at shutting down dissent and debate. The message is clear: "Shut up and clap when you are told to". Holding your Government to account is the basis of democracy and pieces like this, thankfully consigned to the oddball corners of the Internet, are naive at best and sinister at worse.
In wheeling out the old favourite wartime trope to justify the argument, what the author fails to point out is that the WII Government, although led by the Conservative Party, included leaders from the Labour and Liberal parties as well. This meant that decisions were made on a basis of broad political consensus and not just by one Party.
The media has a duty of responsibility to hold the Government to account when and if it is clearly making the wrong decisions.
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I don't think this is a fair summary either of the aim of the blog, or the role of the Press.
Published news media has a function in democratic debate, insofar as it permits the public to challenge their elected representatives via journalists who are (in print at least) free to be partisan, unruly and in many ways unbounded by the restrictions and conventions that affect politicians. They can be a useful, disruptive influence on the whole process. Their privileged access, however, is predicated on the assumption that they are providing a service for those who cannot be there directly (as there are just too many of us). The market-led nature of non-broadcast media is
supposed to ensure that the angles journalists pursue are influenced by their readers' interests (as measured by what they will actually pay for). The reality, with the disruptive influence of online news that is now much more reliant on headline grabbing, ad-revenue-generating clicks, rather than subscriber loyalty, is that there is a widening disconnect between what journalists instinctively want to do and what their readers want them to do.
The blogger's main point is absolutely, demonstrably correct. Most journalists are instinctively treating this as a business-as-usual political crisis, and asking all the usual tick-box questions about day to day competence, as a prelude to deciding if and when to run the standard 'under pressure' 'questions asked' and 'should resign' articles they all keep a template for in their desk drawer. They are also, to be fair to them, doing exactly what they were trained to do, and (in the blogger's words) skim-reading medical journals before writing features and analysis in which they effectively pass themselves off as experts. Such an approach, however, utterly fails to grasp the size, complexity or novelty of this situation.
For whole chunks of what we normally take for granted in our national life, we are in the middle of an existential crisis. Yes, the politicians making the decisions must be scrutinised, but there are other tasks befitting journalists. The stuff all of them did week in, week out when they started out on local or regional titles, and which they clearly now think is beneath them, such as championing the good stuff that's going on and trying to put a human face on events.
I think the blogger's most prescient point was in her reference to Captain Tom. If we discovered he had come down with Covid-19 we would all say he was a fighter. It would be a perfectly normal expression of hope for his recovery. Yet when Dominic Raab used the same perfectly common expression, opining that Boris would come through his illness because he is 'a fighter', he was savaged by more than a few hacks for supposedly implying that those who die of Covid-19 were somehow weak and lacking courage or vitality.
Yes, the Press should be scrutinising our leaders at this time, but that is not what they are doing. They are preoccupied with the business-as-usual game of assuming everything is a matter of basic competence and hoping to be first to claim a scalp, and unfairly judging those in power who dare to express the hope or optimism that the public desperately needs to feel right now.