Corbyn misses the point when it comes to Scotland’s media
PERHAPS there was a Camelot era for Scottish journalists when they walked tall in society and doors were opened with a swift flourish of their laminated yellow NUJ Press card. My generation of journalists like to think we saw out the last of those days when you could bank your expenses in a separate account that took care of holidays and soft furnishings so that your main earnings could be free to pay for the roof over your head and the bar tab we deployed for the endless task of maintaining contacts. I’m not saying that journalists could have been regarded as pillars of society fighting off invitations to join school boards and open flower shows but they were accorded a degree of respect tinged with fear.
This was rooted in an acknowledgement that the newspaper game was a difficult one to enter (more so if the school you attended was named after a saint) and that you had access to privileged information and the secrets and lies of politicians and celebrities. In the West of Scotland you were assumed to have mastered the ability to retain and recall information even after a potentially life-changing quantum of alcohol. We didn’t really know much about anything in particular but we knew a little about a lot and often that was just enough to persuade your lay friends and acquaintances that you were a polymath and a true lad o’ pairts.
There were good reasons why in England especially journalists were considered to be ideal fodder for Britain’s intelligence services: they seemed to move effortlessly among the salons of captains and kings without ever being considered members; they thrived on conspiracies and were artful in the ways of extracting information from reluctant witnesses. It was well-known that the big English newspaper titles offered a means of decent employment for the ‘difficult’ offspring of the aristocracy who were not considered to possess sufficient backbone for an officer career in the armed forces or the Conservative Party.
Rarely though, were newspaper journalists ever called to account for the opinions they offered and the stories they spun. The single letters page that existed in a newspaper was the exclusive preserve of retired teachers and military historians; epistles critical of individual journalists were routinely spiked. In Scotland in 2018 the output of journalists, especially those who report on politics or football, are scrutinised and analysed to an extent unimaginable less than a generation ago.
Few of us can have any complaints. We are paid decently for the privilege of airing our grievances and indulging our preferences. Rarely do we stop to consider the effect our words can have on the targets of our prose and their families and when we do, we all too often reach for the “public interest” justification; a concept that possesses an astonishing measure of elasticity.
The last decade or so has borne witness to the most turbulent and dramatic period in modern Scotland’s political and constitutional history. The independence campaign will continue until another referendum and our relationship with Europe, which is also woven into the constitutional debate, will shape our economy and politics for another generation. Since 2005 there have been three Holyrood elections; four UK elections, an independence referendum and a plebiscite on our membership of the European Union. It seems we are never far away from an election that will be “the most important” of modern times.
In another age newspapers would have increased pagination and staff numbers to cover these adequately; in Scotland there has been a decrease in both. Into this huge deficit have come the tribunes of social media such as Wings Over Scotland, Bella Caledonia and an army of Twitter-users. In the mainstream media we harangue them and dismiss them for not playing to the long-accepted rules and conventions of form and language established by the newspaper elites over two centuries.
Jeremy Corbyn ventured into newspaper and media territory with his Alternative Mctaggart lecture this week. The leader of the opposition at Westminster made some salient points about our industry, although they might have carried more impact if he had agreed to answer some simple questions about his party’s failure in the last two years to construct a viable position on Brexit. Your primary obligation, Mr Corbyn is to oppose the main policies of the government of the day. For those of us who work in the Scottish media industry, though, his words carried little worth. As ever in these types of lectures this one was about another country and a different reality.
It occurred at a time when questions over the impartiality of the BBC on issues pertaining to Scottish independence have emerged once more. On the same day the corporation was forced into an embarrassing apology for its lop-sided interpretation of the latest GERS numbers. This came a few weeks after its bosses in London decided to have a tilt at the Youtube accounts of two prominent and influential independence bloggers. In addressing the BBC’S anointed and ridiculously protected and subsidised role in our national life Mr Corbyn failed to discuss the impact of its publicly-funded website on Scotland’s local newspaper sector. And when he talked about the narrow pattern of ownership among the UK’S biggest newspaper titles he stopped short of discussing the common thread that links them to the BBC: the hugely disproportionate numbers of privatelyeducated Oxbridge graduates who occupy their most influential positions.
When the second referendum on Scottish independence eventually happens, scrutiny of the conduct of our newspapers and broadcasters will eclipse that of the first one. Unionist supporters will seek to dismiss this as evidence of nastiness and division in Scottish society when they know it is nothing of the sort. Some of those on the Nationalist side of the debate will look for phantoms that don’t exist either, especially in the corridors of BBC Scotland. They need to exercise caution here. Aristocratic, Conservative and right-wing ownership of most of our national titles has existed for more than a century and in that time few financially viable proposals have emerged to dilute those interests.
By all means highlight whenever possible those instances when the bias of the owners is manifest. Campaigns to boycott the BBC or to intimidate journalists on social media, though, are not a good look to that crucial six per cent of the population who require to be persuaded that an independent Scotland is not a merciless place.
Questions over the impartiality of the BBC on issues pertaining to independence have emerged once more