CentreRight

It’s genuinely good to see the Sun attacking Labour and supporting the Tories, and to see Lord Mandelson today complaining about bias is risible. However, I don’t want to be churlish ... but ... some aspects of this relationship make me uneasy. I know that many of you are going to roll your eyeballs, but hear me out. Just because the Sun is bad for Labour, doesn’t mean it’s entirely good for us. Here’s why:

First, let’s be realistic. The strategy of the Murdoch media is to find a man on the up (Blair, Cameron, etc), build him up further and destroy his opponents, in order to ride the zeitgeist and maximise its relationship with those in power, for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. There’s nothing wrong or illegal in this, and I don’t share the Guardian readers’ views that Murdoch as the devil incarnate - in many ways he is an impressive man - but he extracts a price, and we don’t yet know what it is.

Second, the Sun’s change of heart changes nothing fundamental. It’s playing catch-up. The Sun’s position, unlike with Mrs T in the 1970s and 80s, is neither radical nor brave. They are following their readers, not leading them – which partly explains the OTT abuse of PM Brown. Third, there’s another reason for the OTT attacks; tabloid power is waining. The Sun needs to maximise its impact on the coming election for political and ad revenue purposes. If the Sun ain’t the story, it’ll hit its bottom line. Hence the reason to dump Brown the day after his speech – all’s fair in love and war (and advertising revenue). The same could yet happen to us. Both the above mean that the Sun has lost a lot of its clout. It’s not as important as it once was.

Posted by Bob Seely.

It’s easy to blame the messenger for bad news, and there’s certainly a long and ignoble history of politicians attacking reporters and media organisations for telling difficult truths. But I wonder if we have now moved to a new era when the media are as responsible for mistruths as politicians. I ask because although the media is meant to reflect reality, I wonder how accurate their reporting is of Afghanistan? I have some doubt, and it is based on experience.

When I was in Iraq, even a year after it was clear that the Coalition and the Iraq authorities had defeated the insurgency, journalists still arrived in theatre with the assumption that we were beaten (the role of the UK in SE Iraq is debateable, but that’s not the point here). Some reporters had real difficulty accepting victory. It was almost an inverse of traditional war journalism. Through most of the modern era, journalists assumed ‘their’ side was winning unless it was undisputedly obvious that it wasn’t. In the final two years of the Iraq War, the opposite took place – an assumption of failure even when it was clear that the insurgency was spent.

I’m still trying to work out the reasons for this: the lazy, soft-left assumption that the Iraq Government was a Western stooge, a bitter resentment of George Bush, a breakdown of relations between the MoD and the media, or just a legacy of the previous Iraq reporting. Whatever it was, some in the media acted as if they resented the fact that ‘their’ side had won. More broadly, I wonder if journalists now have an addiction to disaster. Watch TV news nowadays and almost every story is reduced to a ‘catastrophe’ or ‘tragedy,’ no matter how parochial the story or how few people are involved. If journalists can’t wallow self-indulgently in mawkish sentimentality the story is hardly worth bothering with. Straight reporting seems to be a dying art.