Media Standards Trust

There was a distinct sound of chomping in the air at last night's 'The Power of the Commentariat' event at the Royal Society of Arts. It was the sound of the press eating itself. A panel of commentators (Simon Jenkins, Suzanne Moore, Daniel Finkelstein et al) commenting on a report written by Editorial Intelligence and the Reuters Institute about the influence of commentators in front of an audience of... commentators.

At least it was - in some cases - self-conscious cannibalism. Simon Jenkins opened by calling the occasion 'impossibly narcissistic', and Suzanne Moore worried about the clash of egos. Still, one couldn't help thinking that, if you're trying to assess the power of media commentators, shouldn't you do it with an audience of those they are supposed to have power over?

Still, despite its incestuousness, the discussion was not without its talking points. Polly Toynbee - from the audience - asking (in all seriousness) how we create an objective measure of the influence of commentators. Simon Jenkins saying, in reference to online debate and comments by the public, "we've unleashed a monster". And Daniel Finkelstein claiming that Paddy Ashdown's proposed appointment as chief administrator in Afghanistan was vetoed by Hamid Karzai due to a column published in a British paper.

Yet no-one raised the central question of whether the 'power of the commentariat' was rising or falling. The assumption implicit in the panel, and within the accompanying pamphlet, is that it is rising. I'd take issue with this. In fact I'd argue the opposite.

If, as Peter Wilby suggested in the Media Guardian on Monday, the power of commentators now comes mainly from their role as the representative voice of their readers - rather than 'because their judgments were thought to have value in themselves' (as in the past) - then as their readers splinter and atomize, so does their influence.

This is borne out by the increasing tendency of commentators - even those previously calm and measured - to shriek and yell to get heard. As Timothy Garton Ash says in the EI/Reuters report "I think it is true that the pressure is to shout louder and louder". Take Anatole Kaletsky, the awfully smart political economist who writes for The Times. In a column about house prices and the economy last month Kaletsky told his readers they 'had better reach for the Book of Revelations to find an appropriate word for Britain's economic prospects in the next year or two'. Isn't there a teensy bit of hyperbole there?

The current position of commentators is, I think, anomalous. They have temporarily filled a gap in the body politic vacated by local and national politicians, unions, and other bodies that developed to represent the public. But commentators' right to that representation is tenuous to say the least. They were not voted in, they have no executive political power. All they have is the power of their pen. As their audiences drop and if they resort to hyperbole to cling onto those that remain, that power will, inevitably, fade.