After the World has ended

I feel sorry for many of the journalists who have lost their jobs as a result of the demise of the News of the World. Like many, I know people like David Wooding, the associate and political editor, to be good journalists who do their jobs professionally. I also still enjoy reading newspapers and recognise that there is a lot to be said for the variety that is available in both Britain and Ireland, and that such competition is in many ways healthy. But I refuse to mourn the potential demise of two unpleasant aspects of a British newspaper culture that have been more damaging to our society than MPs' claiming for duck islands on their expenses.

The first is the notion that anybody who is successful deserves to be brought down, by whatever means possible. Of course, there are those who are breaking the law or being grossly hypocritical, and they deserve to have their hypocrisy or illegality revealed. But the extent of the hacking that appears to have occurred, and the standard fare not just of the News of the World but of the tabloid press generally, works on the assumption that virtually everybody in political or public life is a wrongdoer who deserves to be exposed by whatever means possible. That is the culture that led to a toleration of hacking and apparently of contaminating computers with Trojans, using private investigators to obtain illegally private information or accepting that lying is all part of a greater good. It is not just a problem with the Murdoch press, and if we see it as confined to the News of the World, we will miss a chance to develop a much clearer sense of where the public interest differs from the potential prurient interest of the public.

The second is a degree of prurient morality that holds people in public life up to standards that few people manage in their private lives, and which are certainly not maintained by those who produce the newspapers. This morality holds that the fragility of many private lives must be held up to public ridicule regardless of the circumstances. That was as much the stock and trade of the News of the World as it is of the other tabloids (often, it is true, followed up by the broadsheets with a pretence of po-faced distaste or of inquiry into the activities of the tabloids.)

The inquiries that David Cameron has announced this morning need to do more than get to the bottom of the hacking scandal, or even of other illegal methods used to acquire private information about individuals who just happen to find themselves - even by tragedy - in the public eye. It needs, as Ed Miliband has said, to see a robust replacement to the Press Complaints Commission, one that is legally required to uphold both the freedom of the press and the responsibilities that it has too. It also needs to gain a new consensus both on those responsibilities and the parameters of the public interest. There needs too to be an understanding of where these roles lie in an increasingly electronic media.

Those who argue along these lines have, in the past, been accused of wanting to muzzle a free press. But the way that newspapers have evolved in the last two decades, where even the broadsheets make it difficult to separate fact from comment, has done more to undermine the strengths of a free press than any such regulation. The challenge for the press now is to recognise that this is far more than a challenge for News International: they need to help lead the new rapprochement or they will find that it is imposed on them; and, to do that, they need candidly to admit that, in backing the toothless charade that is the Press Complaints Commission, they have so far failed to grasp this nettle.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

Through the media lens

Of course, it matters that Labour will not have the backing of the Sun at the next general election - even if their 'verdict' is based on a wilful distortion of Labour's record. (100,000 more primary pupils each year get good reading or maths scores, for example, and the proportion gaining five good GCSEs including English and Maths is a third up on 1997. And since those improvements reflect differential improvements in different social classes, ethnic groups and schools, they cannot be lazily attributed to 'grade inflation'.)

But it is also the case that the support of the paper has been lukewarm since the 2005 poll and virtually non-existent since Tony Blair stepped down. But what is perhaps as interesting is to see the reaction that ordinary people who actually watched Gordon Brown's speech yesterday had to it, before they were told what to think by their newspapers.

YouGov have been doing some interesting conference polling, and they found a remarkably strong instant reaction among those who saw the speech. 63% of those who watched it rated it a 'good' or 'excellent' speech. 50% of people thought the PM was doing well as PM and 51% rated him a capable leader. This shows how important it is that Gordon Brown and his ministers find more ways to get their message across to voters through live broadcast events, unmediated by the commentariat. Cue lots of TV debates, then.

Fox News is more balanced than this sort of British reporting

Here in Buenos Aires we get to choose between the hilarious 'fair and balanced' Fox News and BBC World News for our hotel room coverage of the US election and global finance crisis. But then reading some of the British press coverage of domestic news makes Fox seem like an oasis of objectivity. How can you write a report like this which piles assertion upon assertion without giving the readers one basic independent fact, namely that in 1997, only a third of youngsters got five good grades including English and Maths whereas today it is close to half? I'm not saying they shouldn't run the rest of their spin, but there was a time when the Daily Telegraph {which is not alone in this respect} used to give you all the key facts first. No longer.

The new Times

I suppose having the leaders on page 2 is a good idea. The Comment sectiion looks a bit confused but I expect I will get used to it. And I can even wear the virtually unreadable typeface for the T2. But who decided that it makes sense to run the Times crossword the full vertical length of the page rather than as a horizontal half page that can easily be folded? One can only assume this design genius has never had to take the train. Time for a rethink on that score, if nothing else, surely?

Harriet and that bullet-proof vest

I am no great fan of Harriet Harman (she had my sixth preference in the deputy leadership ballot.) But she doesn't deserve today's ridiculous media fuss about her wearing a bullet-proof vest for a photo opportunity to publicise neighbourhood policing. And the po-faced political correspondents who attack her for it have attended many such photo-ops where politicians donned uniforms in the past, going back to Margaret Thatcher.* So, Harriet should stand her ground, though it won't make PMQs any easier for her tomorrow.
*UPDATE: Danny Finkelstein provides the proof at Comment Central.

Our fickle press

Jackie Ashley is right in her observations about the fickleness of the press when it comes to Gordon Brown. But hasn't the real problem been - as John Rentoul recounted yesterday - the extreme fickleness of Polly et al on The Guardian?