One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily casting about for some dark force to which to attach the blame. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, nameless Russians, an uneducated populus, social media, whatever.
One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of the rise of populism might be the journalists themselves, and the extent to which the once noble aim of impartiality has led to something ridiculous — where almost everyone in authority is treated as a liar.
For the past three decades, Britain has had centrist governments led by mainstream politicians. And in that period, did we find that journalists devoted much airtime and column inches to reporting this as a good thing? We did not.
It is often said that levels of human anxiety have an innate default setting. In other words, if you retire from a stressful job, you will not suddenly become relaxed: instead your anxiety merely finds a new home. In retirement you will become gripped by the paranoid belief that your neighbour is stealing your apples, or that you are being overcharged by the milkman.
In the same way, contemporary political coverage has a default level of negativity. It doesn’t matter what the facts might be, or how reasonable the arguments, you must always present an opposite view in which those same facts are interpreted in a negative light. Unemployment down? It’s because of a growth in low-paid and temporary jobs. Sun shining? Yet more evidence of global warming. The burden of proof journalists set themselves for a bad-news story is remarkably low: one shot of a sad couple on a sofa or an offended comment from some thin-skinned moaner on social media can be eked out into an entire segment on Newsnight.
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