Sunday, March 28, 2010

Come On Media, Make Up Your Mind!

A curious set of coincidencies today - I went from the car where a news report was attacking the Tory decision to launch a personal attack on the Prime Minister to the house where ITN were doing the same. Then I clicked on iPlayer to watch Cameron's very impressive performace on the BBC Politics show, only for the questions to be about class, background and being a toff.

Either the media want to talk about personalities or they want to talk about policy. They can't have it both ways!

Or it is a case of when the Tories do it about Labour, it's wrong - but when the media do it about the Tories, it's fine?

(By the way - call that a personal attack? I don't think so! Each posters had a policy message - negative, yes, personal, no.)

1 comment:

Alistair Oakley said...

It seems simple to me. The media want to talk about personalities because they feel it makes better reading/viewing listening. However politicians need to be speaking about policies not personalities. You can't argue that this latest poster says anything about Conservative policy. It's an attack ad, pure and simple, and the fact that the Conservatives are resorting to these tactics so early is a concern.

As for the class issue, surely it's understandable that people would be concerned about how unrepresentative the Parliamentary Conservative Party is as a whole? When the four most senior Conservative politicians in the country have personal fortunes sitting in the millions, surely they're less able to relate to people struggling to get by? I'm not saying it's a decisive issue, but it shouldbe discussed at least.