Who is to blame for the malaise in public life? Is it politicians, journalists, or both, working in harmony?

Over the past decade, concern has been growing steadily about the lack of engagement in British public life. It has been a major theme of the coverage of British elections for more than a decade; it will be again, at a future election. Here - from our respective viewpoints as a politician and a journalist - we want to pose these questions:

First, how far is public disengagement from politics in Britain a function of how it is covered by the news media? Second, are the twin themes of public disengagement from politics and the way in which most people are informed about politics - that is, through the news media - related?

There is increasing evidence that the British public is disconnecting itself from party politics. A MORI/Electoral Commission report showed that a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds who were "active citizens", taking part in political activism, did not vote in the 2001 election (though the same survey also showed that other activities which could be seen as political were increasing, as respondents felt they offered the opportunity to effect real change).

The most common explanation proffered by the media, implicitly or explicitly, is "voter apathy", induced by politicians - because they are too bland, too confrontational, too complex or too banal. Yet politics is constructed not only by politicians, it is constructed by the media as well. It is a system built, consciously and unconsciously, over time.

Politics is not simply a professional activity performed by full-time politicians, aides and civil servants: it is a necessary series of mediations in social and economic life, the more freely engaged in, and the more widely spread, the better. Journalists who cover politics in democratic states should, on behalf of the public interest, hold politicians to account. But journalists and politicians, and everyone else in public life, also rely on democratic politics, as well as a common agreement that there is something called the facts, for their existence as public actors. In that sense we have a common interest in the health of the public arena in which we move and which we create, recreate - or damage.

Delivering the 2001 Hetherington Memorial Lecture, the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "Politicians and the press are locked in a relationship which doesn't really work for either." Indeed, the media have changed in rapid and fundamental ways. Round-the-clock news is now more readily available, but it has not been complemented by deeper and fuller analysis and debate. The trend, even in a country with rich traditions of current affairs programmes such as the UK, has tended to be the other way: fewer factual programmes, at least on the main television channels.

At the same time, newspapers have moved towards a more polemical and abrasive style. A relentless concentration on "personality" risks constructing a public world of commercial stimulation and ennui, limiting the trusted space in which we as a society can ask and answer the questions of the times. First in the United States and now here, the growth of infotainment has blurred boundaries between politics and entertainment. A recent Guardian survey among roughly 50 public figures - all but two of them non-politicians - showed widespread disappointment with standards in the news media, a disappointment which amounted to anger and contempt.

All of us should share an interest in ensuring - as Joe Klein noted in The Natural, his book on the Clinton presidency - a "public square filled with something other than rant". Indeed, the American "public square" is a warning to other democratic states: it has become, on many TV and radio channels, a place where pronouncements are given extreme form - either as "shock-jock" radio (largely of the right) or in "discussions", which are competitions in denunciation or loudness. Rational discourse is not the point: it is drama, personality clash and contentiousness.

Broadcasting in the UK has not, with some exceptions, chosen that route but the same pressures are there, and the same impatience with debate and rational discussion - and the space which has to be devoted to it - is evident.

The rise of professionalism in political communications, a contentious area, is not without its benefits to progressive governance. Labour has some reason to be proud of the improvement in its communications since the disastrous amateurism of the 1983 campaign. But when that capacity to communicate overshadows what is being said, reflection is needed on how politicians, as well as journalists, operate. The techniques of media management should not get in the way of governance. The discipline and coherence needed to make messages clear and widely known have brought a reliance on techniques which, though effective, can also be counter-productive. The relationship then falls into a spiral of blame: the journalists point to spin, the politicians to a concentration on splits and personalities. The journalists allege insincerity, the politicians distortion and lies. The journalists decry cover-ups, the politicians talk of the impossibility of private lives and private mistakes.

The effect has been a decrease in trust in politicians, media and the public sphere in general. MORI surveys over the past 20 years have shown that the majority of the public does not trust either private or public institutions.

While the internet and cable television create the potential for a free flow of information across the globe, it is indicative of the problems modern political communication faces that this proliferation has led to a decline in confidence.

It may or may not be possible to discover who, between journalists and politicians, is more "to blame" for the unhealthy situation in which we find ourselves; it doesn't matter. Both sides have to recognise that what has been created is a system in which both feel constrained to armour themselves against each other, and to accuse each other of constant and deliberate bad will. What has been created, bit by bit, is a presumption of bad faith; and, most damagingly of all, a series of relationships which resemble more those between states hostile to each other, but not actually at war, than two great democratic institutions.

