the special relationship

public policy research – September-November 2008142

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Showmanship practised through the mass media, whether by good or bad politicians for good or bad reasons, is now indivisible from the practice of

political (and other) leadership. Journalists who do not reflect on the effect that jour-nalism as a whole has on public figures, and thus on public affairs in general, tend to see such showmanship – proactive pro-jection of political strategies, the creation of a public image and the political inter-pretation of events and actions in their best possible light as ‘spin’: at best, questionable self promotion, at an extreme, outright falsehood. Those politicians who have been promoted to hero status escape the charge, at least for a time: but it is always available to be taken out and levelled.

The charge is made, however, by those who closely resemble politicians in just this respect. Journalism is, and has ever been, indivisible from showmanship: it cannot exist without attracting an audience, week after week, day after day and now hour after hour. Further, news media, like politi-cians, take the facts of the matter – the Olympics, the Russo-Georgian conflict, the gathering recession in the western econo-mies – and massage them, abbreviate them, package them, claim elements of them as ‘exclusive’, project their part in their progress into public consciousness to be as prominent as possible.

Politicians must do many of the same things. They must take the facts of the mat-ter – on which they are rarely expert – and

interpret them in ways which serve the interests they represent. The closeness of the relationship between two sets of people who have a very similar relationship to the public (the ‘audience’ for one is the ‘voters’ for the other) accounts, in part, for the mixture of affection and bitterness of the relationship.

It is worth noting a distinction that is vital. Politicians in power, and in a virtual sense in opposition, take upon themselves the vast responsibilities of government, which do not become lighter: journalists have nothing like that upon them. Instead, they have a responsibility to those who employ them to produce what they ask of them. By good fortune and through politi-cal choice, in many countries, the owners, public or private, have (or have been legis-lated to have) to differing degrees a sense of civic duty; and journalists have developed a sense, more active at some times and in some journalists than others, that they serve civic interests as well as their masters’. Together, these can further the interests of pluralism, and thus of democracy – and are necessary for it.

Ever closerHowever, that role – of serving democratic choice – is now seen as imperilled – at the same time as there is a general turn-ing away from party politics. It is an extra cause of bitterness between journalists and politicians: both see their constituencies shrinking, and are forced to cling to each other the more, often blaming the other

The special relationshipThe continued closeness of the political and media world post-Blair is ruinous to both, argues John Lloyd. But it cannot be undone without a cultural revolution of global scale.

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public policy research – September-November 2008 143

for the declining state of their fortunes. This is especially true for the politicians, who increasingly stand, like the famous emperor, surrounded by every kind of un-illusioned spectator who sees through the pretence that s/he is wearing clothes. The decline of the political party everywhere means that the transmission belts for the message, first to the faithful, then to the sup-porters, then to the undecided, no longer work (indeed, in the UK at any rate, the party organisations in many places regard it more as their duty to excoriate, rather than support, the leadership, especially when in government).

The politicians thus need the media much more than before, to carry their messages. Journalists, however, also see audiences, whether for broadcast news and current affairs or for the press, turn away, to the alarm of those concerned with the sector – Ed Richards, head of the regulator Ofcom, warned in a January 2007 speech, that ‘the drift away from news consump-tion, whether in broadcast or print media, appears to be a secular trend that is acceler-ating. [M]any get specific information about single issues that interest them as consumers rather than following news more widely as citizens. If so, how far does this matter for a healthy civil society?’

Gotcha!Journalism has reacted to this in a number of ways – most notably, by reducing political coverage, which seems to justify a pessimistic answer to Richards’ rhetorical question. But for the politically engaged – readers of the upmarket press, bloggers and their audiences, party members and committed supporters – the specialised news media go into ever greater detail, both in terms of facts about politics and in constantly widening the scope of intrusion into politicians’ private lives. Journalism does cover politics – for the interested, increasingly, as engaged wonks: for the largely uninterested, increasingly, as a game of Gotcha! (There are crossovers between these two approaches, especially by the

political bloggers.) In the first of these, it now finds an almost infinite area of expan-sion on the Internet – some of that done by professionals, much of it by enthusiastic, or sycophantic, or venomous, amateurs.

