:Fixed Point

Last night, Newsnight featured a story by Guido Fawkes on bloggers vs Establishment News and included an exchange with Paxo, Michael White of the Guardian, and Guido himself (in an rather hilarious attempt at ‘anonymity’) - update here is the interview.
Guido’s believes that major broadcasters pussy-foot around politicians, in order to retain access and exclusive coverage. The result is covered up stories and anodyne reporting from press releases.

I don’t find this convincing at all.

There is an analogy from the business world. Would a major manufacturer, hungry for market share, refuse to supply a retailer? In the uncontroversial case, manufacturers may refuse retailers who don’t give due prominence or support to their product. Parallel imports aside, this is why Armani are fully justified in not selling clothes to Primark. This is rarely a problem because you can get Armani clothes in plenty of other places, and there are plenty of clothes other than Armani at plenty of other shops.

The problem only arises where the manufacturer is dominant in the production of that good, for example if Armani was the main clothes producer, then it could foreclose the market to Gucci by forcing retailers to only stock its product,or insiting on minimum resale prices. The manufacturer tries to minimise interbrand competition and remain dominant.

The key difference of course is the presence of competition in the first case. And this is the case in politics - surely even more ruthless and competitive than the business world. For every Prescott that refuses to speak to the BBC, there are other power-hungry politicans who are only to grateful for obtain market share from their rivals. Similarly, for every poodling BBC that refuses to dish the dirt on overweight and incompetent Lotharios, there is advantage to be gained for broadcasters that aren’t so obsequious. In other words, you can refuse to supply, but you hand your competitors some advantage by doing so.

Of course, there may be a situation where there is an oleaginous equilibrium - a competitive retail and manufacturing market but one characterised by strict delination of products. In politics, the newspaper industry looks like this. But even here, for every Guardian editor that brushes aside interesting gossip on Labour, there’s a Torygraph waiting to publish. And for politicans seeking to gain market share, there is an advantage to speaking through non-favoured outles from time to time because the marginal voter is what matters.

So while there may be period in which some broadcasters toady up to some politicians, competition between politicans and broadcasters ensures the dirt gets dished eventually.

Or in even more simple terms, the politicans need the media more than the media needs them (plenty of sports and celebrity ‘news’ to take up airtime and column inches).