How’s that for a combo? What they have in common was suggested to me by this very thoughtful and, I’d say, important piece by John Lloyd in the Financial Times over the weekend. Lloyd is writing about how one of the factors leading the BBC into its current state is the general media culture in Britain as a whole, and in particular its approach to politicians:
All of British public life has grown much more harshly questioning over the past two decades. In part this is a reflection of the well-discussed decline in public manners and deference. In his rooms in the Commons, Peter Mandelson – who has been forced twice from cabinet office after media revelations – told me that, “everyone is now treated in the same way: politicians, celebrities, sports people, without discrimination. The standards of manners and courtesy have dropped. Politicians, it seems, are regarded as being for the use of the media, purely and simply, to be used and abused.”
Used and abused. One of the saddest stories of the weekend was Matt Drudge’s photographic display of Maria Shriver in the headlights. Now, Shriver is a hardened journalist herself, but the toll of what now passes for politics had clearly taken their toll. But the ratings are surely up. The most popular – and lucrative – discourse now consists of both sides vying to call each other traitors or liars. This is not to say that the media should be what goo-goo types or Jim Fallows wants. Sharp elbows, wit, excoriations, sarcasm, polemic all have an important place. But big media organizations also have another obligation (which free-loading misanthropes like me can legitimately avoid). Lloyd sums it up well:
Public-service journalism is primarily concerned with one “output”: better informed citizens. In an organisation as rich as the BBC, this could be done by deploying journalists to report on the complexity of the world. The broadcaster could underpin, not seek to replace, democratic politics. It should assume that all power, including political power, can tend to corruption and it should investigate any possible abuses. But it must also do what the British media does not do: recognise that the media has become one of the largest powers in the world, and thus needs investigation itself. In that way lies some hope of trust, even in a cynical world.
The coverage of Iraq mainly as a means to bash Bush and Blair, the hounding of the private life of a pol like Schwarzenegger (or Clinton, for that matter) and the disguised conflation of reporting with opinion are all signs of a media in some kind of crisis. The popularity of blogs is, in some ways, related to this. But we are only a very small part of the solution. A deeper, wider cultural change is needed.
The Dish 