New Labour: the masters of spin?The New Labour leadership of Tony Blair is regarded very widely – indeed, world-wide – as something of a locus classicus when it comes to the political management of news. New Labour was created, after 1994, with the perceived need to manage its relations with the news media at the very heart of its project. Powerful figures such as Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell, as well as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, saw presentation not just as an exercise to be bolted on once policy had been decided, but as an integral part of policymaking itself. For them, the proactive presentation of policy and image was a necessary condition for winning, and continuing to win. They believed:

• First, that the British press was historically biased against Labour, and that broad-casters often magnified that effect – but that many journalists were not so biased, and more importantly, that their proprie-tors and editors could be persuaded to look again at Labour, if it was really New.

• Second, that within the media world, Rupert Murdoch, with The Sun, the News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as Sky TV and a worldwide media empire, was uniquely important – and that while he was a conservative figure, he was also known to support winners.

• Third, that the hyper-confrontational style of political interviewing on radio and television, which Labour had encouraged and fed when in opposition, required a careful calibrated response – under which party spokesmen would concentrate as much on putting across a particular mes-sage as on answering the question, basing their belief on the experience of John Major’s limping administration.

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• Fourth, that the Clinton administra-tion’s victory in 1992 was due – as the Clintonites told them – on occupying as much media space as possible with announcements, events, personalities and attention to reporters and commentators’ needs, including (especially) those who were hostile.

• Fifth, that the creation of a news cycle which never stopped, and which needed constant updating and an endless supply of new leads and fresh quotes, meant seizing and keeping the news initiative.

They believed none of these elements could be fundamentally changed: whether or not the country got the news media it deserved, it had got them. Their effects, however, could be moderated. Hence ‘spin’.

Spin has been widely misrepresented, especially by journalists, as little short – and sometimes nothing short – of lying. But it is a worldwide phenomenon, adopted in part in response to a decline of the power of parties and conventional political move-ments; in part because politicians needed to project themselves as the initiators and car-riers through of great political projects; and in part because media – and its audiences – were increasingly interested in celebrity and in the revelation of something which could be called scandalous.

Spin was a joint creation by two classes of people who need each other, in some cases desperately; it was what one of these classes, the journalists, who had long lived by ‘spin’, said was practised by the other, whose profession was also indivisible from it. It has functioned as a kind of talis-man of journalistic integrity and a finger pointed at political mendacity: in fact, for both journalism and politics, that which is now labelled spin has necessarily always existed. In today’s form, it is the inevitable, sometimes healthy, sometimes unhealthy, result of increased political and news media specialisation, individualisation and – more and more – loss of audience.

Spin has been probably indelibly identified with New Labour, and the figures particularly of Blair, Mandelson

and Campbell. There is no question that Alistair Campbell had a rough edge to his tongue in his dealings with journalists, and a brusque dismissal of awkward questions, coupled with a bullying manner towards those whom he believed had crossed him; that Peter Mandelson threatened often to cut people off from private briefings if they wrote or broadcast something that annoyed him (though, I am told, these exiles were usually of short duration); and that Blair was practised at putting a posi-tive gloss on the same event or project to quite different audiences. But little in the nature of deliberate lying had been dis-covered: and some of what was discovered, was unintentional. Most of what journalists were told was open to checking, to oppos-ing opinion and to sceptical analysis. If and when the announcements did not get such analysis, politicians and their aides would certainly rejoice: but the fact it was not was not their fault. Journalism, when taken beyond propaganda or acquies-cence, exists to challenge.

It has also been indelibly identified with the Iraq conflict, because of the dossier published in 2002 to support the decision to go to war, and the affair in which the weapons expert David Kelly – revealed as the source of a story carried on the BBC Today programme by Andrew Gilligan which said that the Prime Minister had deliberately lied to the country to make his case – took his own life. As I have written elsewhere (‘What the media are doing to our politics’; Constable 2004), this remains a kind of journalistic black hole, a largely unexamined belief that Gilligan/the BBC were correct, but that a ruthless govern-ment aided by a patsy of a judge man-aged to get away with it. Gilligan – whose revelations about the court of the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, have shown that he could be a fine and stubborn investigative reporter – was less to blame than a BBC which had worked itself into a state, top to bottom, that it could and should ignore complaints from Number 10 because these were bound to have no sub-stance, being the products of ‘spin’.

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Cameron: the taming of the shrew?In spite of this and other allegedly climactic revelations that British politics was stiff with spin, it is now ingrained in the politi-cal process. David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party and now the most pop-ular politician in the UK, came into office with the same determination to manage the media as had Blair. In his case, he saw he had to first of all ‘tame’ the BBC, which the Conservatives saw, rightly, as left liberal in its default position. As one of his shadow cabinet colleagues told me when I was writ-ing a profile of Cameron for the Financial Times, the new leadership had realised that in many ways, Britain was more like the BBC in its attitudes than it was like the pre-Cameron Conservative Party – and that the Party had better realise that there was not an angry, disenfranchised, rightwing majority waiting for the word.

