22/12/2015
It may be transparently obvious when you think about it, but to me it is in some sense an epiphany â the realisation that the legacy media are not going to improve their reporting on the EU because they don't believe they are doing anything wrong.
And now we have it in spades, as the media pile into their "
Tory splits" meme. Trilling about "civil war" in the Conservative Party buts them slap bang in the centre of their comfort zone.
This is a space they will occupy to the exclusion of all else as it saves them the trouble of trying to understand the intricacies of the referendum and the complex interweaving of British and European politics, where they are totally out of their depths.
This makes the extensive and consistent failure of the media part of the referendum story. It has long been held by any number of authorities that a free press is an essential requirement for a functioning democracy and thus, where the media are entirely dysfunctional, that must reflect on the quality of the debate and the way the issues are understood (or not).
But it seems to me also that newspaper readers (and especially online commenters) can't entirely walk away from any responsibility. Occasionally, in the line of duty, I am required to look in on the
Telegraph comments, only to find that it is an extremely unpleasant place to be.
Most significantly, though, what strikes one is the inability of most commenters to stay on-topic. There may be a thousand or more comments on any one article, but one can often count the number which actually address the subject of the article on the fingers of one hand. Not uncommonly, it is evident that commenters have not even read the article, displaying that ignorance by the way they write.
In that sense, these are not "comments". They function more like online chat rooms, affording an opportunity to sound off in a general way about the subject in question, the end product usually being the low drone of ignorant prejudice which conspires to inhibit learning and understanding.
This is actually a great pity because it legitimises the tendency of media writers to ignore their own comments. If all they have to offer is this low-grade drone, then there no more point in wading through the mire than there is on dwelling on the contents of a cesspool in the back garden.
For all that, though, this is also the media's fault. It is an unfortunate fact of life that these comments need moderating at two particular levels â one to remove the ugly
ad hominems that descends into profanity and the personal criticisms that are entirely unrelated to the matter at hand.
In that context, the greatest sin of all is, apart from the occasional diversion, that tendency for comments to veer off-topic and to stay off topic. And that boils down to moderation. Done properly, culling of the comments will not remove criticisms of the pieces â or even of their authors â but they will clean out the irrelevances and allow the readers to focus on the issue at hand.
An excellent example of this is the current article by
Matthew Goodwin, offering an analysis of the current polls on the referendum and, in his own inimitable style, pontificating about the prospects for the campaigns.
What is highly relevant to any predictive work by Goodwin, however, is that there are few professional pundits who have been so consistently and spectacularly wrong in the areas of his supposed expertise. Picking up his
many errors is like
picking legs off flies.
Another highly relevant point is that opinion polls are very poor predictors of political referendums, and especially where â as in this case â a "renegotiation" is in progress, which can profoundly change the perception of the offer. To predict possible outcomes from current data, therefore, is seriously to mislead.
However, if the newspaper insists on employing a tarnished pundit, to offer useless analyses â and thereby lacks any self-critical capacity âit falls to the readers to make the necessary points. But, of well over two thousand comments on the piece, I doubt whether even a handful actually address the issue. Any attempt to do so would simply be lost in the swamp.
And there is the crucial point. There is little use in complaining that we do not have power, when we do not use the power we have. Hunting as a pack, readers could drive low-grade pundits such as Goodwin from the media â making them the laughing stock that they deserve.
Instead, we get unfocused self-indulgence which pollutes the website and which can be safely ignored â and is best ignored as it does the "leaver" cause no favours at all.
