Tony Blair and feral media
Posted on Tuesday 12 June, 2007
Filed Under New Labour
After a decade of living by the mass media sword, Tony Blair – pictured left – is griping about dying by it. The media has become ‘a feral beast’ that hunts ‘in a pack’, he claims today in a speech at an event organised by Reuters.
Blair’s complaints strangely reverse cause and effect. When aspirant prime ministers fly to Australia to abase themselves before News International executives, and then once in office effectively exempt its British interests from corporation tax and personally tout its wares to their continental counterparts like some glorified salesman, they inevitably send Rupert Murdoch a powerful message about just who wears the trousers in the relationship.
When a political party courts six-figure donations from Tory pornographers who run middle-market tabloids as a sideline but refuses to publish a serious political periodical of its own, it gets what is coming to it.
The problem is not that the media has gone wild in the country. Genuine scoops – such as the BBC/Guardian revelations on the cash-for-Saudis affair – are all too infrequent in comparison to the coverage of ministerial sex lives. Where it matters, the press is rarely critical enough.
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7 Responses to “Tony Blair and feral media”
I don’t quite get the “refuses to publish a serious political periodical of its own” line. Do you think the Labour Party should have a newspaper? Isn’t that something only Leninist parties see as a priority (hence paper sellers)?
Er … yes, Luke. I’m remotely surprised you even take issue. Historically, Labour owned a mass circulation daily called Labour Herald.
Even when I was first a Labour Party member, there was Labour Weekly and New Socialist.
The last time I worked in political journalism – the early 1990s – there were also Lib-Dem and Tory weeklies. Are they still going?
So there’s nothing remotely Leninist about it. If you want to get your own unfiltered message over, put out a serious publication.
Or perhaps, in this day and age, run a serious website open to debate.
Oh and Luke, as far as I am aware, a number of continental social democratic parties still do put out newspapers.
If Aftenbladet isn’t directly owned by the Swedish SDs, it might as well be.
And utterly hypocritical of Blair to invoke the Freedom of Information Act as an example of his progressive achievements in this area, when Blair and his cohorts have sought to hobble it, dilute it and neuter it.
Just a horrible, graceless, self-pitying whinge. As usual.
He’s spot on about the Independent. In fact, he’s more right than he is wrong in the whole piece.
When you say the press are rarely critical enough, that’s partly because they spend far too much time doing what Blair is accusing them of, creating political soap opera for example.
The only reason Blair is having a pop at the media is because it keeps catching him and his cabinet out when they get upto no good.
Dave
“Who wears the trousers”?
Can that phrase be anything but sexist?
Glad to see your referencing Bow Wow Wow though.