See how the media mood music shifts on front pages and websites. Last week, the Britain of elderly, frail, sick people waiting on hospital trolleys suddenly became Mrs May’s Britain of “pioneers and innovators who will shape the world ahead”. So the 60% of over-65s who had voted to leave the EU had become players in a “bold, strong, open, outward-looking” national future. Hail to the Times’s “Tungsten Theresa”, displaying all the “steel of the new Iron Lady”. At least according to the Daily Mail.
Ah! “Brexodus” … heaved the Bun. “It was a magnificent, historic speech. We couldn’t have written it any better.” The Telegraph had its old columnist Boris back in place, promising a queue of global powers offering juicy trade deals. The Express turned swiftly huffy over a “spiteful” front page when “Die Welt, a German newspaper, pasted Mrs May on to a photo of the union flag, along with the caption: ‘Little Britain’.”
What about the “togetherness” that May wanted, what about a truly United Kingdom marching out of Europe? More moody music. You might have glimpsed some prospect of that in a Times editorial praising the PM’s “clever, nuanced and arguably fine speech”. You might even have paused over the Guardian’s verdict on the “huge success” of this “political manoeuvre” because “in Downing Street, they think Leave voters are still comfortable with what they did in June while a significant number of Remain voters have now accepted that Brexit is going to happen”.
Perhaps press divisions of six months ago don’t seem quite so visceral after a “speech that has strengthened Mrs May’s authority both in her party and in the country” (the Guardian again). As ever, events in the real world bring changes of stance.
The City is coming to terms with Brexit, which means the Financial Times is growing more reflective. The Labour party is wallowing back and forth, which means that the Mirror has lost any real edge to it pieties. “We want the very best for Britain as do all who voted in the Brexit referendum, whether they cast their ballot to leave or remain in the European Union.” Peace in our time, then? Only, alas, if you believe that the attack dogs of Fleet Street have lost their snarl. “Guess what? Silly Lily (Allen) and the Bremoaners still don’t get it” – and the Mail still sees no reason to let them forget it. “Mrs May faces fierce opposition in Europe,” according to Peter Oborne.”Her own civil servants are mutinous and many diplomats are in denial. A cross-party coalition of Clegg, George Osborne and Peter Mandelson is plotting. Teamed up with big business and a recalcitrant House of Lords, it’s clear that the British establishment is out on manoeuvres.” Oh! those sinister forces of yesteryear are gathering.
All of which indicates only the briefest interludes before pitched battle recommences. “Everything I liked about my country – tolerance, moderation, courtesy, sensibleness, pragmatism, irony – seems to have disappeared,” tweets a disconsolate Robert Harris (in loco Cicero). “If Remoaners (like him) don’t stop their wild hyperbole – and vilification – they’ll end up damaging Britain,” replies Stephen Glover (in loco Dacre). “Will the last country leaving the EU turn out the lights?” burbles the Sun (in loco Rupert).
Which brings any media tour of this cloudy horizon straight back to the biggest information player of the lot, the BBC, and to its new governance structure. By happenstance, the new chairman of the BBC’s new board, Sir David Clementi, was getting a polite grilling from the culture select committee just as Theresa May walked into Lancaster House a few hundred yards away.
Of course, Sir David, waiting to take up the job, jumped his committee hurdle with ease. He was a new boy to broadcasting. How could he say much about priorities when they all seemed “important”? Generalities, charmingly framed, were his first recourse. But one thing, he claimed, was much more important than anything else. His BBC had to be trusted, impartial and independent. It had to find a “middle way”.
He himself was a political neutral, he said. “The BBC is nothing if it doesn’t carry the trust of the people to be impartial and accurate … Above all, the BBC needs to be seen as the medium of record in the era of fake news and post-truth. The BBC has a real role to ensure it is seen as the place where people go to make sure they can distinguish between fact and fiction.”
A very traditional posture, in sum; one welded into place by its new chairman. But also one needing a great deal of scrutiny at this moment of change.
“I know it can seem a bit obsessive and of course everyone wants things to go well – but if you stay silent when liars win, they lie bigger,” tweeted James O’Brien, of LBC and Newsnight in the aftermath of May.
That’s the theme that needs examining now. Clementi thinks the BBC “did a good job (of reporting the referendum) in a set of very difficult circumstances”. It’s not a universally popular view. Every time I write about the corporation these days, the online commenters gather in full trashing mode down below.
The BBC didn’t do a good job over Europe, it seems, with too few porkies on either side laid bare. The BBC is already being described as “another beauty” (like CNN) as President Trump gathers steam. Last week’s heavily contested BBC Trust finding that Laura Kuenssberg wasn’t “impartial” by using a Jeremy Corbyn interview answer out of context will only light more flames. The worst car crashes are in the middle of the road.
And the hardest question on all these fronts simply asks what kind of conventional impartiality is possible in these direly divisive days? The days of Trump and Boris and Juncker and Jeremy. You can do he said/she said journalism by the yard – but it’s mostly a reporting nullity, increasingly derided. You can shift and shuffle your centre of reporting gravity to trail public opinion. (Polling approval for May means gentler treatment). You can lollop along, head down, attempting to split the Brussels/Westminster difference between BBC board and Ofcom regulation.
But today’s prevailing mood music is harshly unforgiving. It wants enlightenment, not obfuscation. It needs to know what you think, what you conclude, assume and believe. That’s a terrible call for state-regulated broadcasting. It’s not what the statutes say. But truth, like actual independence in a post-truth society, is more than an anxious assemblage of facts.
It is a fundamental public service as the mood music stops.
