Sam McBride: If democracy is to survive, we need more good politicians – and more good journalism; but both are in trouble

There are insufficient moments in life for reflection, but for me this is one because whatever follows will be my final News Letter article.

Almost 14 years ago, I arrived in the newsroom of the oldest continuously-published English language daily newspaper in the world as an inexperienced reporter; 18 months later I was put in charge of covering politics.

Since then there have been more than 3,600 editions of the News Letter, I have written more than two million words, the internet has transformed journalism, and every major Stormont party has changed leader.

The centrality of good journalism to democracy is more clear to me now than it was in 2007.

If democracy means anything, it involves us as the public — whether rich or poor and regardless of any other aspect of our lives — being in charge; we put in place rulers and remove them as we see fit.

The only way in which most people can make informed decisions about how our chosen rulers have performed is through journalism.

Few voters can follow the proceedings in parliament, devolved assemblies, and council meetings; fewer still can read the thousands of pages of government publications, often slipped out quietly when their contents are embarrassing, which reveal how power has been wielded in their name.

Armies of professional spin doctors work to cleverly disguise the bad news; the more unscrupulous simply lie about it (you know who you are).

Those in power have the inbuilt advantage of patronage, and the financial clout derived from control over vast budgets of public money – that is, our money.

Journalism has many flaws, but if democracy survives as a meaningful concept it will be because there is more good journalism which reveals and explains, and less sensationalist clickbait or lazy regurgitation of press releases.

In Northern Ireland, democracy faces two additional problems; one is ancient, the other modern.

The first problem is tribalism. The orange and green divide protects the feckless and incompetent from what ought to be the democratic sanction for their behaviour.

Many voters believe that Politician X may be a scoundrel – but at least he’s our scoundrel; if we don’t vote for him then the other side might win the seat.

The second problem is the contraction of journalism. In my time at the News Letter, the number of journalists has roughly halved – as it has in many other newspapers.

That is not quite as bad as it sounds because technology allows us to be more efficient.

But there are inescapable consequences to staffing falling so sharply. It is much harder to do the sort of in-depth journalism which was possible when I arrived in 2007.

It is not only newspapers which face challenges. UTV has in that time seen a deluge of experience depart. Only the BBC retains vast journalistic resources, but even that is coming under pressure.

There is a reason why in a coup the TV studios are quickly invaded and that dictators suppress independent newspapers. Knowledge is power; kept in the hands of the few it adds to their control.

The journalists once described by the late Ian Paisley as “whirring multitudes of pestiferous scribbling rodents” who were “perilous as vipers” no longer exist in numbers akin to vermin.

That alarms some thoughtful politicians and civil servants who can see where unchecked power leads. But others relish unaccountability.

Power does not always corrupt. But its corrupting temptation is magnified in the absence of scrutiny.

Who among us would, day after day, year after year, never dip our hand into a large bag of money if we knew it was never counted and no one ever looked? When morality fails, scrutiny is a powerful deterrent.

Robert Caro, the great American chronicler of how power is seized and deployed in a modern democracy, has said that “regard for power means disregard for those without power”.

Dipping a hand into that bag of money is indirectly taking from someone who desperately needs an operation, or a roof over their heads, or support for their severely disabled son.

At its best, journalism simplifies complex developments so that they can be easily understood and holds power to account on behalf of the powerless; at its worst, it preys on the powerless.

As journalists, we have power and must be held to account. The strengthening of Ipso – which provides a free means of complaining to an independent investigator about anything which I write – in the wake of the phone hacking scandal was overdue and in the public interest.

But even when journalists are not themselves acting reprehensibly, we can easily be distracted by the colourful or by our preponderance to move as a herd.

Indeed, apparently serious public interest journalism can be fluff. A supposed exposé about the government spending £5 million on something which sounds questionable may indeed be an important story.

But just as easily it could be an advertisement of the reporter’s ignorance. Has the cost actually fallen dramatically? Is the apparently unnecessary item actually crucial to an important process? I wince at the knowledge that I’ve written such stuff.

Not everything is a scandal. If we present the mundane as lurid, then the truly lurid becomes mundane.

In my early years in journalism many well-meaning older colleagues advised me to consider other careers because the trade was dying.