So what do we do? Conventional wisdom usually has it that real change is impossible or undesirable, since mutual suspicion, even enmity, is the appropriate relationship between journalists and all structures of power; the reasoning is based on the view that all power corrupts and so all power must automatically be suspected of corruption. This opinion holds that whatever excesses or mistakes the media may be thought guilty of, they should not be seriously examined - for fear of laying the media open to regulation, legislation or control. Proprietors and journalists share this view: the possibility of regulation raises the prospect - and, for broadcasters, the reality - of a forced commitment to public service broadcasting in the form of news, current affairs, arts and religious programming, a commitment which takes space that could be used more profitably.

Yet the media cannot escape their social role. Their information is a prompt to action; if wrong, it can be a prompt to mistaken action. If consistently wrong, or exaggerated, it is an invitation to cynicism. The media define the framework within which debates take place. To insist these facts are so is not to limit, or be a prelude to limiting, the freedom of the media.

Implicitly and explicitly the media put the responsibility for the withdrawal of engagement and trust, which we described at the beginning of this article, on public figures, usually politicians. Yet, in the pursuit of their own ideals, the media should look at themselves as actors, as well as continue to act as investigators. The development of such a self-critical practice and of a journalism that is analytical of its own, as well as others', powers would contribute to the continuing freedom of a society that cannot be free without a free media that wishes to understand, and assist the rest of us to understand, what freedom is.

Journalism is not an unconstrained profession. Its more contentious assertions can be tested against libel laws tougher than those, for example, in the US; proprietors have a past and present practice of close control of at least some of the newspapers' public positions; broadcasting is fairly tightly regulated on issues of balance and objectivity; and the Press Complaints Commission claims it has become sterner with news-papers that are shown to transgress its guidelines.

However, it is not a self-reflective one, nor does it have, for all of these constraints, a routine external examination of its practices. We do not have independent, journalist-led centres or institutions that debate the practices of the news media, challenge their power and produce narratives of their effects on public life. Like any great power, the news media need such institutions.

If we ask of journalists a period of sustained self-examination, then what should we demand of politicians? The starting point must surely be the place of parliament in our democracy - whether as the means of holding the executive to account, scrutinising legislation or providing the forum and the focus of our national conversation and debate. In spite of large parliamentary majorities, high-quality exchanges have taken place across the floor of the Commons. In this parliament alone, discussions around the future of higher education and stem cell research spring to mind as examples of controversial issues where the searching questions and lucid arguments advanced during the debates proved decisive to the ultimate judgements made.

Yet effective scrutiny of the executive demands more than debating. In recent years the work of cross-party select committees in parliament - away from the adversarial atmosphere of the chamber - have grown markedly. These committees now sit for longer and produce more reports than in the past. Similarly, the use of pre-legislative scrutiny, whereby draft legislation is examined by a cross-party committee informed by the evidence of expert witnesses, is a recent parliamentary innovation. This process ensured that the Civil Contingencies Bill (involving the use of emergency powers by government) that was introduced as legislation was markedly different from its earlier, and highly controversial, draft. Such developments and innovations must now be taken forward.

Lessons can and should also be learned from the devolved legislatures and assemblies. Notwithstanding the controversy over its building costs, the Scottish Parliament (in both its temporary home and its new building) has shown how new and welcoming approaches can bring vast numbers of citizens to the public galleries of a parliament. Similarly, in marked contrast to the antiquated procedure of Westminster, Holyrood's use of public petitions as a means of affecting the business of its chamber demonstrates a more effective means of linking parliament's debates to the concerns of the public.

If we can offer such suggestions for how to improve the working relationship between parliament and the public, then we must also find ways to bring such innovations into the public domain. The public's image of parliament remains defined largely by the clips of Prime Minister's Questions shown or heard on the broadcast bulletins. The other means of holding the executive to account and scrutinising legislation are rarely seen in broadcasts or discussed in print. Indeed, parliament's ability to provide the forum and the focus of our national conversation and debate is heavily reliant on media coverage. Of course some steps are within politicians' own control. In this regard, the recent move back to later Westminster sittings - potentially missing news-paper and broadcast deadlines - is to be regretted.

Yet it should be a matter of urgency for politicians and journalists to work together more closely to translate the public space of political discussion. This means not just ensuring more media coverage of the activities of parliament; it also means a commitment to facilitating direct discussions between politicians and the public in all forms of new and old media, to creating at both a local and a national level the "public meetings" of the modern age. The clear antidote to concern about how politicians or the media are using information is to offer more, not less, accountability from both sides.

This is a fraught area. On the side of politicians - and other public figures - a distrust of the media is now widely ingrained. On the media side, a view is now commonly professed that politicians - and other public figures - spin, even lie, continually. A competitive rivalry is inevitable, even essential. But what we have now isn't that; it's a dogfight, at times a vicious one, whose main casualty is our public life.

Douglas Alexander is minister for Europe and John Lloyd is contributing editor at the Financial Times

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