This government’s fatal flaw: The media

By Diana Smith / @mulberrybush

All governments have it – a fatal flaw which will bring about their decline. In the case of this government it is something that has been apparent to all close observers from the start.

The government’s fatal flaw is their relationship with the media. It was their successful manipulation of the media which gave the Conservative Party the largest numbers of seats at the election, it is the relationship with the media which is leading the government to making some seriously bad political decisions, and it will be the relationship with the media that will bring about the fatal loss of public trust.

During the year leading up to the election I watched the way in which the media was used to manipulate public opinion. We had a series of moral panics headed by the right-wing press aimed at demonising sections of the community and pointing to real or imagined failings by public services under labour. These were all stories aimed at making the case for “change”.

In many of these cases it was quite clear that the facts had been distorted, and I think that most people, including myself, thought that we were just seeing a cynical use of the media for electoral purposes. I could not personally believe that the Conservative politicians actually believed the points they were putting forward. Now I think differently.

Many of these moral panic stories are based on “outliers” or extreme and unrepresentative cases, which may be more or less well founded.

As examples.

· The current fuss about housing benefit, which is being used as a justification for extreme policies that could see many thousands of people forced from their homes, is a tiny number of cases in London, where large families in properties with exceptionally high rents have clocked up unusually high housing benefit bills.

· Midstaffs Foundation Trust, where misreporting of the misinterpretation of some complex statistical material, combined with carefully orchestrated anecdotal material, has been used as the justification for scrapping NHS targets, and doing away with PCTs and SHAs.

· Blatant misuse of crime figures, for which the government has twice been publically rebuked, has also been used as justification for attacking the way in which the police service has been run.

· The Audit commission, which plays a valuable role in making government at all levels accountable, has been scrapped after the service was demonised in the press using false charges.

The reason why I now think that Conservative politicians have been more deeply influenced by some of these misleading cases, and by media reaction than I first thought, comes across through tell tale quotes and actions.

With the announcement of the spending review, the chancellor pointed to welfare reforms and said that the public had shown they wanted action to be taken. So we have a situation where stories are encouraged politically through the right-wing press, they influence political opinion, and the government then feels the need to act on the public opinion thus created.

The day after the spending review, George Osborne appeared on the Today Programme to talk about the proposals. He was very upset that the BBC had not given sufficient prominence to the letter published by a number of prominent businessmen, endorsing the government’s actions on the economy. This letter, which had been orchestrated by Conservative Party supporters, had formed an essential part of the government’s plan to give their proposals credibility, and George Osborne was clearly seeing the BBC’s failure to give it the prominence he would have liked as an indication of the BBC acting in a partisan manner. He clearly did not consider the possibility that the BBC might have seen through it.

When David Cameron appeared in Europe for what was in his description “a spectacular success” we had the extraordinary picture of him piling out of his car, all fired up, delivering his sound bite to the press there ready to receive him, before power-walking into the parliament. Apparently the “grid” called for a media success on that day and he was there ready to perform. On this occasion the press weren’ impressed, and clearly do not buy his version of events.

The end of the honeymoon is upon us, The media are clearly coming round to the view that they are being “spun” and are much more resistant to the process.

These are young men. They have had the kind of backgrounds where they are not used to failure, or disapproval. They have made their plans, and we are now at the point where the plans are coming off the sheets of paper, and are getting translated into real actions with real consequences. They are being challenged, increasingly forcefully, from a range of different directions. I think they may genuinely be struggling to recognise that things are not necessarily true because they believe them to be that way.

They are about to be tested. I believe that things frequently happen in less than obvious ways, and that there is an element of naïve idealism within the mix that makes up the government, which may yet have a positive role to play. This means opening up to the full possibilities of a coalition, wider than the formal coalition between Conservatives and Lib Dems, accepting as Nick Clegg says that no one won the election, and actively seeking cross party co-operation on the range of difficult, urgent and long term problems that need action now.