The attack of the 'Feral Beast'

Daniel Henninger:

In America, presidents end speeches with, "God bless you." In the U.K. last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair ended a big speech with: "I know it will be rubbished in certain quarters." Mr. Blair's subject was the media.

Rubbished it was.

Simon Jenkins of the Sunday Times smashed a bottle of printer's bile against the wall and dumped the following shards on Mr. Blair's head: Only by "dismantling their footling reputations and hounding them from pillar to post will we ever get a noose round their necks." "They" are the British political class and "we" the British press.

With a few exceptions, the fellows around London's newsrooms averred that the prime minister's criticism was, yes, rubbish. Perhaps the trashing flowed from the talk's most quoted line, that the media today is at times a "feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits."

In my experience, no subject triggers longer conversations around the U.S. now than "the media." People are fascinated by what's happening to newspapers, the role of cable TV and, of course, the Web. Most people I talk to about this are information junkies, a human compulsion that made newspapers possible. They know that technology is bending the information status quo and want to talk about whether the direction of change is for better or worse.

Mr. Blair said his subject was "how politics is reported" in the Internet age. Yes, the British and American media are distinct creatures, but I found Mr. Blair's comments sufficiently provoking on an important subject to warrant an airing here in the U.S.

Deep wells of energy are emptied daily in political or professional life now, says Mr. Blair, "coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points it literally overwhelms. Talk to senior people in virtually any walk of life today--business, military, public services, sport, even charities and voluntary organizations--and they will tell you the same." He says, "Any public service leader . . . will tell you not that they mind the criticism, but they have become totally demoralized by the completely unbalanced nature of it."

Mr. Blair's complaint about balance appears not to be about political bias, the normal media beef of American conservatives. Mr. Blair is a Laborite. Instead, Tony Blair seems to believe the media has become mostly melodrama: "Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grays are almost entirely absent. 'Some good, some bad'; 'some things going right, some going wrong.' These are concepts alien to much of today's reporting. It is a triumph or a disaster. A problem is a crisis. A setback is a policy in tatters."

In place of life's grays, he says, we now get political blood: "Attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to make an error, it has to be venal, conspiratorial. Watergate was a great piece of journalism, but there is a Ph.D. thesis all on its own to examine the consequences for journalism of standing one conspiracy up. What creates cynicism is not mistakes, it is allegations of misconduct."

...

I thought the most interesting reaction to Tony Blair's speech was how quickly the British media moved to prove his point. There is no humility in that crowd. There is plenty of arrogance. It is the combination of arrogance and willful ignorance that makes their feral attacks so unattractive and unpersuasive. They apparently need to ratchet up these characteristics to make their small points. The assumption of venality is also misplaced. President Bush and Tony Blair are not venal characters, but our enemies are and they are rarely ever presented as venal.