Fishburn Hedges

01.11.2011

Ahead of our first 'Media and Government' event this week, we hear from Jill Rutter (programme director, at Institute for Government) with her view on the upcoming debate.

On Thursday, Jon Snow, Iain Dale, Peter Riddell and Jason Nisse line up at IFG to discuss where influence lies. 

But one issue they all need to bear in mind is the degree of public scepticism about the media.  The UK is characterised by incredibly low levels of trust in the press and in Parliament and political parties. 

We set out some key facts and figures in a 2010 report.  The basic story – government trusted little; media trusted little too.  And that was before we had phone hacking – and before we had the MPs expenses scandal.  Trust can only have gone in one direction since.  Although the 2011 IPSOS Mori Veracity Index shows that journalists have gone up marginally in the public’s estimation, this is also based on a pre-hackgate survey.

Back in 2008, the UK was lurking at the bottom of the table alongside Berlusconi’s Italy – though they trusted their press more and their politicians less.

But within that there were some intriguing differences:

- Radio was trusted more than television; both were trusted much more than the press;

- Within the press, Guardian and Telegraph readers trusted their papers far more than tabloid readers – even then, 70% of people who bought the Sun didn’t believe what they read in it.

Is the internet the salvation?  Not according to this data – in 2008 levels of trust in the internet were pretty similar to levels of trust in the press – well below broadcast.  But three years is a long time on the internet – so that may have changed.  When we looked at this in 2009 the question was whether social media would help governments bypass the media and communicate directly with citizens.   But although it is now possible to follow @WilliamJHague and @edmiliband, the real power of social media has come in organising opposition to governments and government policies.  In the UK organisations like 38 Degrees have used the internet to mobilise against forest sales; the new national planning framework – and to save the NHS in an unspecified way.  At the same time, the government has unleashed the power of e-petitions.

This sort of one click government allows new and more voices to be heard.  But at the cost of further downgrading the quality of political debate.  Even the nuance of a John Humphreys or Jeremy Paxman interview is missed when I just need to tick on a box to oppose – out of context, with no burden to make a tough trade-off and no responsibility for making a choice between competing unpalatable options.

So the real question for all our panellists on Thursday is not who really matters – but what do we need to change to make our media deserve to matter.

Written by Jill Rutter

 

Jill joined the Institute as a Whitehall secondee in September 2009 and was co-author of the Institute's report on arm's length bodies, Read Before Burning (July 2010). She has also been part of the better policy making project. Before joining the Institute for Government, Jill was Director of Strategy and Sustainable Development at Defra.

Prior to that she worked for BP for six years, following a career in the Treasury, where she was Press Secretary, Private Secretary to the Chief Secretary and Chancellor, as well as working on areas such as tax, local government finance and debt and export finance. She spent two and a half years seconded to the No.10 Policy Unit (1992-94) where she oversaw health, local government and environment issues

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