Only the anoraks are looking forward to the next general election. The media, politics and the interactions between them are in bad shape. The 2001 election was a turn-off, with numbers of voters, viewers and readers significantly down. The combined audiences for the main evening news bulletins on ITV and the BBC fell from over twelve million in 1992 to less than nine million in 2001 and the turnout was the lowest for 0 years. The parties are unloved and there is popular resistance to political communication.
The paradox – and the challenge – is that the party with the most sophisticated and best resourced media outfit in British history has become so widely distrusted and that such lavish television coverage of a major event like a general election attracts fewer and fewer takers. It seems to be a case of more and more for the few, not the many. The coverage of the game of party politics appears to have reached a dead end.
There is some unlearning to be done. Labour has won two landslide victories with its central command approach and relentless leaning on the BBC. ‘Of course bullying the BBC works. That’s why we do it’. It could have been Norman Tebbit in 1987 but it was a Labour spokesman in 1997. The parties seek to be proactive, to drive the news agenda and to keep all spokespersons on message. For Philip Gould, the party must ‘always seek to gain and keep momentum’ and this ‘means dominating the news agenda, entering the news cycle at the earliest possible time, and repeatedly re-entering it, with stories and initiatives so that subsequent news coverage is set on your terms’. But the broadcasters have to balance co-operation with the parties with explaining the issues and holding the parties to account.
The newspapers may be in decline but they are increasingly unaligned and campaign openly for their own agendas. Detachment from the main parties will be at a peak in 2005. Because of Iraq the Guardian, Independent and Mirror will not give enthusiastic support to Tony Blair, and for a decade the Conservative-inclined papers have lacked a credible party to support. The Telegraph, Mail and now the Express are driving the Conservatives to the right.
I fear that the broadcasters will offer more of the same, with a few minor variations. Television has involved ordinary voters via phone-in, focus group, telephone poll and question-time formats – breeding a talk-show democracy. It can be extended via the internet or text messages to provide tailor-made information, but it will not be a transformation. Twenty-four hour rolling news is a disaster because there is not sufficient new or interesting material to justify the coverage – the policies have already been unveiled and the punditry provided months before. What fills the available time is repetition of a limited number of items in different outlets together with the speculation of pundits.
One welcome casualty would be for the networks to abandon their Pavlovian following of the leaders’ battlebuses. Journalists crowd into a bus and bear witness as the leaders declaim the campaign formula for the day. News values are put aside and the only time when these tours come to life is when they do not go to plan, as when Shirley Storer accosted Blair outside a hospital in Birmingham in 2001. This does not mean that the media follow the parties’ agenda. In 2001, the top topics covered in the press were Europe, the John Prescott punch and the parties’ strategies.
It is also time that the commentators assumed a lower profile than the politicians. The politicians’ soundbites get shorter, and there is more analysis and ‘framing’, as the newsreader interviews the reporter in an ‘insider’ conversation with the voters excluded. For all the talk of the dominance of the party leaders in television coverage, Andrew Marr is seen and heard more than all the leaders combined.
But the politicians have to meet the media more than half way if they are to break the cycle of decline. Modern campaigns are presidential, and for Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair to refuse to participate in leaders’ televised debates because it is contrary to our political system or alien to the political culture hardly squares with the parties’ leader-oriented election campaigns. Other democracies have them (Germany is the latest). No doubt there will again be the traditional minuet of the broadcasters offering a package to the parties who will ostensibly show keen interest but at least one will calculate that the risk is too great and abort the idea. In fact the debates are becoming more difficult to organise because of the multiplicity of channels and the fragmentation of the party system.
Until the parties and politics change there is not much the media can do. A leaders’ debate would give a (probably short-term) boost to public interest. We must hope for the prospect of a close contest, or of a Lib Dem breakthrough to second place, or a surge of support for UKIP, to stimulate a new narrative. As ever, ‘it’s the politics, stupid’. If a 2005 election is simply a rerun of 2001, general election campaigns may lose their privileged position of being reported at great length, regardless of their newsworthiness.