Atlantic Bridge: why the media are incapable of breaking scandals

By Stephen Newton

This summer the Guardian made some of its last investigative reporters redundant. One leaver, David Hencke, told us that the reason journalists had failed to break the MPs’ expenses scandal, which was happening right under their noses, was that the lobby is too chummy. But this not the main reason.

The main reason our newspapers are so poor at breaking political scandals is that investigation costs money. Even simple jobs like trawling the internet take time and so incur costs that will not be recovered if the trail turns cold. It may be necessary to read up on some aspect of the law or a code of conduct. Really controversial stories may need to be passed by a legal team first and that can be very expensive.

The MPs’ expenses scandal is a good example of how such news now comes to enter the public domain. A non-journalist does all the work, packages everything up and auctions the news to the highest bidder. Newspapers like the Daily Mail have relied on the public relations industry for the bulk of their soft, titillating news for quite some time. Now they are now quite open about relying on Max Clifford for their political scandals too. The closest this newspaper comes to investigation is assigning someone to watch Victoria Beckham’s nipples for a day to see if she’s wearing enhancers.

The Mirror appears to have given up on grown-up politics a long, long time ago. The tabloid’s political editor, Kevin Maguire, has been reduced to gossip-mongering and spent the weekend bitching on Twitter that the Tory conference is smaller than Labour’s. He tells us the Mirror sits with the Japanese in the press room, so seriously do the Tories take it.

Such laziness is not confined to the tabloids. Who can remember when the Observer, Independent or Times last broke a significant news story? Amazingly it took four Sunday Times journalists to report that Cameron has dinners with donors at which, they say, not a lot happens.

A second reason political scandals are hard to break is that, for the media, the news is a collection of stories set within the context of an overarching narrative that cannot be disturbed. Nobody is going to make an effort for news that doesn’t fit and disturbs the flow. Now that the Sun has decided that Labour’s lost it, the story of British politics for the next few months has been decided: ‘Cameron has cleaned up the Conservative Party, made it electable and has become our saviour. He is destined for a landslide victory.’ Anything that goes against that line will be published very reluctantly indeed.

This is why the Charity Commission’s investigation of the Atlantic Bridge, which is managed or advised by five shadow cabinet ministers, has so far failed to make an impact. It appears unlikely that the Atlantic Bridge ever intended to be politically neutral, as charity law requires. Its offer to reward donors with trips to the USA is scandalous. Its hosting the US launch of William Hague’s book is outrageous.

Yet our newspapers are now incapable of reporting this news properly, if at all. Only the charity magazine Third Sector has given this story prominence, the Guardian ran a small, cautious piece.

The Labour supporting Mirror and other newspapers are simply not interested.