Journalists are being caught in the coronavirus culture wars

The public appears to be rallying round its leaders, and turning against its media, says Sean O’Grady

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, takes a question from ITV’s Robert Peston (AFP)

There have been a few opinion polls recently that deserve to be taken seriously, and which should give journalists pause for thought. Or rather further pause for reflection, as some patterns have been clear for a while. On the one hand, there is a clear vote of confidence by the public and support for the government’s handling of the coronavirus. The Conservative party’s ratings and those of the prime minister are also remarkably high. They have been slipping very slightly, and could quite conceivably turn ugly, but for now the British, like others, are tending to “rally round” their leaders.

On the other hand, the public doesn’t rate the media quite as highly, I’m sorry to say. Different media score more or less well (so newspapers are less trusted than broadcasters), as do different titles, but there is some dissonance between what the public is reading and watching, and what they are thinking.

One key to all of this is, I’m sorry to say Brexit. Those who trust the government and believe that journalists are “misjudging the public mood”, or some such, tend to be Leavers; the reverse is true of Remainers. This accords with common sense and the essence of responsible journalism, which is to report on, ask questions of and investigate those in positions of power. At the moment it’s a Tory Brexiteer government, so those asking the challenging questions and writing up the insider stories are thought to be anti-Boris, biased, fake or corrupt. If Labour were in power, or some phantasmagoric global elite, would the press give them any easier a time over, say, the shortage of PPE?

What we are witnessing as journalists is the media being caught up in Britain’s unending culture wars; or, more accurately, caught rather badly in the crossfire. It is as depressing as it is bewildering that those on both sides of these battles – populist right versus populist left – like to disparage reporting of inconvenient stories as fakery by “the mainstream media” – MSM.

The recent Sunday Times account of the dithering in Downing Street is a case in point. The story was attacked by one, pro-Johnson side for being either wrong or ill-motivated or irrelevant – but a Murdoch paper can find few allies on the progressive wing of society to defend it. Our culture wars are fought by the two tribes across many overlapping fronts: Brexit, Meghan, migration, Trump, globalisation, the media itself, even Covid-19. Everything is bitter and politicised; it’s exhausting.

The only bias journalists actually have, or should have, is towards the truth. Of course we have a partisan press, but – as social media and opinion polls show – we also have a highly partisan public.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor