Conference snapshot: Our journalists need to get out more

By Diana Smith

Any encounter with a large collection of front bench politicians these days automatically involves a lot of security. Conference venues are chosen because they are places that can be sealed off from the rest of the world. Getting into a conference requires a series of identity checks to get a pass and then passing through airport style security. I went through the security immediately after one of the most prominent members of the shadow cabinet, who was frisked like everyone else. Because security is such a palaver, you really don’t want to do it twice so once you are in the bubble you are there for the day.

Having visited Westminster a number of times, I know that you get there a very large number of politicians of all hues, large numbers of the public who are there either as sightseers or on particular business, and always a smattering of journalists. This conference bubble was different. There were the politicians of course. Stands full of people with particular interests to represent, large numbers of party members and guests, and just about every political journalist you can think of. I counted off eight of the ones that I could recognise, plus scores of people manning cameras.

The conference hall was a slightly odd experience. There is the intimacy of being able to see the speakers, and knowing that you are there in real time with them, but you watch their images projected by the camera men onto the huge screens. The men with their cameras are everywhere. I smiled at a brief encounter between two, each moving to a better position and stopping to shake hands, each with an enormous lens resting over their shoulders.

I was initially puzzled by a series of glass fronted boxes on the wall of the conference hall, some dark with people sitting on the floor, some lit with a pink and purple light, with people sitting in them, slightly reminiscent of the red light district in Amsterdam. It took me a while to work out that these were the TV interview studios. Where top ranking political commentators were doing live interviews with top ranking politicians.

I did not spend much time in the conference hall. I went out and spoke to many people manning the stands. People in charities, wondering how they were going to cope with the expectations to deliver more for less, people from the energy industries, wondering if they were going to get the support they needed, people from the PR industry aiming to sell services to help people present their case, groups lobbying for health issues, care, the countryside, women, children, small business, Unions, women’s groups, pensioner’s groups, and so many different concerns that at the real stuff of politics.

The New Generation that Ed Miliband talked of in his conference speech is out there changing the party right now. This is a genuinely exiting time for grassroots politics, and as the pressures produced by the coalition policies become much more apparent over the next month these new grassroots movements will become more and more significant.

The journalists, in their bubbles inside the bubble did not for the most part see this. I had an interesting encounter on my way home. The two young women who shared my table in the train still had their security passes on and they were media people from Sky. The one who insisted on a forward facing seat, was expensively educated, self assured, and clearly used to getting her own way. The other was a rather kind gentle young woman who explained to her companion that she had overcome her reservations about working with Sky, and had been relieved to take a job where she could find one. She was simply intent on doing her job well. The older woman had a brief phone conversation with a colleague, asking “had he got the images?â€, and then lamented the glory days in which conferences drew big name celebrities. Clinton used to come…

Everyone’s experience of conference will be different, but I will not be alone in feeling that the journalists were clearly not at the same conference that I went to. I saw some really powerful messages on the drive for a new kind of politics. Much of the country will have missed that.

I have real fears that the media are too powerful, too intrusive, and too manipulative. Yesterday did nothing to dispel that fear. It is perfectly understandable that we want to see our politicians as human beings and that we are interested in human reactions, but we are now at a point when the media are no longer passive observers in this, they are actively a part, and a destructive part of the story. The images that formed the basis of Tuesday night’s reporting were not the product of chance, they were the result of cameras deliberately trained on individual faces to pick up any reaction that might display a moment’s emotion.

In the bubble, both at Westminster and at conference, our journalists have become far too obsessed with personality and gossip. We rely on our journalists for the images that we get to see. If they are delivering the wrong images then this is not serving our democracy well.