When in office President Sarkozy of France was contemptuous of the media. His treatment of it suggested that the French Fourth Estate in his time – and maybe still – is not what it was as a force in political and social affairs. Evidently Sarkozy felt no need to woo it, explain himself to it, or have it on his side: he treated it with disdain, as if it were irrelevant.
And perhaps it was then indeed becoming so, at least as regards the political process. There were two connected reasons for thinking this. One is the internet and in particular the twin phenomena it has created of blogging and interactivity, by the latter meaning the comment threads that accompany most op-ed pieces on media websites.
The other reason, in no small measure following from the first, is the loss of trust and credibility that the media have suffered in recent years.
There is much that is good, and something bad, about the effect that the internet has had in these respects. The good effect is the great democratisation of opinion and debate that the internet has enabled, and the way it has made the world porous to information. We might be living through an information honeymoon: how long before nervous governments begin to emulate China in policing the internet more vigorously and eventually castrating it? But at present much information gets arrowed around the world in fractions of a second, a lot of it such that someone somewhere would rather it were kept quiet. In these respects the internet is like the agora of old, except that everyone can attend and have a say.
The downside is the volume of rubbish, the anonymous viciousness and sneering, the ad hominem attacks, the paragraph-long pretensions to authoritativeness, the degrading of debate it encourages, making the internet what I’ve before now called the biggest toilet wall in history. Well: it takes a lot of compost to grow flowers, so we have to put up with this; and anyway, some things deserve trouncing with the gloves off, even if not everyone can tell the difference between justified and irresponsible versions of that process.
The media have always been a much weaker presence politically in the United States than in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. This is a function of the US’s size, and the fact that although all newspapers and TV channels are local to constituencies of readers and viewers, in the US newspapers are mostly local to geographical regions too. Moreover whereas the broadcast media in Britain tend to take their cue on national (not on international) news and opinion from the print media, the sheer variety of media outlets of both kinds in the US makes the news and opinion landscape there considerably less uniform – except on the lowest common denominator material which focuses on celebrities, sports and spectacular murders. Only where there is a genuinely national press such as in Britain has it been able decisively to influence policy and elections – think Murdoch’s Sun and its electorally damaging opposition to the Labour Party.
But if the power of the press is weakening in the way here surmised, is it a bad thing? It might be that a diminution of political influence can allow the more valuable functions of the Fourth Estate – which are to inform, to challenge, to explore and to debate – to emerge more strongly, for the reason that the cacophonic Babel of voices created by the internet makes the need for ‘expert filters’ all the greater, as forums where a degree of responsibility, reliability and accountability places positive constraints on the quality of content. If a media organisation gets it wrong in some respect, say by libelling someone, it can be brought to book. The anonymous insulters or liars on the internet are (in the literal sense of the term) irresponsible, and so there is no constraint on their output. This big difference will get bigger with time, as the geometrically increasing uptake of the agora-like potential of the internet progresses.
One can see the promise, and in fact already the presence, of a mutually positive relationship between the media and the blogosphere, chiefly in the latter’s hawk-eyed challenge to the former. Columnists and leader writers once pontificated with the luxury of hearing no raspberries blowing back; individuals who disagreed might write a letter to the newspaper or the individual journalist, a practically silent protest with little effect. Now the entire world can know what responses a piece of journalism has evoked, and when it gets things wrong or is egregious in view or stupidity, it can be publicly castigated. This drastically diminishes the standing of the press, but can and should have the effect of making the press ever more careful. And that enhances its function, described above, of serving as a more reliable, better informed, clearer voice than most voices in the overall tumult of noise.
So whether or not the media are losing their political clout, one must hope that they will retain the better part of their purpose as just described. For however good it is that the sans-culottes are everywhere in today’s versions of Alexandra Palace and Printing House Square, it would be a dismal thing indeed if they were the only occupants.