Secondly, even more boldly, Cameron hired as his head of communications Andy Coulson, formerly editor of the News of the World. Coulson had been fired from the paper because it was on his watch that his royal cor-respondent was found to have been paying

a private investigator tens of thousands of pounds to bug the royal Princes’ phones (for which the correspondent went to jail); in his more successful period, he had carried stories revealing George Osborne, the shadow chan-cellor and a close friend of Cameron’s, as sniff-ing cocaine in the company of prostitutes.

For a Conservative leader to hire one with these two counts against him was a huge event. Where Alastair Campbell was a political junkie and a radical – he was wholly opposed to private schooling, for example – Coulson had, on his own admission, little interest in politics and had risen to the edito-

rial chair via the coverage of show business. His appointment, together with the view taken of the BBC, marked the acceptance by the second of the two major parties that presentation was now a matter of finding out what message the media most wanted, and tailoring the policies of the Party as far as pos-sible to that message.

A global phenomenonThis is, of course, not confined to the UK. The management of image, and of the news media, is now a worldwide concern of politicians.

In 2000, the Russian submarine Kursk sank in the Baltic Sea. President Vladimir Putin, then in the first year of his first term, was on holiday. He released a brusque statement, saying all rescue measures were being taken, and there was nothing more he could do. He was later filmed, evidently with his permis-sion, enjoying himself in the sun at his Black Sea dacha. He was roundly accused – probably more abroad than in Russia, but there too – of callousness: belatedly, he broke his holiday and returned to Moscow, to ‘take charge’ of an operation which, in the event, failed.

Putin did not repeat the mistake: he has since made a point of putting himself publicly ‘in charge’ of vital issues. Most recently, this summer, the now Prime Minister Putin broke off from attendance at the Beijing Olympic Games to fly to Vladikavkaz, in the Russian Caucasus, to ‘take charge’ of an operation against the tiny Georgian army then laying waste Tskhinvali, in South Ossetia, which a one-star general could have carried through. The point was not to do, but to be seen to do. In the Kursk incident, Putin had been living in his mind in the age before leaders had to be seen to lead on television: a large part of his adult life had passed while a series of aged and ailing men ran the Soviet Union, whose increasingly feeble utterances did not change the hard fact of the dominance of the Communist Party, to which TV was subservi-ent. Putin has since made sure that his TV is also – if in a different style – subservient, but ©

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The management of image, and of the news media, is now a worldwide concern of politicians

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he had to realise that it is he, not the party or the state, who must take centre stage in a country which consumes its version of the world from TV, and a world which consumes its version of Russia in the same way.

However, the lesson is also learned by those who still have parties to protect them, but now find these walls less solid than they were. The Sichuan earthquake of June this year saw Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, get on a plane and be seen to empathise with the victims – a move which brought him, and his comrades, a good deal of praise at home and abroad. For some time – as a Chinese journalist friend told me – it seemed as though China was living in a new media age, as Wen’s presence seemed to legitimise a coverage in broadcasts and in the press which allowed frank com-plaints, including of corruption, to be aired as never before. The shutters came down again, however, before the Olympics.

President Sarkozy of France achieved his predominance in his party, and in the country before the 2007 presidential elections, by enormous activity, much of it for the benefit of the cameras. His activ-ity afterwards was similarly televisual, with a series of announcements and visits intended to underscore his message, that France was again on the move, and that the barriers to flexibility in the economy had to be removed. At the same time, the more interesting issue of his personal life intruded: his wife, after a public affair, returned with obvious reluctance for the election campaign. After, she left once more, and Sarkozy rapidly wooed and won the model and singer Carla Bruni. This romance delighted readers and viewers everywhere, but cut across his other media message, at least initially, and, coupled with his predilection for ultra rich company and their yachts, seemed to contribute to a drop in his popularity. However, Bruni, with at least as shrewd a sense of showmanship as her husband, has presented herself as a new kind of first lady – able to command a photo shoot on the roof of the Elysee by the world elite’s photographer, Annie Liebowitz – and charming and diplomatic enough to

enchant the UK press during a spring state visit to London. Contemporary people of political and media power are, if well advised, often able to rewrite narratives.

