The more the Dimblebys and Paxmans appeared, the more the ratings fell. Are journalists now as divorced from reality as politicians?

Ten days after an election that saw cynicism confirmed as the national mood, the Guardian confronted 25 greater and lesser media "players" and asked if mass boredom was their fault. It was a reasonable question. The 2001 campaign was a humiliation for political journalists as well as politicians. Audiences for BBC and ITN news shows and election specials fell faster than turnout. The press didn't do much better. Campaigns have been good for sales in the past. Only two daily newspapers sold more copies in May. Beyond the crude ratings were unavoidable questions of direction and principle. Can the failure to expose the lack of choice between the pro-corporate parties be explained by their minority appeal to news executives and celebs on six-figure packages from news corporations?

You may find my reasons for media nervousness too Spartist. But I'm sure you can find alternatives. I am equally confident that when the Guardian asked for a moment of reflection, it expected that recent events would prompt mild self-criticism. With the possible exception of the Politburo of the North Korean Workers' Party, no band of politicians on the planet would have dared respond with the effusion of back-slapping and back-scratching that hit the Guardian's luckless media editor. Failure? Boredom? Tush! The election was a triumph for one and all. Everyone who matters says so.

"Newsnight had a very good campaign," said Kirsty Wark of Newsnight. "There is an informed section of the public . . . who are coming over to [Sky]," said Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky. "I like to think that ITV scored a big win," said Jonathan Dimbleby, the presenter of ITV's election special. "We were right throughout the campaign and we were right on the night," agreed John Sergeant, ITN's political editor. Dermot Murnaghan, another ITN presenter, spoke movingly of the sheer bloody hard work behind the surface glamour of newzak stars. "You can't leave the studio to go to the toilet, so you just have to tie a knot in it," he wrote, as if he had suffered like the shattered minimum-wage women in call-centres. This was surely the moment for Jeremy Paxman to bellow: "Answer the question!" But the request that he interrogate his own business transformed him from Torquemada to Gwyneth Paltrow on Oscar night. "Whatever credit was due for our interviews really belongs to the producer and deputy editor," he wrote before informing fascinated readers that the little people in question were one Karen Flynn and a James Stephenson respectively.

Of the 25 news grandees questioned, only two gave straight answers. Elinor Goodman, the political editor of Channel 4 News, said that political interviews were pointless when politicians were "all so well-rehearsed in their soundbites". Richard Sambrook, the director of BBC News, had the honesty to accept that apathy was as great a problem for journalists as politicians.

His colleagues refused to endorse him, not just, I suspect, because vanity and self-interest encourage denial. A study of campaign coverage by Professor Justin Lewis and his colleagues at Cardiff University found that the media had convinced themselves they were on the side of the masses.

The Cardiff team analysed 200 election news reports: 62 per cent made at least one reference to public opinion. At first glance, they seemed suffused with the democratic spirit. But Lewis pointed out that the use of surveys and interviews was of a very partial, not to say peculiar, kind. Public opinion polls were rarely deployed to discover what opinions the public held. Less than one in five poll references on television reported what people actually thought about an issue or policy. In about 80 per cent of cases, polls were used merely as form guides to judge the state of the horse race between the parties by bookies posing as reporters.

Lewis is well aware of the weakness of polls, conceding that they are inaccurate and notoriously easy to manipulate, and can stop debate before it has begun. But, as he says, if the media believe them, they should at least report what they say.

According to the polls, Europe and the minor differences between the parties on taxation didn't interest the public greatly. Yet in all the days wasted debating tax, none of the superficially populist BBC or ITN journalists Lewis monitored said that, for well over a decade, polls have reported that most people want taxes and spending on public services increased.

With the exception of one brief mention on the BBC, there was no discussion of the overwhelming public demand to renationalise the railways. The strong dislike of student tuition fees and impositions on the elderly were not aired. Nor was the suspicion of corporate influence in the NHS and elsewhere. Whenever opinions were to the left of the Westminster consensus, Lewis concluded, they were ignored.

It was only when views were from the right that they received a hearing. Selected polls were used to construct a picture of the conservative, xenophobic Middle Englander as the typical citizen. Antipathy towards the European Union was just about the sole subject on which opinions from polls were quoted.

Television presenters and execs might protest that they concentrated on taxation and Europe because that was pretty much all the parties talked about. They might protest that the hypocrisies of television's populism are small in comparison to the pretence by Richard Littlejohn and other millionaire newspaper pundits that they are tribunes of the downtrodden.

They might protest on many other grounds, but, as the Guardian survey showed, the media are content to operate a filtering system and reflect public opinions back at the public via a distorted mirror. Such ersatz populism breeds cynicism, and not only about journalists.

Anti-corporate feeling is remarkable when you consider that you cannot live without receiving continuous propaganda from corporations. The average citizen is exposed to 1,300 advertisements a day, according to the Henley Centre for Forecasting. Each claims that its bauble is essential or life enhancing. Advertising is as populist as journalism in the sense that companies have done their polling and claim to be giving you what they know you will gratefully receive.

Their messages are being blanked out. In France, Le Monde Diplomatique reported that 85 per cent of ads had no effect and 5 per cent produced revulsion. A spokesman for the Chartered Institute of Marketing told me that no comparable research had been done in Britain. He added, however, that well-founded fears of being dismissed had produced "ambient" advertising, where logos are stuffed into the few uncommercialised corners of public space - sent to mobile phones, printed on the bottom of beer glasses, projected on to buildings - to wear down what he described as "consumer immunity" to marketing.

If the election told us anything, it was that the electorate is becoming immune to political as well as commercial marketing. William Hague posed as the voice of common sense railing against the liberal elite, and was wiped out. Tony Blair spent years pretending to be "the people's" this or that, and attracted the support of one in four adults.

The failures of journalism, advertising and politics (and, yes, on many occasions I can't see the lines between them either) have mixed consequences. The blanking out of advertising isn't leading to a rejection of consumer society any more than the dislike of the dominant modes of journalism and politics is leading to the flourishing of radical newspapers and parties. Rather, we are seeing consent that was once given reasonably wholeheartedly becoming provisional and unstable.

Corporations as diverse as Esso and Nike find that protests and consumer boycotts can strike from, apparently, nowhere. The effectiveness of politicians' appeals to respect the rule of law and parliamentary democracy are waning as fewer believe that politics can give them anything except a torrent of fraudulence.

Beyond the obvious lies the unknowable. The irony of official society lies in its thoughtless justification that Blair, say, or Sainsbury's or the Dimblebys are merely giving the public what it wants; that the findings of market researchers, polls and focus groups are examined solely to make the consumer sovereign.

Millions are not grateful for the attention paid to their alleged preferences by the enormous surveillance apparatus, and no one quite knows why. Are they apathetic or cynical? Bored or disgusted? Do they see through populists in the media and politics who are populist only when their interests aren't threatened, or don't they? What are they thinking? What are they going to do?

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website