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For the first half of the 20th century, we journalists understood that our role was to report politicians on their own terms. We did not try to interpret, still less challenge. On the contrary, it was understood that the role of a parliamentary correspondent was to set down and describe the words and actions of the leading statesmen of the day. Political speeches would be reported on newspaper front pages, often spread over several columns, the day after they were made. It was assumed that the reader would reach his own judgment. In his early novels, Christopher Isherwood insisted that he sought to convey an unrefracted version of reality to the general reader. “I am a camera,” he said. Political journalists had exactly the same objective.
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