Downing Street Says » PM Lecture

» Tuesday, June 12, 2007

PM Lecture

Asked what the Prime Minister was trying to achieve in his speech today, the PMOS replied that first and foremost the Prime Minister was trying to make an analysis from the vantage point of someone in his unique position of having been at the top for a substantial period of time, and who was coming to the end of his time, and therefore in a position to offer his honest view, popular or not, on what is the problem at the heart of the relationship between media and public life. His analysis was that this is not a problem because of the people involved, it was a problem about the changing context of communication. That changing context was one in which, because of changes in technology that affect us all there was increased competition. This drives the need to make impact more important than factual reporting, and this was distorting the relationship. As the Prime Minister said, he is not out to cast blame, he is out to try and analyse the problem. The Prime Minister believed that there were possible solutions down the road in terms of regulation, because the changing technology also means that the distinction between broadcasters and print journalists, whilst it would not disappear in terms of their respective roles vis-à-vis comment and so on, it made the basic distinction between them increasingly irrelevant. Broadcasters were increasingly going online, so too were print journalists. So they would have different roles, but the platforms would increasingly be the same.

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PM Lecture

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