When the Dimbleby family next exercises its ancient manorial right and announces the result of the general election, fewer citizens than ever before will be stirred. In 1997, the turnout was the lowest in the history of British democracy. This time, it will almost certainly fall below 70 per cent, and may go down to two-thirds. Millions will have glanced at the populist policies of the centre-right consensus, crafted by the finest minds in the political marketing departments to appeal to the gut instincts of the greatest number, and shrugged.
If any serious discussion follows a collapse in participation - and only fools would put money on that - politicians must be summoned to the dock. But there is another group that is also animated by consensual populism and has a professional interest in encouraging enthusiasm for politics. Political journalists daily entice the public to care about Westminster. By the most basic measures, they are failures. Explaining why is astonishingly difficult. A start can be made by grasping the scale of political journalism and, by extension, the scale of the flop. For this is a business that employs thousands.
At the top is the quasi-masonic Lobby of 200 reporters whose members - political editors and correspondents - commune with the Prime Minister's press secretary, Alastair Campbell (or elected representatives when he's away and they're forced to slum it). Their colleagues often regard them with envy and suspicion, but most grudgingly admit that the servile mass is leavened by some of the best reporters around. Outside Westminster, most newspaper columnists are political journalists. The specialists in health, education, the environment, home affairs and the rest are para-politicals who receive steers from their ministers and departmental spin-doctors.
Broadcasting, meanwhile, has become a gigantic system of outdoor relief for political junkies: Radio 4 has the Today programme, The World at One, PM and The World Tonight; Radio 5 Live gorges itself on a diet of politics; the daily political newszak cycle on television peddles from the breakfast shows through lunch, early evening and several newses at ten to Newsnight; news websites, Sky News and the BBC's and ITN's rolling news services compete with the long-established media to be first with the political stories. To this crowded market, we can add the weekly political interviews for On the Record, Frost and Jonathan Dimbleby, the political debates on Question Time and Any Questions, the occasional political investigations by Panorama and Channel 4 and the forthcoming election specials.
Walk into the broadcasters' studios opposite Parliament at 4 Millbank and you feel as if you are entering the headquarters of a busy merchant bank. Hundreds of researchers and producers scurry to arrange and broadcast interviews and reports. The floors are full of studios for the BBC, ITN and Sky, arranged in a quadrangle around a light and airy central well. At its base is a restaurant and bar dotted with potted plants, where contacts are squeezed and information swapped.
Everyone you meet is bright and inquiring. The puppy-faced youth who gets the coffee has a First from Oxford. The researcher fighting against the fate of shabby gentility that awaits those underlings who don't become stars in a downsized, deunionised media can argue any point as well as the lavishly rewarded presenter she serves. Like everyone around her, she is desperate to please the audience. No one wants to be accused of the capital crime of elitism. A friend of mine emerged from interviewing BBC news and current affairs managers and cried: "If I had heard the word 'relevant' again, I would have gone for them with a chainsaw." In broadcasting, as in print, every stratagem is used to catch and hold the interest of the fickle populace.
All for nothing. Turnout at newsagents is matching turnout in the polling booths. The decline in newspaper sales has been unrelenting for decades and shows no signs of slowing. Roy Greenslade, the Guardian's media commentator, has shown how depressing circulation figures would be grimmer still if they were not inflated with free copies dumped in airports, hotels and cafes. Discount them, and you find that in September 1999, the 12 national dailies sold 11,237,974 copies at cover price. A year on, sales had dropped by 4.1 per cent to 10,778,457.
Soothing voices assure us that we shouldn't worry because the public is now getting its news from television. Not so. Ten years ago, the BBC's Nine O'Clock News regularly attracted an audience of 6.5 million. Before the show was shifted to 10pm, it was lucky to achieve six million and often fell below five. The soothing voices are not checked. They go on to tell us that the abstention can be explained by viewers switching to satellite channels for the information they crave. This was not the experience of Sky and the ITV News Channel, which rushed to fill the 9pm slot the BBC had vacated. Their early ratings were 13,000 and 0 (that is, no viewers at all) respectively.
Media managers are in charge and should be named and shamed. The costs of creating the virtually unwatched News 24 led to the asset-stripping of solid programmes at the BBC. (Tony Hall, the bureaucratic genius responsible, is off to run the Royal Opera House - surely the ROH has suffered enough?) The bouncing of the evening newses around the schedule displayed a contempt for public service broadcasting.
But Campbell and many politicians argue that the journalists themselves have become trivial to the point of inanity. Obsessed with the fluff of Westminster, reporters spread cynicism by spinning imaginary crises out of a half-remembered conversation overheard while they danced with a man who had danced with a girl who danced with Stephen Byers.
That's rich coming from you, pal, grumble the hacks. We are not the ones who have disillusioned readers and voters by recycling announcements about non-existent funds for the NHS and education. Both sides are right and both miss the point.
