It seems that Politicians and journalists live in a magical pixie-land where comments can be ‘politically damaging’, a party can face higher election prospects by ‘regaining the narrative’ and Melissa Kite’s opinion on David Cameron’s holiday plans makes the blindest bit of difference to the world. Here’s the real news: they’re wrong. People don’t blindly believe absolutely everything they read in the newspapers, and the only sway the press really has is over Westminster Village itself.
Lord Norton thinks that the country is suffering from a crisis of confidence in the press, noting the fact that whilst only 27% of Britain’s population express trust in Parliament, only 19% trust the Press.
I say good. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of bottom-feeders. Never before in human history has a group of people had such a narcissistically inflated view of their own importance.
Lord Norton says “a free and vigorous press is an integral part of a healthy democracy” but I disagree: I think free and vigourous comment and investigation is an integral part of a healthy democracy, and we won’t need Fleet Street for that much longer.
The internet has already changed the playing field and is showing no signs of stopping. The best investigative political journalism in the country comes from Guido Fawkes, and the best political comment from a raft of sources including political insiders, political outsiders, journalists, MPs, and perfectly ordinary people.
In America, the election was fought by circumventing the media and creating conversations among normal people. People got involved, People became less apathetic. People actualy wanted to talk about politics. That’s how it’s going to work here as soon as one of the parties has the guts to take the conversation away from the press.
As I’ve written before1, the saddest thing about the Conservatives, and David Cameron in particular, is their inability to break away from the stranglehold that the press have had over the world of politics since Blair turned up (arguably since Thatcher).
Forget about the media. They lie, they cheat, they have their own agendas and we don’t need them any more. They’re worse than the music industry – Fleet Street is, to quote Hunter S. Thompson,2 “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. There’s also a negative side.”
We don’t have to follow what the press say. We can use the internet now to communicate with real people and have real debates. We can let the British people use the intelligence that we know they have. Let this whole George Osborne/Brown recovery saga be the last sad straw, give up trying to please the media. They don’t deserve it.
And if we do that, we don’t win because of the media, we don’t win because we’re better at fighting than the other guy, we don’t win because we’re better at lying or at presentation. In the immortal words of Libby Holden: “we win because our ideas are better”.
- I promise, my constant criticism of Conservative internet policy has absolutely nothing to do with CCHQ turning down my job application at the start of the summer! [↩]
- This quote was actually originally aimed at the TV industry (and didn’t include the left-in-because-its-funny last sentence), but I think the boot fits [↩]