Confidence trick
Leader.
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1300067,00.html
Who sups with the devil needs a long spoon, says the proverb. But no
spoon yet devised is long enough to have preserved the trustworthiness
of political leaders in the tabloid era. Yesterday's survey of public
attitudes from the committee on standards in public life paints an
abject picture of the current collapse of public trust in our politics.
But the responsibility for the crisis should not be dumped exclusively
on our politicians. At the heart of the lack of confidence in ministers
is a devastating dialectic of corrosion in which the media, and not just
the politicians, are equally to blame.
Only 24% of us generally trust government ministers to tell the truth,
the survey finds. That is depressingly in line with previous surveys and
a dreadful indictment of our leaders. But this report breaks crucial new
ground by helping to explain why things are as bad as they are. The key
here is unquestionably the media. If you think the standing of
politicians is low, then consider the standing of parts of the media.
Only 7% of the general population trust tabloid journalists to tell the
truth, and only 10% of the tabloids' own readers do either. Things are
better, though hardly qualitatively so, when it comes to the broadsheet
press and television news journalists.
But the killer finding is the extent to which the media set the agenda
for the way the public judges politicians. Eighty two per cent of the
population say they are influenced by television news, and 63% say that
newspapers influence them too. No other factors - not personal
experience, or discussions with friends or education - come even close
to rivalling these. Consider what this all adds up to: the media, which
the public does not believe tell the truth, are notwithstanding the
greatest influence in forming the public's views. The public's low
opinion of government ministers, in other words, reflects the media's
own. Is that the fault of the ministers or of the media? In our view,
neither partner is blameless, but what is clear is that the whole system
of public trust is poisoned by the interaction between the two.
It is indisputable that the Iraq war and the Hutton inquiry provided the
principal context and backdrop to the grim findings in the new survey.
But beware of assuming that they are the decisive reasons why trust is
so low. Three out of five people questioned said that external events
like Iraq had had no effect on their opinions. The standards committee
wants the survey to be a benchmark for similar studies in the future.
Perhaps these will show trust recovering as Iraq fades. Let us hope so.
But the problem may be more deep-seated and more structural than that.
If the real problem lies in the media-political culture, then that is
where the real answers lie too.
It is not, after all, as if the public is unreasonable or unrealistic
about the kind of politicians it wants. As the report says, the public
is interested in current affairs. It wants politicians who tell the
truth, who don't take bribes and who concentrate on trying to spend
public money wisely. It thinks standards are actually quite high. It
thinks our politicians are less corrupt than elsewhere. It does not
think politicians should set an example in their private lives. But it
thinks they should tell the truth and accept responsibility when things
go wrong - and it simply does not believe they are doing so.
The government's current shambles cannot be understood except partly
through this prism. In that case the obvious answer for ministers is to
stop adding poison to an already polluted system with their briefings,
leaks and other media tricks. A truth and trust strategy cannot be a
media strategy. It has to be, as much as possible, unmediated. If
ministers concentrated on parliament rather more, and on the media
rather less, they would be a lot better trusted - and even a bit more
truthful - than they now are.
--
Jez
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious,
of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society
highly values its normal man.It educates children to lose themselves
and to become absurd,and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed
perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."
R.D. Laing
Skype callto://hellward
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