Following Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday and the on air resignation of Shadow Foreign Minister Stephen Doughty, renewed accusations are doing the rounds claiming BBC bias. One of the most shared blogs I’ve seen regarding this accusation uses a now deleted post by Andrew Alexander to illustrate how the Daily Politics was ‘not reporting news, it’s making it’. But this is once again people misunderstanding, and showing contempt for, the role political journalism has in a healthy democracy.
The role of political journalism has been developing and changing for years and it’s only a recent development that we have constant access and cover of government and parliament. What has never changed however is the political establishment’s contempt for the media’s access to their business and the reporting of it. As Nick Robinson described his role back in 2012:
This may sound as if, for me, political journalism is about catching out, tripping up or embarrassing a politician. It is not. It is, however, about exposing publicly what many know to exist privately: tension between colleagues, policy contradictions or a failure to have thought through a policy clearly. The job I did then and to a large extent still do now, is to identify these problems and seek to bring them to light.
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