The unholy trinity of hacks, MPs and money
Media and those they hold to account are now the same thing, writes George Pitcher. It's pointless to pretend otherwise
There’s a story that priests love to tell from the pulpit about difficult theology. It goes like this: A lady congregant approaches her bishop after church and asks if he’ll explain to her the doctrine of the Trinity.
“Certainly,” he replies and offers her a sherry back at his palace. After an hour or so, she rises with the words: “Thankyou, Bishop, I understand now.”
In alarm, he reaches for her elbow: “My dear lady,” he says, “if you think you understand the Trinity, then I haven’t explained it properly.”
It’s why clergy try to swerve preaching on Trinity Sunday. It is notoriously difficult to do so without committing one the ancient heresies.
We may not these days risk the stake for using metaphors such as a three-leafed clover, or water taking three forms in steam, liquid and ice. But these images simply won’t do for explaining a single godhead who is one in three and simultaneously three in one.
Temporal matters
Happily, such ideas are far more easily deployed to explain more temporal matters. The worlds of media, politics and business are a case in point. They have sufficiently coalesced during the first decades of this millennium so that they pretty much exist as a single entity with three distinct identities.
We should refrain from calling them a Trinity – far less a Holy one – but they now form a triumvirate of singular power. And it’s pointless to pretend otherwise.
The FT’s excellent Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson recently identified that multinational businesses have not only occupied the socio-economic territory previously owned by politicians, but that this is a development of which we should honestly acknowledge both the danger and the value.
He quotes Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter:
“Everywhere you look, business is currently aiding and abetting a system that has taken away all of the social support systems.”... As more boardrooms pursue social missions far beyond Milton Friedman’s definition of maximising profits, he argues, “business must support a serious long-term plan to build a functional, effective political system”.
This is as true of the mass media and their journalists who hold (or are meant to) commercial and political power to account. It’s pointless to pretend that journalism isn’t owned by business interests that have a particular political agenda to support in their own best interests. It’s simply a question of transparency – we need to recognise its symbiotic relationship within the triumvirate.
We also need to acknowledge journalism’s internal economies. It now requires a commercial model that replaces its old dependence on display and classified advertising. Without that, we don’t have the love-triangle in which the three participants healthily operate.
Business owns media as well as the political space for social provision. Politicians depend on both for their electoral prosperity – just as journalism feeds on politics, while business needs a political economy in which to thrive. They need actively to triangulate in a manner that is accountable and regulated – but not so heavily that their independent abilities to operate are restricted.
Profound implications
This has profound implications for those who seek to operate in the complex relationship at two or more of the points of the triangle. Indeed, it’s arguable that it’s in any case impossible to operate in only a single capacity of the three. And if at once acting in two areas, then the third is a necessary corollary.
The political lobbyist not only has business interests to satisfy but must, rightly, be scrutinised by journalism. The politician needs journalism for electoral promotion, but can’t achieve that by doing to business what the current prime minister suggested he would like to do to it with his stonking-hard Brexit plans. The journalist needs access to both business and politics not just to do her job, but just as vitally to pay for it.
This is a triangulated relationship which arguably has pertained for as long as each of these economic activities has existed. Nevertheless, they have had to pretend otherwise – the journalist to be free of fear or favour; politicians to claim that they never read the papers and don’t need the media in order to play to the gallery and business to claim that it only needs to serve the interests of its shareholders (note here Porter’s now fashionable abandonment of that erstwhile demi-god of free markets, Friedman).
Daily triangulation
It’s as well that all who work within the triangle acknowledge the nature of their daily triangulation, as media, political and corporate economies converge in the urgency and instant transparency of the digital era.
Thank god – if I may use that secular heresy – that we no longer need to pretend that we can have a pious independence within this triangle of power. Our task is rather to square that triangle.
The important conclusion here is that nobody can operate well in one of these areas who doesn’t perform in all three – in that sense of an unholy trinity, we’re all now three in one and one in three. And this at a time when all three institutions are in crisis in terms of the lack of public trust in which they are individually held.
The stool on which a free society sits is three-legged. It is supported by its commercial economy, its politics and its media. Those three legs are currently riddled with the rot and worm of distrust and in danger of collapse. It’s only the quality of those who work there that will provide the necessary treatment and restore them to the condition they need to support the weight of all of us who rely on them.
That means understanding well and intimately just how they triangulate. And if you think you do understand that, then I fear I haven’t explained it properly.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.