The Guardian caused a fluttering of tutus in the Lobby corps de ballet recently when it published a Cabinet Office assessment of the various political journalists. More telling than the mild abuse was how the state judged reporters. They were rated by their sources. These were not nervous whistle-blowers with secrets to leak - David Hencke of the Guardian, the only journalist on the list who fitted the romantic image of the crusading truth-teller, was dismissed as an obsessive conspiracy theorist. Sources meant spin-doctors. Friendship with "friends" of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, William Hague and Michael Portillo made you a person of pomp and substance in Whitehall.
A good point for the prosecution, I thought. The endless "it is understood . . ." scribblings alienate readers from politics and journalism, and Campbell may be right to condemn them. (Forget for a moment that he is also their source. Hypocrisy does not invalidate an argument.)
What, for instance, were readers meant to make of the declarations by Mandelson's claque of hacks that the Cabinet careers of Nick Brown or Chris Smith or Robin Cook or Mo Mowlam or David Clark (the target varied according to whose job Mandelson fancied at the time) were over? That politics was a filthy business they wanted nothing to do with? Now that Mandelson is gone but Brown, Smith and Cook are still in office, what are those same readers meant to make of the journalists? You can't, even by the kindest standards, describe the kite-flying as information.
Journalists might reply that they have no choice. They have to "move the story on" and get scoops - and spin-doctors are the best source. Politicians might counter that reporters don't cover parliamentary speeches and so they have to hire manipulators if they wish to reach the public. Journalists might argue that a cowed and controlled parliament, and speeches stuffed with soundbites, are not worth covering. Politicians might ask: whose fault is that? You people treat honest differences of opinion as splits. And as for soundbites, remind us of the name of the industry that demands them?
Like two drowning men who would swim to the surface if they would only release their hands from each other's necks, politics and political journalism seem to be sinking together. The floundering is well covered in the forthcoming Westminster Tales: the 21st-century crisis in British political journalism, by the media professors Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber, a very hard-headed book on Westminster and Fleet Street.
They look at how what you read and see is produced, and conclude that the advantage must now be with politicians, particularly politicians in power. The explosion in the number of channels and stations that has followed the deregulation of broadcasting gives senior politicians and their minders the ability to refuse interviews to presenters or journalists who are out of favour. The state has a thoroughly politicised propaganda machine which can swamp reporters with recycled news, diversionary announcements and leaks to the boys and girls who won't bite the hand that force-feeds them. Journalists, whose budgets have been slashed as the competition for revenue and declining audiences grows, don't have the resources to investigate or the time to produce considered work.
In a world of information (and misinformation) overload, they are also swamping each other with ever more political chat shows, whose output must be bettered in an instant with the thinnest of new angles. In contradiction to orthodox consumer theory, but in vindication of the late Kingsley Amis, more means less.
Those of us who have banged on for years about the effects on public discourse of media capitalists' search for short-term profits would be happy to welcome the professors on board and leave it at that, were it not for the ticklish subject of the audience itself.
"People aren't stupid", every Radio 5 presenter bellows. And many who reject the status quo - greens and trade unionists, for example - are anything but. Many others, unfortunately, are very dumb, and idle to boot.
Robert D Putnam, an American sociologist, briefly seized media attention when he published Bowling Alone, a study of the collapse in participation in every kind of communal activity, from voting to joining school boards, in the United States. Good mainstream academic that he is, Putnam does not raise radical questions about the dislocating effects of consumerism and instability at work, preferring to blame the growth of solipsism on the replacement of the generation that learnt the need for civic mindedness in the war by cosseted baby boomers. (A conclusion that suggests there needs to be a world war to get people into the polling booths.)
Yet when Putnam turns to television and its spin-offs, he produces an original argument: they are sapping interest in life outside the living room. It is not a question of more and more time being wasted in viewing. The more concerts you go to, the more likely you are to vote, or work for a charity or political party or school. More means more with everything except television, which isolates and destroys links.
Putnam quotes British and American psychologists who describe viewers in a state of passive aggression - passively slumped on a couch, aggressively demanding more stimulation and faster cuts as they punch the zapper. Anyone who has vegetated in front of the box one day and failed to recall a single programme the next will feel the force of the argument.
Television news cannot deliver satisfaction. Its ratings in America have fallen from a great height. Reports cannot be cut like a pop video, however gorgeous the presenters may be. News cannot help but demand a vague willingness to engage with the world, which audio-visual entertainment weakens.
I am sure that if the next election pro-duces mass abstention, politicians who have failed to offer anything worth voting for will be culpable. I am certain that if political journalists are asked to account for themselves, they will shout, "Don't shoot the messenger" - while forgetting that the messenger is shooting himself.
