When a Tory voter emotionally complained
about how she had been deceived about cuts to her tax credits, it
caught the media’s attention. I don’t want to get into the debate
that followed about whether she deserved sympathy or not, except to
say this just shows up some elements of the left at their
sanctimonious worst. What struck me was the juxtaposition of this
with another remark I saw elsewhere, which is that everyone who had
looked at the numbers knew Osborne would cut tax credits after the
election. This remark is correct, if be ‘knew’ we mean highly
likely.
That information had clearly not got through to this Tory voter.
Conservative MPs know
she is not alone, which is of course why the Prime Minister lied
about
it
before the general election, and why he and Osborne continue to try
and cover
up
the facts. It is the media’s job to get information across, and on
this it clearly failed. Most in the parts of the print media that see
that as part of their job did their best: those in the part who are
paid to deceive also did their job well. Whether we should let those
who produce news like celebrity gossip and sports reporting use that
platform to peddle political propaganda is an interesting issue. But
these do not arise in the UK with the television media, which has a
duty to inform in an impartial way which it is clearly failing to
fulfill.
This is not about the television media’s coverage as a whole, but
how information is presented in the kinds of programmes that this
Tory voter is likely to watch: the major news programmes, interviews
with the Prime Minister or Chancellor etc. Take for example the clip
where the Prime Minister lied about cuts to tax credits. There David
Dimbleby asks him by saying “some people” have suggested tax
credits would be cut, rather than “every non-partisan expert”.
This may seem small, but this kind of detailed textual analysis is
critical (and it is what many journalists have been trained to do).
Of course this is not an isolated incident. The idea that the deficit
was a consequence of Labour profligacy rather than the recession is
widely believed (as another pre-election debate illustrated), which
means the television media again failed. In other areas where the
partisan right wing press do their best to mislead, like welfare and
immigration, the average person’s perception of key facts is wildly
wrong (in the direction they are misled), which means the television
media has also failed. Journalists seem happy to quote large sums of
money on magnitudes like government debt in a way designed to make
them sound scary, but fail to put them into historical context (it
needs just one chart), which would mean focusing on the debt to GDP
ratio and pointing out that this will fall even if we run modest
deficits. The politically loaded and inaccurate
term taxpayers money is freely used, and the term welfare benefits
misused. I could go on and on, and have.
Political
journalists working in television try hard to be unbiased in a party
political sense. They do this partly because there are political
machines that try and hold them to that. I would suggest being
unbiased towards the facts, and more positively their duty to inform,
are at least as important. Unfortunately there are no equivalent
mechanisms to ensure this happens.
