More News Not Fit To Print

Sometimes a story isn’t news. It might be important and insightful, even titillating. But there isn’t the time or space for reporters to tell it. Oddly enough, this often applies when stories revolve around them.

How else to interpret the silence when a former director general of the BBC says journalists are collectively “part of the problem” with how we’re governed?

“The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming,” Greg Dyke told Liberal Democrat conference-goers this weekend, “yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening.”

They duly proved his point. The host of the meeting where he spoke, Liberal Vision, was a website run by the party’s ex-spokesman. It made no mention of Mr Dyke’s remarks. Neither did a single national newspaper, or broadcaster, with the exception of his old employer, the BBC, which got its retaliation in early by quoting itself as saying “its coverage was taken extremely seriously and was highly regarded by the public” and thus couldn’t possibly be part of Mr Dyke’s “Westminster conspiracy”.

To the corporation’s credit, however, it did at least report a string of quotes. Mr Dyke, who was fired in a fight with the government over its false Iraqi intelligence, said: “I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors,” plus “the Labour cabinet” and “the political journalists at the BBC.”

The former ought to come as little surprise. The BBC’s top executives are appointed by the government of the day. Like his chairman, Gavyn Davies, Mr Dyke used to be a donor to the Labour Party. As the corporation’s founder, Lord Reith, observed of the establishment: “They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

This is not the mantra managers usually spout. “The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC,” argues the current director general, Mark Thompson, “is delivering impartial, unbiased news.” In practice something different happens.

When he was political editor, Andrew Marr boasted: “my Organs of Opinion were formally removed.” But he also called the BBC “the child of the British parliament”, and said his role was to relay what politicians said. “If they learn how to use the prime medium of the age,” he wrote in My Trade, an autobiographical history of journalism, “people like me will be out of a job.”

That’s unlikely if they act like Mr Marr, who once told the nation that America’s conquest of Baghdad showed Tony Blair had been right to go to war. “It would be entirely ungracious,” he announced, as tanks rolled in, “even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister.” Was this what his book called “the high civic purpose of informing the voters”?

If so, they’re not impressed. Scandals over parliamentary expenses have only heightened public disaffection with the whole system. It’s certainly not abated in the three years since an inquiry called Power to the People found: “The main political parties are widely held in contempt” because “they are seen as offering no real choice.” More Britons have taken anti-depressants than voted for the government.

Apart from occasional talk about proportional representation, or different ways of paying MPs, there’s been little detailed discussion of what might be done. At the BBC, Mr Dyke said, “A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system.” Moreover, they thought: “it’s not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system.”

The same is true in most other newsrooms, if the lack of coverage of these comments is any guide. Mr Dyke certainly thinks the problem is systemic. “In the end political journalists live in the same narrow world as politicians do and they don’t see a need to change because they think it’s the world,” he said. “They just don’t understand that out there it’s very different.”

But what the man on the street thinks isn’t newsworthy. If it were, we’d hear more from people like those buried in the Power inquiry. “The media’s agenda is largely directed by the vested interests of political parties and capital,” one interviewee said in an appendix. “Commercial considerations influence too greatly how newspapers and other media gather, edit and represent news,” another carped.

So where will a discussion about alternatives take place, if not in print or on the airwaves? Most political bloggers are allied to parties. Even the self-styled Guido Fawkes, who’s appeared on Newsnight denouncing the cosiness between reporters and ministers, ignored what Dyke said, despite sitting beside him at the meeting. Presumably, it didn’t further his agenda.

Everybody has one, of course, so the notion of objective journalism ought to be bunk. Even where reporters stick to facts, they’re usually telling us what powerful people say and do, and putting it “into context” by repeating their assumptions. Alternative points of view do get aired, here and there, but they don’t get recycled as background. Helped by public relations teams, and the under-resourced newsrooms that dote on their press releases, big business and the government drown them out.

Since most media companies are profit-oriented, and dependent on adverts, they rarely discuss the corporate capture of politics, let alone talk about subverting it. Someone needs to start doing this, by redefining public service journalism. That means figuring out how to fund it, and devising different standards for framing stories.

Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of professional journalists who, to quote Tony Blair’s spin doctor, rely on “the principle that you can report anything that a source says, regardless of its veracity, provided that you report accurately what the source has told you.”

Greg Dyke stood up to that, and so should we.

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NOTE: Roy Greenslade is confused.