like many in my generation, born soon after the war and benefiting from a liberal education, I was inspired in the 1960s by the "new journalism." Not Tom Wolfe's-that came a little later-but the investigative techniques then being pioneered: the harsher style of television interviewing; the guying of public figures in satire; the taking-down-a-peg sharpness of metropolitan journalists working for the broadsheet press. It was a journalism which looked back in contempt at a closed world of privilege, bigotry and secrecy and implicitly looked forward to openness, relativism and classlessness.
A profession was expressing a desire to come up in the world. It was inspired by the US, whose cruel and sprawling growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries was celebrated and ridiculed in the big city newspapers and the magazines, backed up by the first constitutional amendment. British journalism of the third decade after the war dropped deference in favour of revelation and irreverence-and power-in the name of a greater enlightenment and thus liberty.
With that came a ready-made moral safety net for the journalists. People in power, it was clear, would not like this kind of journalism. They would therefore express their anger-but that anger would have a simple cause, that of the liar revealed, the hypocrite shamed or the privileged levelled. The two standard mantras were the remark made in court by the call girl Mandy Rice-Davies at the time of the Profumo scandal-"he would [say that], wouldn't he?"; and the advice given to young journalists by Harold Evans, then editor of the pioneering Sunday Times-"Ask yourself, when interviewing a politician: 'why is this bastard lying to me?'" Taken together, they were an invitation to change the rules of engagement with public figures, and an exculpation of journalists from the consequences of these engagements.
I no longer believe that British news journalism has the central purpose of setting the world to rights. This is not a belief that it has gone to hell in a handcart: in some ways, journalism is better now. There are more magazines, everywhere, which-like this one-operate between current affairs, ideas, literature and social science, and which are often of a higher level than magazines available in the 1960s. Norman Mailer's higher journalism has been copied by legions of creative writers who have illuminated large swathes of the world. There are television and radio documentaries which are worth sitting still for many minutes to see and hear, so searing, or informative, or astonishing are they.
But neither the newspaper editors nor the television directors can disguise the fact that their media no longer have enlightenment as their guiding principle. You might almost say that they no longer have enlightenment values as their philosophical underpinning-although it is too soon to be categorical about that: the battle is still being fought. The crucial value, in whose name much of the 1960s "new journalism" radicalism was published or broadcast, was that of holding power up to account. And that is being diluted. The media now hold politicians to account not so much for what they should be doing, but for what they should appear to be doing, or even appear to be feeling.
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story." It was a joke, but it is no longer. The media's power is evidenced by its willingness to pursue a particular line-usually one which shows someone in power to be incompetent or venal or heartless-whether or not the importance of the story or the balance of the evidence supports that line. Politics is now more rooted in scientific and technological developments, more consciously constructed with the aid of experts than ever before: while at the same time, in reaction, the general media, the great machines of news, are becoming less willing-perhaps less able-to make sense of this world.
Their analyses and investigations load our leaders with huge festoons of meaning, much of which they cannot bear. The media exacerbate this by seeking to destroy their private lives. The working over of politicians' psyches is now considered fair game by those who equate endlessly repeated rudeness or meaningless revelation with radicalism. It has blown back on the politicians themselves, who caricature their high calling in order to attract a transient attention. It has infected everything. Last month the BBC ran for a whole day the story-which took up to a quarter of the time in its shorter bulletins-that the prime minister's 16-year-old son, returning to his hotel after an outing to a disco, made a mild commotion.
The real adolescent vandalism is the media's, practised on our public figures. Accountability means responding to an informed critique, not abuse or intrusion masquerading as the public right to know. Democracy has become commodified through the media. And because the media are the most powerful actors in many-perhaps, now, most-public occasions, they desperately need to be interrogated and themselves held to critical account. The media constitute a huge concentration of private power which has no effective countervailing power of its own. It is among the most urgent tasks of democratic practice to provide one. If this is not done, then I will be much more heavy-hearted about my son becoming a journalist than I was about my own, light-hearted and idealistic choice. n
