Democracy detached from the people

The title of this book comes from the so-called “three-fingered salute” — the magical quick fix we all have at times used to reboot a “hung” computer. Tom Baldwin invokes it as a metaphor to fix the crisis in liberal democracy, which he says needs an immediate “soft reboot” before it is too late. There are too many forces both on the Left and the Right, he warns, itching to “press delete on democracy altogether”.

He blames the current crisis on two of liberal democracy’s key pillars — the media and the political class — that, he argues, are engaged in a cynical battle for the control of news agenda and busy creating unashamedly partisan alternative realities (aka fake news) at the expense of public trust and democratic institutions. The crisis, according to him, didn’t start with “Russian trolls, Facebook news feeds, or the sinister manipulation of big data” but is the result of “an abusive thirty-year relationship between politics, the media, and a new Information age”.

While the book’s focus is on western democracies, it will resonate in India where a worrying trend towards undermining democratic institutions and values is emerging alongside attempts to start spurious culture wars. And, as in the West, sections of the Indian media are complicit in this. Notably, India is cited in this and other recent books on the subject as among the countries where the rise of “strong” and right-wing nationalistic leaders has put democracy in danger. This year’s annual report of the American think-tank, Freedom House, puts India on a list of 71 countries, with Hungary, Turkey, Poland and Egypt, where democracy is in deep crisis.

Mr Baldwin is not an ivory tower academic but a hands-on professional who straddles the media-politics divide and has watched from close quarters how the two sides manipulate each other in the scramble to control the agenda. A former senior British journalist (political editor of The Sunday Telegraph and Washington bureau chief of The Times), he switched sides in 2011 to become the then Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s communications chief and oversaw his disastrous 2015 general election campaign. This gave him the opportunity to observe the media from the other end of the spectrum. And what he discovered made him not a little ashamed of his former trade and colleagues: A “puffed up” and self-important bunch less interested in issues or policies and more in Whitehall gossip that would get them on the front page the next morning. Some of the biggest names in British journalism made their reputation by spinning sensational “exclusives” out of wafer-thin facts. His own first big scoop, he admits, was based on a bare “non-denial” by a heavily inebriated source.

Boris Johnson, who aspires to be Britain’s next prime minister, was sacked from The Times for fabricating a quote. But this didn’t discourage him, and later as The Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, he turned fake news into an art form. With the encouragement of his bosses in London, he took it upon himself to subvert the European Union project with negative stories — sowing the seeds of Euro-scepticism. And Brexit.

“Boris was a prime proponent of what people now call fake news. He would pick on one tiny thing and blow it up out of all proportion to serve the agenda of The Telegraph,” one EU official told Mr Baldwin.

Mr Baldwin also discovered that while both the media and politicians claim to speak for the people, neither has any connection with real people. No wonder, neither anticipated three of this decade’s most dramatic events: Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the jaw-dropping revival of the Labour Party, which has brought the once “unelectable” Jeremy Corbyn to within sniffing distance of Downing Street.

Mr Baldwin writes: “Imagine being a weather forecaster and getting it wrong. Not just a bit wrong — like predicting it will be a sunny day and finding yourself caught in showers — but wrong, wrong, wrong. So badly wrong, so catastrophically wrong, that people get stuck in snow blizzards and families freeze to death in their cars. This is how much of the media and politics have felt after getting it wrong over and over again these last few years.”

This is how serious the disconnect is between the media and politics on the one hand and the people they presume to write about or represent on the other. Is it any surprise, then, that the public interest in these two foundational pillars of democracy is at an all-time low and people are willing to believe anyone but mainstream media and political class. Hence the rise of “authentic” far Right and far Left populists; hence Brexit, Trump and Corbyn. And the popularity of new “alt-right” and “alt-left” channels of information.

Of late, there has been a spate of academic books on democracy’s existential crisis. This is the first mea culpa from the heart of the crime scene, as it were, and deserves attention.

CTRL ALT DELETE

How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy

Tom Baldwin

Hurst & Company

371 pages; £20