Tainted journalists
by Peter Preston Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
It was, said my African editor friend, a “terrible headache.” He needed trained, talented journalists, the lifeblood of his paper. But he couldn’t afford to pay big money, and a malign inversion of market forces kept snatching the talent away. The brightest head not to other newspapers or even television, but into government as aides or press spokespersons. My African friend had to work with the leftovers.
This is not, perhaps, what the developed world would define as a natural balance. Television anchors and similar media luminaries can command six- or seven-figure salaries whilst the people who run the country limp far behind. Britain’s prime minister, for instance, earns much less than any editor of a national newspaper. His press secretary, recruited with a subservience to market rates, earns more than any of the Cabinet ministers he serves.
Either way, however, there is a common problem that increasingly affects us all. Where should the natural boundaries of journalism be drawn? What’s the role of journalists who cross, and sometimes crisscross, the routes between political public relations and an independent press?
There are more of us traveling the route than ever before. They are hugely sought after in Britain as special advisers, so much so that the Committee on Standards in Public Life issued a report proposing that this swell of recruits should be capped at no more than 100.
In some nations and some political traditions, perhaps, such matters are commonplace. The United States, for instance, is used to tens of thousands of batons changing when the time-limited presidency changes. An incoming president brings a huge team, and it’s entirely natural that trusted reporters or editors from a previous life should find a place in the lineup. Equally, the United States has developed expertise in think tanks to create a transition zone between government and the public sector. It’s a way of running things, a system. Such systems, up to a point, can cope with the strain.
A different system exists in much of the world. In a British model, the civil service is supposedly neutral and continuous, and the difference lies in the policies incoming ministers bring. If the permanent civil service loses its neutrality, that spells trouble. Any taint means permanent danger for democracy.
The special advisers create another area of controversy. If they’re journalists, they carry their contact books with them. The advisers know the reporters left behind who will write their stories about the government. They can, through their ministers, wield substantial power in policy-making. These people can make permanent civil servants jump to attention, and they can operate in the half-world between the politicians and the front pages by floating tales off-the-record and passing parcels of blame to other ministries.
Fascinatingly, too, their influence has no clear lines of demarcation. They win their appointments by faithful adherence to a political cause before — sometimes long before — they get a sniff of power itself. After it’s all over, they expect to return to journalism as though this were merely an extension of their career. Thus, today, you can find ambitious writers on some papers who will secretly write a speech for a favored politician and then praise that same speech for its perception in the leader columns. Thus, the day after tomorrow, the press itself becomes clogged with the thoughts of ex-advisers who have never escaped from their propaganda roles.
The ethical distinctions in this situation can be narrow. There is, for instance, nothing basically distressing about a specialist correspondent in health or the environment joining a minister for a while. Indeed, the insights one gains inside a department can make a better-informed writer upon returning to journalism. But what if that “expertise” becomes more public relations than journalism? Then the corrosion starts.
Independent journalism and politics don’t mix. The moment I became a journalist was the moment I gave up party politics and, as an editor, I wholly disapproved of my staff getting the two intertwined. The readers don’t understand, and they shouldn’t be expected to understand. A journalist can’t have two masters.
But such disapproval is now lagging far behind the times. My African friend sees it as part of modern life that he and his government must fish for talent in the same shallow pool. Bright young recruits have a choice, and neither path strikes them as odd. They both fork off the same career road.
So it is, too, in the West. Editors in the former communist countries were de facto political appointees. Their heirs and successors may be more free and more feisty, but the historical proximity to state power remains. Those of us in the traditional democracies see a generation beginning to think of itself as a part of the power it’s paid to monitor. We don’t even sense that things are going awry, and when public trust in us seems puny, we scratch our heads. We do not pause to realize that the spin is not with us.
Peter Preston
Global Journalist columnist Peter Preston is editorial director of the Guardian Media Group and was the chairman of IPI from 1995 to 1997.