Feral media

Considering Tony Blair's important speech yesterday comparing the media to a "feral beast", The Independent's editor, Simon Kelner, in a signed front page statement, appears to take it as a personal affront. Under a bold paragraph taken from the PM's speech, criticising The Independent, Kelner writes:

What clearly rankles with Mr Blair is not that we campaign vociferously on certain issues, but that he doesn't agree with our stance. What if we had backed the invasion of Iraq (like [sic], for example, we supported the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone)? Would he then be attacking our style of journalism? Of course not. We are unapologetic about our opposition to Iraq, the biggest foreign policy folly of our age, and we shall continue to hold him and his government to account.

Would he? I don't know. But I'll happily give my view, as a supporter of the PM's foreign policies. I'd attack The Independent's style of journalism regardless of its editorial line, for the reason Blair stated: "Today it is avowedly a viewspaper, not merely a newspaper."

The Independent does not recognise a distinction between news copy and editorial comment. Since its birth in 1986, it has had many distinguished commentators, starting with the late Peter Jenkins. Quite recently in its history, however, The Independent has ceased to discriminate between that function and the provision of the news. In eliding that distinction, the paper has diminished the quality of its own comment (not that of its contributors, but the paper's own editorial voice), which is shrill and hectoring rather than analytical. The newspaper's comment in response to the PM largely confirms his diagnosis by contriving to miss this point.

The communications media are of course entitled to take editorial views. It ought not to be, and they ought not to see it as, their function to act as opposition to an elected government. Part of the reason for that is pragmatic: they are thereby hampered both from reporting the news properly and from adopting a critical distance necessary to venture informed judgements. Consider the newspaper's further coverage of the PM's speech by its political editor, Andrew Grice, who gives an account of the history of relations between Tony Blair and the media. Read it carefully, and pay particular attention to Grice's rendition of the conflict between Downing Street and the BBC over the case adduced for the Iraq War:

The collision came as they tried to spin a war. Two dossiers were published as Mr Blair sought to win public support for his private pledge to George Bush to back a US invasion of Iraq. The first drew selectively on intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destructionand claimed he was planning to be able to deploy them within 45 minutes. The second, or "dodgy" dossier, relied on huge chunks of a student's thesis culled from the internet.

Alastair Campbell, the communications director, declared war on the BBC when it doubted the veracity of the claims. The hunt for the mole closed in on David Kelly, a government weapons expert, who committed suicide. Although No 10 won its battle at the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, it was a pyrrhic victory. BBC heads rolled but the evidence revealed during the inquiry damaged the Government. Mr Blair recognised that Mr Campbell had to go.

What is notable about this passage is that it entirely omits the government's side of the dispute. To read it with no background in the subject, you would assume No 10's communications director was railing against the BBC for its farsightedness in doubting the accuracy of those dossiers. The reason was in fact that a BBC journalist asserted on national radio that the Government had made a claim relating to national security that it knew to be false. That charge was itself false. The journalist in question, Andrew Gilligan, levelled it without justification or evidence, or even keeping an accurate record of his interlocutor's comments. That abdication of professional responsibility was compounded by the BBC's Director General, Greg Dyke, who failed to read the transcript of the broadcast for a further three weeks. It is striking that Grice's account contains no reference to this incident and mentions neither of those names. As such, it is - there's no way round this, and I would be interested to know whether Grice even realises what he's done - a biased and unreliable comment that undermines the distinction between fact and opinion.

I should mention that The Independent today also carries an opinion column by Steve Richards that praises Blair for having "made one of his more courageous speeches" - which is also my view. But then it's not part of my criticism of the newspaper that it lacks a spread of opinion on its comment pages. My criticism is that the newspaper elsewhere in its pages has a surfeit of opinion, overwhelmingly in one direction, where it should have none.