What If?

A hypothetical gambit addressed to the good men and women of the press gallery

I am, of course, in no position to lecture anyone on how to do their job, least of all political journalists. Occasionally in the course of my life I have myself been called a journalist, and I generally take it as a term of abuse. I don’t know what it takes to be a member of the press gallery, and I hold no belief that were I thrust into such a position, I would fulfil my duties with anything like satisfactory results.

And yet here I am, providing exactly that lecture which I have already confessed myself unequipped to deliver. Hypocritical? Undoubtedly. Unwise? Certainly. But I feel I must reach out and offer some of what might be loosely termed my wisdom to my brethren on the political beat, just in case it might help them avoid what, in the media game, we call “being utterly and irredeemably awful at your job”.

I issue no demands. I am not here to berate you. I merely proffer some gentle “What-ifs”.

What if, as press gallery journalists, you took a good look at the politicians on whom you report, assessed their personal qualities, their moral fibre, their core values, their devotion to friends and family, their kindness to strangers and favourite hobbies…

And said, “I don’t care about any of that”?

What if, instead, you bethought yourself that the best way to assess a politician’s capability for their job was to assess only those things that are actually relevant to their job?

Or to put it another way, what if you asked the question, “Is the prime minister a good prime minister?” and sought to answer it by the expedient of examining the things he had done in his capacity as prime minister?

What if, in answering that question, you gave no weight at all to whether his kids love him, how he spends his weekends, or whether he was nice to you that time you met him; but gave a LOT of weight to things like, say, the policies he enacted, the laws he helped pass, and the practical actions he took?

What if you went even further than this? What if you not only judged politicians by how they performed their actual jobs, but you also made those judgments on the basis not on how their job performance affected their career prospects, but on how their job performance affected the people they purportedly represent?

What if, in fact, whenever you wrote about, reported on, or analysed a policy from any side of government, you completely ignored as irrelevant the issue of whether it would win or lose votes, and merely provided information to the public as to what the policy meant for them and what impact it would have on their lives?

What if you did all this in spite of politicians’ efforts to make you do otherwise? What if, when a politician’s representatives came to you and asked if you’d like to interview a member of parliament on the subject of family and faith and personal beliefs, you said, “Thanks, but as that has no bearing whatsoever on their job, and my job is restricted to coverage of their carriage of their job, such an article would be a waste of everyone’s time. But if you’d like, I would love to interview your boss on the subject of what they’ve done, what they plan to do, and what that means for the people they claim to be serving.”?

And when a politician did say things to you, what if you didn’t assume in a hundred percent of cases that they must definitely mean what they say, because who ever heard of a dishonest politician? What if, even just occasionally, you allowed the possibility that you’re being lied to to drift across your consciousness?

Let me try to wrap this up in a brief pithy way. What if, as political journalists, you made the decision to pivot to covering what’s actually important and providing a service of some value to your audience?

I’m not saying you should do that. I’m just saying…what if?