From cynical to critical: how political parties should view the press

“The truth is, journalism has long struggled with the idea of bias and, through many periods since the founding of the Republic, much of the press has sometimes been openly partisan. ‘Objectivity,’ relatively speaking, is a more recent cultural standard”, writes Jason Grotto in this great Pro Publica piece on journalism in the US. Much of it also applies to Europe.

An antagonists relationship

A sometimes partisan quality press can be a strategic problem for political parties; a tabloid press that submits to one-sided “message control” and does not bite the political hand that feeds it stories and money is not a democratic one. “Flooding the zone with shit,” as Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon put it, only works if someone is there to pick up the pieces floating in the water.

And often politicians, especially populist ones, expect journalists to do just that. “Journalists are the biggest whores on the planet anyway,” said the right-wing former leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, HC Strache (he has since apologised and taken it back). Ironically, his career has followed the German tabloid publisher Mathias Döpfner’s saying that “whoever goes up with us, goes down with us”. 

In short, there is a lot of cynicism among political professionals about journalists and vice versa.