While much of the hullabaloo over twitter and the tendency of its users to flout injunctions obtained by the rich and famous to hide affairs has passed by with a singular lack of venting from this direction, my ire was roused by a report in the recent edition of the Private Eye.
The passage in Rotten Boroughs covered the case of a teenager, sufficiently agitated by the lack of activity in his town in Cheshire, who subsequently ran for office in the local council, and won with the notion of building a skate park. His gesture and enthusiasm were annulled within a week, reportedly by a campaign against the range of links covered on his facebook page, which might ‘cause offence’. The Eye concluded that a combination of establishment bitterness and lazy journalism was to blame, but I thought there was also something bigger at play.
What strikes me is that there is a dehumanisation of politicians and famous people. It’s almost as if we expect them to behave in a perfect way – as defined by the spectator. The false outrage and moral finger wagging that occurs when someone has an affair is risibly hypocritical and fundamentally destructive.
It’s also pretty dispiriting, and while the line has to be drawn at criminal activity there is often a reluctance to acknowledge human flaws. When a politician changes a decision, it is a ‘humiliating u-turn’, when they makes mistakes they are derided, even if they admit to it, and when have affairs they are bathed in moral spittle.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem if it didn’t change the way that politicians behave – and all the noise and fury over injunctions is only there because there’s an unwillingness to accept people are flawed. The reaction in France, for example, to the stories about Dominique Strauss – Kahn has been mixed – not so much on the guilt or otherwise but a shift from a shrug as default response to philandering sleaze.
And if you take it away from sex and look to serious policy – you could look at the ‘war on drugs’, say, or immigration for example, or prostitution, where politicians delicately trot around the hectoring tone of the Daily Mail. An article in the Graun highlights the former, Richard Branson joining the fold.
And surely this fundamentally reduces the ability of the government to pull through genuinely transformative and positive policy making?
June 6, 2011 at 22:24 |
In New Zealand, John Key works by commissioning a report by”experts” and then seeing how it plays before commenting on the result. This way if the general view is thumbs down it was never official policy. Thumbs up and he gets interested. Maybe a bit cowardly – but kinda demomcratic.
June 7, 2011 at 22:00 |
Not so sure about that – because the media’s hardly a democratic mouthpiece, and it’s hardly particularly strong in NZ. Sure, get feedback by all means, but angling it through the lens of the media is just going to distort it to their agenda, surely?
June 9, 2011 at 11:34 |
“The media” is not a thing. Besides the usual suspects, bloggers, pressure groups, party members in constituencies all join in into any debate and a consensus can build despite the Daily Mail.