This is not journalism as we know it

Ed and David Miliband at the Labour Party conference in Manchester (LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)

First there was Big Brother; now we have regressed as far as The Brothers.

I’m exaggerating, but not much. The front page story of David and Ed really does belong somewhere between Reality TV and 1970s-style Family Drama. Unlike the re-make of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, which has been broadcast on ITV1 recently, the re-make of The Brothers is appearing on all the news channels. The Real-Time Family Saga of the Milibands is What The Papers Say.

Nowadays it’s not unusual to observe that if this is politics, then politics has changed almost beyond recognition, to the point where it is recognisable by the absence of that which used to define it – ideology; which in turn raises the question as to whether this is politics at all. To which I would add the parallel observation that if this is news journalism, Jim, it’s not journalism as we know it.

In short, both journalism and politics are newly characterised by their lack of character.

Can we blame political journalists for not getting a substantial, political story that isn’t there? Can we take against the Milibands (whichever) for being weightless, when there is no coherent body of ideas for either of them to gravitate to? Yes, we can, since lack of substance is something that each cohort – journalists and politicians – has chosen to accept rather than to challenge.

But aside from their timorous response, in which, whether they know it or not, they are reinforcing the false idea that voters, readers, humanity itself, cannot brave any more than this, there is also another sense in which their emptiness is true to the reality we inhabit. In this sense they are the journalists and the politicians which our age deserves.

Eighteenth century London merited the invention of modern journalism. The combination of market exchange and maritime exploration formed the character of the Spectator magazine (1711), in which the comparability of people (as well as commodities) and the exploration of self (as well as foreign territories) were the stuff of journalism and the makings of the modern, self-regarding persona.

Nineteenth century journalism reproduced the new world of industrial production and represented the battle of ideas which accompanied its development.

All the world was contained in twentieth century journalism. That is, as journalists reported on the world which people were already making, it also contained that world within fixed limits, re-presenting it as a ready-made; a fait accompli.

Here and now, in that part of the twenty-first century world which today lives less by origination and production and more by the provision of mediating services, we are getting yet another kind of journalism.  The new journalism seeks to insert itself between two moments in ‘the conversation’ (as unending as it is inconsequential), just as City-type financial ‘products’ insert themselves in the circular story of where the money goes (once it has left those places which make their money from making things). Fully in line with finance, (Western) journalism is also trading in derivatives.

Turning politics and journalism into the real-time telling of a family saga, is not only the personal responsibility of the individuals involved in both the saga and the telling of it. It also tells of the condition of society, its journalism and politics, in a geographical area which has replaced origination with mediation.

Hardly surprising, then, that (Western) journalism and (British) politics are currently lacking in originality.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Dr Andrew Calcutt is Principal Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London, and Editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org. He is speaking in the debate Stop the press: journalism in jeopardy? at the Battle of Ideas festival in London on Sunday 31 October. An additional Battle Satellite debate on the state of journalism Read all about it: truth in demand is taking place on Tuesday 19 October at Central European University, Budapest.

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