Press vs politicians, who is more in touch with the public?
I recently attended an interesting debate in the House of Commons with the motion ‘the press are more in touch with the public than politicians’.
Ian Reeves and Celia Duncan (Press Gazette and CosmoGirl respectively) debated against George Galloway and Peter Bottomley for the motion. Given the increasing interactivity between the public and the media I found this a particularly interesting issue.
The Ministers argued that they are elected by the people, for the people and therefore more in touch the public; however, we make decisions about what media to use/buy everyday, making it immediately accountable. The underpinning argument from the Ministers seemed to be that they hold a drop-in centre once a week for constituents.
I have never written to my local MP, let alone attended a drop-in session, I have, however, left comments on newspaper websites and even in my darkest days (I admit somewhat ashamedly) voted on a reality TV show!
I do however, vote in every election, which is not necessarily typical of my age-group and feel that MPs are ultimately responsible to the electorate. Given the rapid changes in technology and the fact that anyone and everyone can now have their own soapbox so to speak I think it is time politicians got up to speed.
Trials were carried out for e-voting and text voting in 2003 and I think that such methods have to be championed in order to get the younger generation out and voting; especially when you consider a survey conducted just before the last election, where fewer than 42 per cent of eligible first-time voters thought they would vote, yet 46 per cent had already voted for contestants in shows such as Big Brother and Pop Idol.
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I think the gap between politicians and the public is quite scary and it’s increasingly growing. My opinion is the media are much more in touch with the public as opposed to politicians.
The media deal with regular people all of the time. Be it for interviews, vox pops, investigations and the like. It seems (and this is just my view) that politicians only come in to contact with real people when there’s a photo opportunity there. Am I the only person who thinks this? I doubt it.
However, my opinion has been changed slightly since working at Edelman. Talking to people like Luke and Jamie actually restored my opinion that some people who work in politics do it because they actually want to make things better for people.