Blair’s speech raised a vitally important debate - and he was more right than many of those who have attacked him.

I’ve been trying to work out what I think about Blair’s speech about the media this week. Fundamentally I think a lot of what he says is right - the relationship between politicians and the media is really quite unhelpful, and certainly doesn’t help the British public by allowing intelligent debate about public issues. Bluntly, the media’s approach promotes the image of politicians as charlatans and chancers, when in fact pretty much every single politician, of any party, went into politics because they wanted to contribute to the public debate and improve Britain. This is a travesty (and apart from anything else politics in fact offers very thin pickings for a charlatan or a chancer!).

So this is an important debate. Much of what he said needs to be said and as Steve Richards says, most politicians are for understandable reasons too scared of upsetting the media to say it.

Blair is obviously right that the media world is constantly changing, and that this isn’t necessarily how we expected it would change - for example the role of blogs and “citizen journalism”. But we knew that. In fact one of the fairer criticisms I have heard of the speech was that didn’t contain very much that was new.

Much of the rest of the criticism of it, I found very depressing. It simply confirmed so much of what he had said. Political opponents and the press all leaped in, to argue that Blair had no right to say any of that, because he himself bore a lot of responsibility for corroding the relationship. Blair had of course of acknowledged this in the speech, but made a decent effort to get beyond allocating blame (the media and other politicians are not blameless either) and reflect on some of the broader issues. Other politicians, predictably, attacked him for it because they knew, and Blair explained in his speech, that that’s what they have to do to get covered. Quod erat demonstrandum.

It’s worth reading the full speech, which the Independent actually printed, across the whole of pages 2 and 3 of Wednesday’s paper. The Independent played a bit role in the whole thing because Blair specifically mentioned them as epitomising the conflation between “news” and “views” in much of today’s media (he claimed this betrayed the “independent” origins of their paper). The paper itself got quite upset about that - personally it seemed like a bit of a storm in a teacup to me: Blair’s attack on them seemed a bit odd but not particularly significant - but it did at least get me to buy the Independent on Wednesday. I don’t agree with others such as Stephen Tall who don’t like the Independent: I admire it a lot for having the guts to be a campaigning newspaper and say what it thinks. None of us need yet another channel for telling us the bare facts of a story - what is missing from public debate is not enough discussion, ideas, and views. However I admire the Independent all the more because I can’t quite see how providing this actually helps them sell many papers: my problem with the Indy is that I admire it more than I actually want to read it.

But more broadly on the question of news and views I’m obviously missing something here, because it seems to me the distinction between facts and opinion in newspapers is long gone, if it ever existed. And I don’t see the Independent as the problem but the tabloid newspapers, who “report” “stories” in such ridiculously loaded terms that it manages to persuade the reader that they are reading about an event while actually it is simply the writer recruiting whatever event has happened to promote his previous prejudices.

So I can’t really accept at face value much of the criticism made of Blair’s speech - since I think a lot of it unwittingly in fact supports his argument by trotting out rather pointless and gratuitously oppositionist lines, simply because that’s what the system seems to demand. What struck me was in fact that although it was quite long on analysis (much of it not terribly ground-breaking), it contained very little in the way of prescription (vague comments about the need to review the regulatory framework some time in the future, which got picked up on, don’t count, as far as I’m concerned). It does not seem to me at all unreasonable for a departing Prime Minister, especially one who has as he said played such an important part in these developments, to reflect on some of these issues - indeed, hell, let’s go further and accept that it might actually be quite helpful. The more important point is whether those he leaves behind are also not able to find a solution.