The Hindu : A media farce in two acts

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Thursday, Nov 06, 2003

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A media farce in two acts

By Hasan Suroor

In Britain's competitive media environment, obsessed with personalities, selection and presentation of news is becoming an increasingly arbitrary exercise.

A FARCE is a farce whether played out in the rarefied atmosphere of Westminster or in the digs of a former royal butler, and in recent weeks Britons have had enough of both. A political farce involving the Tories — and guaranteed to make ordinary people even more cynical about politicians than they already are — has been matched by an increasingly farcical royal soap that bounces back into news just when it looks like having run out of steam.

It is a miracle of the present-day media, with an insatiable appetite for news, that a political party unlikely to come back to power for at least another ten years is able to dominate headlines and prime-time bulletins for weeks together; and any old minion from the royal stable with a kiss-and-tell story to peddle acquires a celebrity status overnight. Even as I write this, a leading newspaper is fighting an injunction against publishing an interview with a former royal servant, and there is a flaming row going on involving an ex-voice coach of Princess Diana over the custody of a set of controversial tapes.

But the really big story has centred around Paul Burrell, a former butler of Princess Diana, who famously called him her "rock". He is reported to have been paid £300,000 by a tabloid for serialising his book, "A Royal Duty", which a Times columnist dismissed as "all froth" though that did not prevent the paper from flogging it for days on end. Mr. Burrell has been the toast of the British media for some weeks now with newspapers and television networks, including the venerable BBC, falling over each other to offer Burrell "exclusives".

The Tory/Burrell drama has run head-to-head, often overshadowing more important events. Despite the apparent differences in the two stories, both are driven by a common factor: the media's obsession with celebrity trivia and personalities; and the assumption that that is what a dumbed-down audience wants. In the case of Mr. Burrell it is obviously his Diana connection that has made him, and what he says, newsworthy. The Tory party may not have a Diana to boast of but it has some of Britain's most colourful and controversial figures and their antics provide enough "masala" for news-hungry journalists to dine on.

All pretence that the wall-to-wall coverage of the Tory leadership crisis was anything but farce dressed up as a political story was abandoned when a serious national daily sent its theatre critic to cover the then Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith's address to his party conference! Reports of his subsequent ouster from the leadership read like a thriller complete with talk of "backstabbing", "conspiracies", "plots" and "blood on the floor".

It is important to remember that the Tory crisis started life as "Betsygate", the name given by the press to allegations of financial irregularities involving Mr. Duncan Smith and his wife, Betsy, whom he hired — at Government expense — to be his secretary. The crisis had all the elements of a "sexy" story — sleaze, glamour, shadowy whistle-blowers and an avowed upright political leader allegedly caught with his hands in the official till. It was the sort of story that was destined to acquire "legs", and with a bit of "sexing up" — the new buzzword — it displaced all other national and international news from the front pages, leaving a vast majority of ordinary Britons cold.

Unlike the royal family, which still has some amusement value and, on a good day, gossip about it can sell a few extra newspaper copies, there is little interest in the Tory party outside the Westminster village. Successive opinion polls and surveys have shown that most people do not even know the name of the Tory leader — or care who leads it or what happens to it.

Many Tories themselves are surprised at the amount and kind of media attention they have got in the past few weeks. In a telling comment, Mr. Duncan Smith has said that many of the stories were so far removed from reality that after sometime he started to read newspapers as though he was reading about someone else. "Half of the stories I was reading I just couldn't see myself described in them. There was this sense that I don't quite understand what it's all about," he told the BBC.

In a competitive media environment, especially one obsessed with personalities, selection and presentation of news is becoming an increasingly arbitrary exercise. Add to the Burrell/Tory farce the recent scramble in sections of the London press to predict the gender of Paul and Heather McCartney's new-born baby (a "scoop" by two tabloids claiming that it was a boy went disastrously wrong!) and you have the makings of "new" journalism which, as much as it follows and reports events, also trivialises them. Beware of it.

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