Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Elinor Goodman

Well, I am amazed by the things that were said about me!  I don’t think my colleagues in the news room would recognise that description of me for a moment  - of someone they respect -  because usually their contact with me is someone swearing down the phone;  and not getting my pieces ready before ‘thirty-seconds-go-on-air’. That is a fairly stomach churning business if you’re a director sitting in the control room wondering if there is going to be a four minute black void at the top of your programme.  I don’t think either, that the people I was at school with,  would recognise me as the person getting this degree.  Because I was someone who struggled with my exams -  as you have heard,  I was dyslexic.  I think I invented numeric dyslexia which is why when I got a job at the Financial Times everyone was particularly surprised, not least my former teachers, insofar as they could believe it was the same Elinor Goodman. 

I am very honoured to get this degree, partly because Essex does have such a high reputation for its Department of Government,  and partly because,  as I said,  I didn’t go to university and at times during my career I have been very conscious of that.  Often when I have been at meetings full of thrusting young graduates, such as you are, competing for bright ideas I have thought: ‘they have been to university, they obviously know a lot more than me.’  My brother, who is here, would say that is ridiculous,  but I still feel it. So I am delighted that you have all got degrees and you never have to have that sense of inferiority.  You go out there and fight at meetings !

But I am also, I have to say, slightly surprised that the university should be seeing fit to honour a journalist at this time.  Because I think its arguable that political journalists have been a corrosive force over the last ten years. My own view is that the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media has helped create an age of cynicism in which it is extremely difficult to have a rational debate,  particularly about what is really the central issue of ‘Europe.’ 

Now,  I know that that might sound dangerously like Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, who is constantly berating lobby journalists like me for getting in the way of the message and who, if you have time to watch television, (BBC2 to give them a plug), on Saturday night, you will see discoursing to this effect for a half an hour - in a profile of him.  But politicians are quite as much to blame as the media, though that’s their department.   I’m a journalist and in my view its up to journalists to stand up to them, not to carp about whether they are being ‘spun’ or not.  Alistair Campbell, and Peter Mandelson before him, realised in a way I don’t think their predecessor had to anything like the same extent, that the press needed exclusives  - ‘scoops’ -  and the television needed pictures and soundbites which distilled their message into pithy 20 second  bits for television packages of perhaps two minutes.  And I know from having sat in an interview studio, if you are a journalist you have got an hour to get a package together.  A bit of you wants to have an intellectual discourse to really probe and put them on the spot,  but the other bit of you thinks ‘god,  I must get a soundbite quickly .’  So we have conspired to produce this thing so now maligned - the soundbite - because we needed them to get their message over briefly - they provided it. 

And the media largely rolled over to New Labour;  television because it had to operate, as I say,  under such tight time pressures,  and because of  the proliferation of channels and bulletins.  That in turn,  led to the development of the ‘two way’, where a presenter in a studio interviews the television journalist on the spot, thus filling any amount of time very cheaply and adding to the impression of  immediacy and action. But it also meant journalists stranded on the end of a link, usually in Downing Street, were desperate for information, any information, any fragment.  So any gobbit of information whispered into their ear just before they went on air by a press officer was all too often regurgitated virtually undigested minutes later.  That was then what  amounted to a ‘Downing Street press release’ and  was presented as an insight into what was going on.  You are all familiar with the sort of thing:  “Sources close to the Prime Minister tell me…..”  It was actually Alistair Campbell,  or even worse,  one of his minions,  but you certainly don’t admit that on air.

In the same way television wanted access to places rarely seen so the opportunity to do a piece to camera in, say, the Downing Street garden,  was too much to resist, - even if the event really wasn’t news worthy in itself.  In the same way you have all seen that shot,  rather reverentially shot from underneath,  of a Minister in his car.  It conveys an idea of  authority. We need it because we need to talk about John Prestcott,  we need fifteen seconds of picture,  and the only angle to film from,  if you are in a car with them,  is underneath them.  So inadvertently we have created an impression of authority which they are very happy to go along with. 

And the press was equally easily seduced,  because the newspapers were fighting each other for circulation.  Editors demanded exclusives and political journalists were expected to supply them.   After all what were they having all those expensive lunches for if they weren’t getting stories ?    The press built entire edifices around a few facts and many more nods and winks.  Now that is something which journalists have always done and what they are always expected to do. But in the increasingly competitive climate of the eighties and nineties the emerging breed of special advisers  (what are colloquially known now as Spin doctors),  realise that they only had to single out one journalist for a taster of a speech to be delivered the next day,  to get it far more coverage than it would have done,  had everybody had it on the same day.  Indeed often those speeches that were so headlined in advanced didn’t produce any copy on the day,  and sometimes they didn’t even say the things that they were supposed to say,  because they had just test marketed them and found that they didn’t work !  You know the kind of thing:  ‘Gordon Brown will tomorrow announce a clamp down’, ‘Stephen Byers is to summon ..’,  ‘a new Tsar is to be appointed.’ 

News judgements went out of the window and because the initiatives all too often came to nothing, readers and voters, I think,  became increasingly cynical. The Tsar didn’t abolish the drug problem over night - he probably  didn’t have much impact on it. But all that hype,  I think,  led to this cynicism. 

Obviously it wasn’t only New Labour who did it.  The Tories tried it too, though in government they never really got it together, because every time they tried to control the media their internal divisions would break out and undermine their message.  These divisions were obviously deep rooted and fundamental and therefore precisely what political journalists should be exposing.  But the Tories also had to contend with one of the paradoxes of modern journalism:  that the media has never been more competitive yet never, I suspect,  has it operated more as a herd. Thus it turned on John Major and  focused on the party’s splits at the exclusion of practically anything else.  It is certainly arguable that those splits made the Conservative government virtually incapable of delivering on other things.  But the other side of this equation was that too much of the media lost its critical facilities when it came to New Labour. 

Now that honeymoon is over, the media is  biting the hand that fed it. Hence,  in part,  Alistair Campbell’s retreat to the bunker.  Its almost like a lover spurned, the savageness with which they are now going against New Labour.   I think its partly because collectively we feel we were too easy on them in the first instance so now lets give them a rough time and show them we are not wimps. 

All this may sound like harking back to a more deferential era  It is not.  There have been some examples of the media bringing politicians to account in a way that Parliament conspicuously failed to do - ‘cash for questions’ is the obvious example of that.  But there was , I think,  an arrogance in the eighties and nineties about the way some journalists, particularly columnists,  elevated themselves to some Olympian plinth from which they sneered down at politicians.  Again, there is nothing new in journalists using their columns to campaign and indeed abuse politicians.  It was Baldwin who talked about the press having the prerogative of the harlot.  But some of their opinions became part of the received wisdom at Westminster,  and thus influenced what broadcasters were saying. Of course  they were supposed to be neutral,  and viewers expect them to be neutral,  and they are right to expect them to be neutral. 

Equally in television  (and here I plead guilty) that as a reaction to all the spin, some of us tried to expose how the politicians were manipulating the public,  at the expense of explaining of what they were actually doing.  The spin became the story because it was a lot easier in fact than challenging the government factually. 

So I stand before you,  hoping that some balance can be restored in the relationship between politicians and journalists in which politicians are held to account by journalists who in turn hold themselves to account.  But basically any of you who go into either journalism or politics for a career I give you this advice: enjoy it,  but remember there has to be a borderline between the two!

Thank you.