Media, government relationship one of suspicion not seduction

JOURNALISTS and politicians have a fatal attraction of the bunny boiling variety.

For those not old enough to remember the movie Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close is a beautiful but discarded one night stand. She stalks her married former lover obsessively, breaks into his house and boils the family bunny rabbit in a cooking pot. Fatal Attraction is only a movie; journalists and politicians are real life people. They have a mutually obsessive, incestuous, and dysfunctional relationship.

To do justice to the reputation of all concerned, the affair between the media and this Government was no one night stand. It was a longer and more intense affair, formed amidst a horrific political blitz in the bomb shelters of economic crisis. Who wouldn’t have huddled together in that barrage of events? Now alas, above ground what looked beautiful by torch light is less appealing in day light. And the pity is that the ardour that is quickly dissipating was so long in coming. The long lonely nights of opposition were until their electoral climax very nearly unrequited love. The most unlovely of governments get more attention than any alternative proposition.

But government attracts the media’s gaze for a purpose. The relationship is one of suspicion not seduction. The Fourth Estate is an extra-constitutional chamber of professed disbelievers. They cut through honeyed words of sanctimony with vinegar.

And words are the common currency of politics and the press. The exchange of gossip or fact, in the alchemy of reporting, transfigures its source with fame. Politicians are talkers by vocation. Rhetoric is still the elixir of political life, of ideas and of power. If few politicians are great orators in the classical mould, most are great talkers in the Irish style. Leinster House is a school of chat and bluster on a Homeric scale. It is impossible to walk a corridor and not be assailed by at least one improbable story.

Impelled to talk and avid for publicity, the oxygen of public life, politicians find the interest of journalists compelling. Journalists who are journeymen historians are in a constant chase for stories. In the modern 24 hour news cycle few stories last a full day and even great ones evaporate after a few. The quest for the next and the new keeps journalists running and usually running behind. They are news hounds trapped in a circle of hell where the quarry is seldom caught, rarely worth eating and never filling for more than a day or two.

Yet if the pack in full flight can be extremely frightening; it is full of beagles that on their own may choose to be beguiling. Journalists have an armoury of arts to elicit information. Flattering the ego of a source, implying they know already, posing as the uniquely understanding medium who can sensitively explain the improbable to another wise incredulous public are just some of the persuasive arts. It is the journalist who will capture as best they can ephemeral facts and in the act of reporting transform them into the story. They represent both a power and powerlessness.

To the politician, journalists represent the power of the medium. They have the awful power to ignore you or of attacking in attending to you. The shared desire to procreate stories is complicated by the myriad of personal relationships that are lovingly constructed and as ruthlessly destroyed in the chase for those stories and for fame. It is not for nothing that the word fame is derived from the Roman Goddess Fama, the spreader of rumours and of lies. Journalists are in part dispensers of heavenly retribution on the vainglorious.

But the potency of the press is also powerlessness. It is usually the politician, especially in government, who knows if not the whole story, then at least a lot more of it. It is the politician much more than the journalist who has the power to make a new story. The journalist as the word suggests has to do with the everyday. The fate of most journalism is like fashion gone as soon as it succeeds.

So to prolong the lifespan of their work journalists seek to reincarnate as columnists. This is the phemaldehyde of the scribe. Properly described as a “rancid embalming fluid”, it is also self-injected by decaying politicians and occasionally like me, their former advisers.

Bottom kissing Baldricks to their Minister’s Blackadder and creatures neither of the day or the night, advisers are the loathed spin doctors of lore. Their accursed necessity to both journalists and politicians is a main cause for their being the object of scorn and spite. In the interests of opaqueness, hypocrisy and dishonesty I am secluding them from view beneath the veil of this analysis.

It is in the opinion column that journalists and their tawdry impersonators can hire their anger. There they become, if only for a moment, agenda makers. The columnist escapes from the other Dickensian orphans, their cold noses pressed against the outside of the frosted glass window. Newly enlarged and frequently enraged opinion writers are free to give vent to a manic morality. They manure popular sentiment and sets standards that nobody can possibly live up to.

In the newspaper column an illusionary power is almost beyond reproof. It is this power seemingly seldom to be pulled part or publicly humiliated that so angers and embitters the politician. They feel belittled that the unelected can enjoy a platform apparently larger and grander than any seat on the backbenches and perhaps a few higher up too.

In passing on and parsing the story journalists and columnists, politicians feel, always leave something out, never get it quite right and sometimes get it wilfully wrong. That hack that only days or even hours ago was supping and simpering in their company has now dipped a vulture’s quill in venom and maliciously mistranslated the beautifully nuanced half truths they have just been told. Only a certified idiot or a reckless adventurer would ever tell a journalist a deliberate lie.

The intense disappointment and falling out of love that comes between every politician and the journalist he befriends is part of each politician’s progress. The moth is drawn most intensely to the flame when aspiring to greatness only to become singed in office. The journalist, once the companion of easy familiarity, becomes an object of suspicion. Clever politicians mask that unease, and seldom admit to anger or care. They pretend not to notice or to be indifferent to the attacks that have replaced what once passed if not for adulation then at least publicity. But even the clever ones feel it.

Our Government already feels embattled by a media that is armed with what Pat Rabbitte called “corrosive cynicism”. But in truth, even on days when it can’t compose a poker face or hold a steady hand, the Government holds nearly all the trump cards. You can sense that ministers, with a lot of ballast like Michael Noonan know that and nobody has trumped the chutzpah of Joan Burton. In the vortex caused by the modern explosion of information and implosion of authority, government is still an essential point of public reference. And even when there is more vinegar than honey, the worst day in government is better than the best day in opposition. Far worse than corrosive cynicism, is indifference. That is death.