The Daily Novel

The death of serious journalism has been announced many times during my working life. The lastest proclamation, was delivered on Monday night at the University of Westminster in a lecture by no greater authority than Alaistair Campbell. If you want to know the essence of what he was saying you can read it on The Guardian web site.

Rather to my surprise I agreed with most of it. The Guardian extract is entitled, ‘A crisis of credibility’. There has been a shift, Campbell alleges, to ‘a culture of negativity’. News is only news when it is bad for someone. This is broadly true of a lot of British newspaper coverage in the printed media. And as Alastair says, ‘Politicians and journalists both have a job to do, and should try to do them without regarding the other as sub-human.’

What Campbell’s article does not acknowledge is that he himself is in part responsible for what has happened in Britain. Between 1997 and 2003 he was ‘director of communications and strategy’ to Prime Minister Tony Blair. The former Daily Mirror political editor turned gamekeeper for a spell. And he treated journalists, as my students told me, as if they were a species of scum.

What my students had to tell me, I listened to. But the really shattering verdict on Campbell as what used to be called the Prime Minister’s press secretary, was that he didn’t rate the foreign press at all. They felt, so they told me, that he treated them with contempt. And this included journalists who had dealt with Margaret Thatcher’s press sectrary, who was a formidable bully who could rival Jeremy Paxman as a human Rottweiler.

And so I can tell Alastair, that the spirit of journalism, with it’s core emphasis on the vital role of reporters telling it as it happens, is still alive and well. In the US press, which I have been reading thanks to my interest in the US election. What readers can get from the Washington Post and the New York Times, is detailed reportage of what is happening on the campaign trail. Not only what the candidate says, but what some of those listening thought about it. And the reporter also tells me what the candidate’s spin team told them.

To do this, requires acres of newsprint, which would not leave enough space for British newspapers to get in the advertisements. But in Britain it not only the heavies, The Times and The Telegraph, etc., it is also the Daily Mail. If you read them online, you can get a lot more detail than you can read in the print version. And, of course, today. Before tomorrow comes.

I am not at all sure what this means for our future in this rapidly changing world. But I am sure that good journalism as still being done, and that it is available to readers. And my guess is that readers, or viewers since the medium is often computers, are savy enough to realise that what a good reporter says is actually of a different quality than the lonesome blogger. The blogger can tell us direct what it is like in trenches. But the journalist, given his daily access to Presidents and their spinners, can reveal to us not only the news, but how the authorities are spinning the news.

Campbell mentioned in his lecture the huge number of non-stories that have emanated from the McCann case. But, he did not read, as I did, the Daily Mail story from their reporter who was given the job of minding the wife of the Reginald Perrin canoeist. She told the full story of what happened between them on the Daily Mail web site. Giving the reader, the opportunity of seeing what was actually happening, while the media circus was hovering around their prey.

The rules of the game are changing and in ways that are not easy to predict. But we should not assume that what we are now getting is far worse than what we used to get.

Which was, as we all know, far from perfect.