Retro-fit

There’s one of two possibilities – Chris Grayling has a very big head, or the cap they gave him was very small. Either way, it’s clearly serving no protective or safety function, and would have been best taken off for the TV interview. But that’s an aside. What is particularly interesting about the clip, in which he was commenting on potential forthcoming railway union strikes, was the very deliberate use of the word ‘militant’. A knowing reference in order to capitalise on current divisions in the Labour Party, and spoon-feed a line to the mainstream media that seems at present wilfully unable to conjure up anything even closely resembling an insightful analysis of post-brexit Britain, Westminister, or representative democracy in the UK.

It came on the same day that I read this excellent thread on twitter from Huw Lemmey, which, in ten or so tweets, provided a succinct summary of the current malaise in mainstream UK political journalism. It highlights a comment by the BBC Radio 4 Today presenter and former senior political correspondent Nick Robinson, comparing the travails of the Labour Party to a famous section of a Monty Python film. What it and Lemmeys analysis reveals is a media corporation with no particular interest in exploring or investigating events, but one quite happy to coast along and simply try to make the news headlines of the day fit a linear and easily understandable narrative. As he points out, a cursory second of thought would reveal that Labour are in difficulty because the party is experiencing a massive and significant ideological schism, in (at least) two directions. They are not experiencing factional fighting at the fringes between two camps with actually very little difference between them (the premise of the joke). So the comparison collapses entirely and we’re left wondering what this tells us, about the reporting rather than those reported on.

We’re used to newspapers and privately owned media outlets being entirely pejorative, projecting a narrative and then shaping the reporting to suit it. But it was only during the Scottish Independence referendum that it really struck me how the BBC ran what came across as a pre-determined news narrative, simply retrofitting the days political news in to it. Undoubtedly mainstream news outlets like the BBC are responding to new pressures, in terms of technology and the public appetite for news delivered at speed. But this doesn’t seem like a challenge that they’ve risen to particularly well, choosing instead to churn received wisdom and easy clichés in place of insightful political analysis. Laura Kuensbergs nightly news reports veer more towards a Westminister gossip column rather than anything offering any real analysis of events and their place in the wider world.

This is not critical of all journalists at the BBC. They have some excellent investigative reporters, but some of the commentariat functions are in need of a radical overhaul. Nor is this to suggest that we shouldn’t have an ‘independent’ people-owned broadcaster, simply to say that idea, and the notion of independent, critical and insightful journalism, is an idea we need to reinvigorate. That happened to a degree in Scotland following the referendum of 2014, (here, here and here for starters) — often crowd-supported and initiated at a comparatively grassroots level — and is also happening elsewhere in the world. As Lemmey suggests; “We need better than this. Not hard to achieve: you see sharper analysis from citizens every day on twitter. Why can’t the BBC manage it?”