Wordblog

Tony Blair’s speech a week ago in which he attacked the "feral" media fills much of the media pages today with Peter Wilby commenting in the Guardian, and Steven Glover in the Independent.

Wilby says the political pack are a bunch of "pussycats" while Glover sees journalists as "lapdogs".

A more distant view is expressed in an Independent story including an interview with Bob Worcester, the pollster, who is a broad member of the Media Standards Trust, set up to encourage higher standards.

Worcester complains that Blair’s speech was "long on diagnosis and short on prescription". It was, he said, "the height of hypocrisy from the man who employed Peter Mandelson, the architect of spin and manipulation".

He said:

Instead of having benign proprietors, who believed in letting their editors have high standards, you have constant pressure from the money men. This is true not just in the media but in the City and generally in society. The accountants don’t have control but they have authority, they are given power in a way that Harry Evans, when he was editor of The Sunday Times, would not have countenanced.

From his polling background Worcester produces some figures. In 1993 a Mori poll found only 10% of respondents believed journalists told the truth but last year the figure was 19%. "I personally think it’s getting worse but the public don’t think its getting worse, though they never thought it was very good in the first place," he commented.

Worcester also points out that penetration of the internet is slowing and suggests media professionals have little idea that only six out of 10 Britons were connected to the web at the end of last year (National Statistics).

"The trajectory was much steeper. It means that it’s going to be a long time before the forecast that newspapers are dead comes true, if ever," he said.