lord of the blog

« USA elections | Main | Climate change »

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The media and the people

I was asked by the Westminster Media Forum to speak for 5 minutes on the type of media people would want in the future. My speaking notes follow:

                                             

                                         Westminster Forum

With the advent of blogging there has been significant growth in the variety of opinion. Newspapers have also moved heavily into the domain of opinion.

Radio and TV news programmes have become more confrontational and increasingly use the mode of ‘a speaker for’ and ‘a speaker against’.

News in the sense of information about complex events has, I believe, lost out in this explosion of opinion.

Let me give an example of the way the public loses out on information about complex issues. Climate change. There is growing concern amongst the public and yet they lurch between a feeling of inadequacy “It’s too big for me – They have to do something about it”. Or, the panic mode “We are killing the planet – they have to do something about it”. The government does some advertising to inform. Pressure groups do campaigning advertising of the ‘stop flying’ variety.

In fact there is far more the public can do then just put less water in the kettle, turn off the standby on the TV or cancel their holiday. They can for example buy all or some of their electricity from renewable resources. They can install wind or solar power generators on their homes or groups of homes and there are grants available to make it cheaper. If they do install a renewable power generator they can in many cases sell the electricity (not just the surplus back to the grid). One renewable energy supplier offers 4.5p per kilowatt even if you are using that electricity yourself.

At least one local authority has a near carbon free policy for its existing buildings.

Climate change is a serious matter and this is the type of information that we ought to make more easily available. Finding it on the internet only works if you know about it!

I can’t see why news can’t cover local issues or individual behaviour in a national way when it affects national issues.

MP’s often say that issues raised with them by constituents are not the issues dominating the press. As a member of the Lords I have been asked how to get restrictions on pubs following the new legislation giving more power to local people. As an MP I was asked about how to get ASBO’s.

There are numerous such examples and it doesn’t need a boring fact sheet to provide it. What can you do? What powers or influence are available to you?  These are important matters for everyone.

When Jamie Oliver started his campaign on school dinners I watched the TV Any Questions? programme. A member of the audience challenged the government to “do something”. Quite rightly in terms of confrontational politics but no body including the Minister on the programme told them that many members of the audience already had significant power. Schools do have an individual budget they can use for their own priorities. Local authorities are free to spend more – some only spent the minimum of around 30p others spent around 50p or 60p. So parents, teacher’s local authority members and officers all had influence but it was rarely raised in the general media coverage of that issue.

When people say they are “fed up” with the political parties do they know how to influence political parties? Or stand as an independent?  Or pursue some of the other options they have in a democracy? Voting is not the beginning and end of the democratic process.

Opinion is the stuff of democratic argument but a bit of news would be nice too!

Unless people have more information on how to use their existing power and influence then politics becomes an increasingly spectator activity.  And if they don’t like the confrontational bit why not just switch off - literally and metaphorically?

The challenge to the media is how to help people, locally and nationally, to become active participants and not just frustrated commentators. This is not just in politics but in all the complex areas of modern life not least science and technology.

Agree with all that Clive, but without minimising the importance of climate change, the pressure groups themselves too often contribute more heat than light to the debate.

One example is the Greenpeace Brent Spar campaign. Another, in the present day, is the Friends of the Earth (sic) line on the Severn Barrage. FoE OPPOSE a plan to build a renewable energy system that would generate at least an equivalent amount of electricity to two modern nuclear power stations and which would last for at least as long as the Great Wall of China has.

On the grounds of preserving feeding grounds for bird species, which are not threatened, in an estuarine environment which is among the most ecologically barren on earth (because it is tidal mudflats) and which will not altogether disappear in any case, the organisation which pretends to promote renewable energy actually is leading the opposition to the only proposal to tap tidal power in the second highest tidal range in the world that is actually proven to work (La Rance in Brittany has been working for over 20 years) and which could be built using private sector finance as soon as an Act of Parliament permitted. Instead FoE are advocating for tidal lagoons which no serious person believes are economically viable and which raise just as many other issues in terms of tidal impact on shipping etc as the Barrage.

My point is that a mature debate is not helped by the unwillingness of the pressure groups to understand and acknowledge that policy is about trading off benefits and costs. Too often they make the best the enemy of the good and exhibit an anti-scientific bias that because of the political influence they exert tends to retard instead of advancing the serious political debate over what needs to be done to meet the real issues posed by, say, climate change. There is an issue of proportionality here, which needs to be addressed as much by the third sector as by politicians and parties.

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: