24‐hours media

• Published date: 01 March 2003
• Author: Nicholas Jones
• Date: 01 March 2003
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.130

24-hours media

Nicholas Jones

Received: 21st November, 2002

29 Granville Road, Barnet, Herts EN5 4DS, UK; tel: +44 (0)20 8449 3027;

e-mail: Jonespin2@btinternet.com

Nicholas Jones is a high-profile political journal-

ist who appears frequently on BBC television and

radio. He is the author of numerous books, in

which he offers his view on subjects including

government spin-doctors and electoral cam-

paigns. This paper is an edited version of a talk

given in November 2001 at the DLA conference

‘Lobbying in the 21st Century’. These remarks

were made in a personal capacity.

ABSTRACT

Democratically elected governments are having to

respond to an increasingly media-driven society.

The pressures imposed by 24-hour news media are

unrelenting: growing demands for access and in-

formation show no sign of abating. Tony Blair and

his personal spin doctor, the Downing Street

director of communications, Alastair Campbell, are

at the cutting edge in developing media techniques

which seem likely to be tested as never before, as

democracies around the world have to grapple with

astute propagandists like Osama bin Laden.

KEYWORDS: 24-hour news media, spin

doctor, Alastair Campbell

INTRODUCTION

Before we discuss the e-mail nirvana, let us

just look at the problem of those of us, myself

included, who are trying to come to terms

with the demands of the 24-hour news

media. There can hardly be a more oppor-

tune moment to look at the whole question

of the 24-hour news media — we only have

to think of what has happened since 11

September — and I say straight away, as

someone who has written about spin, that

democratically elected governments have

found that they have no alternative but to

come to terms with that 24-hour news

media.

We have only to look at the way in which

America and Britain are now trying to win

the battle of the airwaves, and they have

come up against Osama bin Laden, a skilled

propagandist. We saw that with President

Milosevic during the Kosovo crisis. Bin

Laden understands the language of television

from his perspective because he is commu-

nicating to the Arabs and to many Muslims

around the world. So, democratically elected

governments cannot ignore the pressures

which have been imposed by the 24-hour

news media, and should we ask the question:

is the 24-hour news media beginning to

impose, on Western democracies, pressure

for action and for results, which is actually

beginning to distort democratic decision

making? That certainly is the view of Jack

Straw. He has just said at the weekend that

the extraordinary demands being made by

the 24-hour news media, and their demands

for instant results, are making life into some

sort of Hollywood movie.

So you can see that governments are con-

cerned about it, and one of Straw’s predeces-

sors, Douglas Hurd, made the same point

during the Bosnia war. He criticised the way

in which there was this emergence in the

media of the ‘something-must-be-done’

Page 27

Journal of Public Affairs Volume 3 Number 1

Journal of Public Affairs

Vol. 3 No. 1, 2003, pp. 27–31

&Henry Stewart Publications,

ISSN 1479-1854