My time at this newspaper has coincided with a period of existential threat to the future of newspapers, with falling sales across most of the western world and myriad failed strategies to bring in from the new frontier of the internet the money necessary to sustain journalism.

Last year everyone at JPIMedia, which then owned the News Letter, took a temporary salary cut as we entered lockdown because advertising and sales collapsed. Both have partially recovered, but the last year has also seen the greatest hope for a sustainable future for journalism.

The pandemic drove dramatic behavioural change; suddenly far larger numbers of people are prepared to pay for news, probably driven by a mixture of the convenience (and far cheaper cost) of online subscriptions and a realisation that newspapers will only survive if they are economically viable.

But the internet has also meant an acceleration of news in the 21st century – we can forget what was reported last week, let alone a few years ago.

In that process we risk making more mistakes and getting caught on a treadmill of breaking news, without the time to consider or investigate an issue with the benefit of time for reflection.

Looking back over the last 14 years, I have seen the best and the worst of politicians and our political system. There are politicians who are dastards; people who ought to be in jail. The libel laws prevent me from further expanding on that cohort of crooks.

But there are honourable politicians who believe in public service; people who in some cases have given up bigger salaries to argue for their vision of how society can be improved.

They are overwhelmingly lumped in with the scoundrels and held in low esteem by the public while constantly facing the possibility of unemployment.

You might think that – within the bounds of the libel laws – journalists should do more to steer readers towards those we believe to be good politicians. To a certain extent, we can do that – mainly by uncovering and printing hidden truths.

But there are two problems in doing so: First, journalists are not best placed to know the full truth. At best, we see through a glass darkly; the person we think is noble may actually be a rogue.

But more profoundly, it should not be the role of reporters to tell the public the candidates for whom they should vote. That makes us democratic gatekeepers, and gives us power we should never have.

Without the good politicians, democracy would die. Yet there is an insidious public perception that “they’re all the same”, something which deepened with the Westminster expenses scandal.

Being sceptical is healthy: asking questions, living with curiosity, and probing what we are being told. In a Stormont system where only six of the 90 MLAs are not in governing parties, scepticism is uniquely important because the government is scrutinising the government. It is a system ripe for groupthink and worse.

In any walk of life, asking awkward questions is central to refining arguments, to testing positions, and to uncovering the worst behaviour.

But beyond scepticism is cynicism. Being cynical is part of the problem for multiple reasons, but most obviously because if everything is irredeemably broken, why are any of us bothering to highlight it or suggest solutions?

Northern Ireland does not have the suffocating corruption of Nigeria, but if we believe it does then when corruption is exposed it will be met with a shrug.

Lyndon Johnson once wryly remarked: “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read ‘President Can’t Swim’.”

It is understandable that scrutiny can to the scrutinised seem to be simply relentless negativity. But readers need to understand that the absence of ‘politician does good job’ headlines does not mean that all politicians are hopeless – just as the absence of ‘Joe Bloggs travelled to work safely in his car’ headlines means that everyone who gets into a car crashes.

The nature of news is that it is – as the word suggests – new; it is an aberration which ought to concern us.

I stumbled into political journalism; my family are apolitical and I applied for this job after working closely with my predecessor Stephen Dempster and the then news editor Ben Lowry on political stories.

This was a land for which I had not been searching but, having found political journalism it became a happy home.

Successive editors gave me remarkable freedom. This newspaper has a staunchly unionist stance but I never saw my role as that of propagandist. What I wrote was often uncomfortable for the unionist parties, but it was the truth.

Tickling the ears of politicians or readers with pleasant lies is not only morally wrong, but counterproductive; at some point they will realise the truth, but by then it may be too late to avert catastrophe.

The world we inhabit would in some ways be incomprehensible to Francis Joy who started the News Letter above the sign of the peacock in Joy’s Entry in 1737. But in others, it would be familiar – humanity’s capacity for heroism and depravity endure.

This job has taken me to Helmand during the Afghan war, to see the Pope address the European Parliament in Strasbourg, to universities and newspapers in Boston and Washington and to far too many riots on the streets of Northern Ireland.

I will always maintain affection for a paper which I remember my father reading on the farm and for which I have been privileged to write.

I never really regarded myself as being employed by Century Newspapers or Johnston Press or JPI Media or National World, but by you the readers.

Without readers, none of this would be written.

For that I thank you sincerely.

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