President Bush was able to present himself as a victor when the US army eas-ily defeated the Iraqi military in 2003: his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on board the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, having landed – as a passenger – in a jet fighter on its deck, was a powerful image of a victorious commander in chief. The image became, of course, bathetic: the defeat of the Iraqi army was followed by a vicious campaign, mainly on the part of Sunni forces unable to accept Shiite equal-ity, aided by Al Qaeda forces under the command of the horrific Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, fearful of a democratic state.

This campaign has, at least until recently, convinced most Europeans, and probably most Americans, that withdrawal of US forces is the only sane option. Bush is, how-ever, stuck with the image he created on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Media narratives framed that powerfully cannot be shaken easily, especially if a substantial part of the western world’s opinion has concluded that a battle to free a society was in fact part of a plot to dominate the world, or at least the Middle East.

Lula – President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil – has used the image he gained during years of radical leadership of the Workers’ Party, coupled with his own working-peasant class background, to assist him to preside over an impressive increase in Gross National Product. However, this has been achieved by running a conven-tional, ‘Washington consensus’ economic policy of the kind he had spent a political life denouncing, and attended by the now familiar sight of a tiny minority of Brazilians becoming very rich, or even very richer. Image, within and outside of Brazil, allows the former radical leftist to follow a centrist, ‘third way’ path, which is serving his coun-try quite well.

By contrast, President Chavez of Venezuela, who did not have much of an

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image before assuming power except that of an insurgent against an unpopular gov-ernment, has sought to ceaselessly create and recreate an image of a radical leader through constant television appearances. In the most notable of these, a weekly programme consisting of his lengthy (4-5 hour) speeches and televised audiences, he issues instructions to the ministers who attend him, and promises instant improve-ments and attacks the US. This is likely to be counterproductive. Venezuela still has an opposition. Moreover, Chavez’s reforms have created a wealthy elite very closely linked to him, and a sharp spike upwards in crime. His appearances and the subordina-tion of state television may therefore come to seem mere, and irritating, propaganda. However, he has taken the necessity for showman leadership into new areas, which might prove, at least in some respects, attractive to others.

Chavez has had an earlier master – in Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy. Berlusconi’s unsurpassed media power con-sists of his holding company’s ownership of the three main commercial channels in Italy; ownership of Italy’s largest advertis-ing agency; ownership of the country’s largest publisher; and ownership of a major newspaper. In addition, as Prime Minister (now for the third time) he has political control of the state broadcaster RAI through a board constructed to reflect his centre-right majority. This makes him an enormously powerful media-political force, without peer in the western world. He is by no means a media dictator – the Espresso group of Carlo de Benedetti has powerful newspapers and magazines hostile to Berlsuconi; and neither the RAI nor even the Mediaset channels lack critical commentaries, political satire and news that is relatively objective. But the fact remains that Berlusconi’s strategic presentation of news and current affairs, his relentlessly upbeat self-image, his ability to express the hopes and fears of the average citizen (unmatched on the left), and his populism that makes use of, for example, widespread dislike of immigrant groups, all combine to

make him the master of the politico-media space. At present – for all of Italy’s econom-ic woes – he remains unbeatable.

Finally, Nelson Mandela, a world-media hero. Instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa, Mandela has become a figure of global hero-status, the hem of whose robe every statesman, celebrity and journalist would wish to touch. Mandela’s astonishing endurance, and even more astonishing determination, to conquer the bitterness of South Africans and seek to create a stable concordat between South Africa’s three main ethnic groups fitted itself perfectly to the western media which saw racism as one of few areas not requiring neutrality. Others involved in the concordat, such as Frederik Willem de Clerk, the South African President and Mandela’s interlocutor, without whom the bulk of the whites could not have been delivered to the concordat, fit no such narrative, and so are largely forgotten. Mandela, whose talents clearly include a canny sense for, and an enjoyment of, self-publicity, has assisted in the creation of a figure of monumental proportions that he often uses to underpin the battle against AIDS or for reconciliation.

These are very different examples of how political power has accommodated the news media in countries at very dif-fering stages of development and different levels of power and status. But the com-monality is that politicians everywhere must now spend a great deal of time thinking about how they work with the media. No political project can now be carried through without a media strategy – a fact which says much about the nature of the public world which the news media have been most active in creating. The modern media’s predilections, speed and (in some areas at least) omnipresence, means that the politician unprotected against it is the politician undone. This is in nobody’s interests.

John Lloyd is Director of Journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and a Contributing Editor to the Financial Times.

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the special relationship

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