The ‘innuendo’ of political reporting

For those who missed it, yesterday's big item of journalism news was that the BBC's Political Editor Nick Robinson had become the subject of an early day motion in which 77 MPs condemned the ‘innuendo’ that appeared in this post in the reporter's blog.

Just over a day later, Robinson's robust defence of his original comments in his follow-up post had gained a swarm of interest, and going on 500 posts from largely supportive regular readers and what must have been a significant cross-over audience from other news sources.

The UK Parliament website carries a list of the signatories, who included prominent MPs Keith Vaz and Lembit Opik.

The problem is that political journalism in particular has to rely so much on the language of comment and the formation of theories (the blog posting in question was even explicitly titled ‘Theories on the Speaker’) to convey a true sense of the thought processes underlying politics.

There's just no way round it, and I was saddened that MPs were resorting to this albeit half-hearted measure to try and curb reporting freedoms. We know, by way of comparison, that most voices dissenting against their party lines in Westminster are not going to want to be named whenever a journalist simply reports that there are dissenting voices to be found - it's something we have to accept. When journalists started reporting at the end of last year that the Labour ranks were almost certain that an early election would be called, no one felt the need to press for the sources or to condemn the journalists concerned for making vague allusions. Similarly, when rumours of the antipathy in the Blair-Brown relationship began to circulate, or when in 2003 the rumour was spread that Lord Ashcroft had hired a private detective to trail a Times journalist, there was no expectation that these claims should be investigated.

In political reporting, simply parroting the messages that the parties are putting out (which would be the only way to engage in truly ‘hard’ political coverage) is not going to reveal the real and underlying motivations behind the actions of parliamentarians. Today politicians are coached in what is ‘on message’, so they are almost never going to confess their thoughts by being caught off guard.

A journalist, political or otherwise, has to use documents and interviews as the basis for his or her work, but to stop there would be a fallacy. There has to be some attempt to supply the reasons behind policy decisions – this is what the public need to know to judge whether politicians are truly acting on their behalf. The way to avoid this process turning news into comment is to take that theoretical element and apply the principle of balance to it also: by canvassing opposing opinions on intentions too.