Standing out in the crowd

So what do we learn from the The Sun, the PM's letter to Mrs Janes and the recorded phone conversation? 

Certainly by this morning - three days on - the balance of both press and popular opinion seems to be against The Sun and sympathetic to Gordon Brown ... though whether sympathy is what he needs right now is another matter.

One of the questions for non-Sun journalists is whether they were right to give The Sun's stories the prominence they did.

Lord Mandelson - who as plain Peter Mandelson told a Guardian interviewer back in 1997 that it was his job to 'create the truth' - during his interview on BBC Radio 4's Today this morning put his finger on something that's worth some thought:

"When The Sun creates the news in this way, this is then followed up by Sky, which then puts pressure on the BBC to follow suit, and I think that this has wider implications for the election which in my view is of wider public concern."

Now, it's reasonable to assume this is, at least in part, Lord M getting retaliation in before the match has even begun - prepare now for complaints of this kind when the election campaign gets going.

On the other hand, there's a reasonable argument that The Sun's stories had a prominence in other outlets that they didn't deserve. And that stories of moderate or no consequence can be propelled onto and up running orders by virtue of conventional journalistic wisdom ... aka crowd or, heaven forefend, mob psychology.

So why did the stories get that prominence? And more or less everywhere?

Well, put yourself in a newspaper or programme editor's seat: you know that these collisions of power and 'ordinary person' can, if everything else is in the right place, become 'defining'; you know that 'conventional wisdom' at some point in the future may well judge THIS moment to have been a turning point.

Do you really want to be the (only) editor who said 'it's not a story'? Even if you genuinely believe it isn't? 

It's a phenomenon that's far from rare and yet we journalists - especially those of us who've been or are in that editor's chair - hardly ever look back to ask whether we should have acted differently. There's not a lot of evidence that we journalists, as a tribe, are terribly good at learning from experience. 

There were at least as many reasons not to go with The Sun's stories at all as there were to lead on them. Some of the arguments for were captured by Andrew Sparrow in his article on Tuesday, only one of which has any real substance: Mrs Janes' argument that Mr Brown, as Chancellor and PM, had underfunded the Army.

The rest - that the PM can't admit a mistake; that he isn't good at empathy; that he won't appeal for sympathy and cite his own misfortunes - are pretty thin stuff.

Plus you have to wonder how we reached the state where we not only require our politicians to be monogamous, moderate drinkers, moderately spiritual and more or less self-funding but now also insist they have the soft skills of a psychotherapist and good handwriting to boot?

And in any event, without both sides of the taped confrontation - and there could never be a question of the BBC using a surreptitious recording of the PM without the over-riding public interest purpose that was singularly absent in this case - you learn something about Mrs Janes (and can have nothing but respect and understanding for her anger) but zilch about the PM or, more importantly, what he thinks about what he's doing in Afghanistan.

In other words, you don't even have the story that The Sun has ... let alone adding something extra.

Fourth estate 

But there's something else here too. Journalism's claim to the 'fourth estate' rests on it being that part of the public domain where all we citizens go to find out what we need to make important decisions about ourselves, individually and collectively.

The Sun - on this occasion and more broadly - is essentially reductive at the very moment we require the debate over Britain's options to broaden. 

As journalists, we should be concerned that for the most part media stories about British involvement in Afghanistan focus on helicopters and kit (important, of course, but far from all there is to talk about), how long British troops might be there and why is President Obama delaying his decision on the US' next steps?

It's relatively rare, for example, that we read, watch or hear any discussion of the cost/benefits of the British presence in Afghanistan compared with a uniquely UK-based focus on terrorism -

Today had one of the rare cracks at this just before The Sun's letter and tape stories. And there are many other approaches you'd be hard pushed to read or see too often - like what a political settlement, inevitably involving the Taliban, would look like in Afghanistan? Or how one would get to it ... or even set off in that direction?

In other words, we as journalists risk selling our audiences short if we take what are, in effect, the soft but journalistically safe options. It's surely in the public interest to continually look beyond the narrow, well-trodden themes and actively hunt out as many approaches as possible, as regularly as possible.

And if that means going one way when The Sun - and the rest - are going the other ... well sometimes the tough option is the right one.