The election and the press

You do not have to support the Liberal Democrats or Nick Clegg or be carried along on the current poll wave to wonder, as a journalist, what was going on Wednesday in the newsrooms and editorial offices of the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Sun.

You don't have to be a conspiracists, either, to ask some tough questions about what their attacks on Nick Clegg are really about. As BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson put it, at its very least (my words):

"The Establishment is in something of a panic at the idea that he might deny the big two parties of their moment of victory and want to stop him in his tracks?"

And as someone much cleverer and more famous than me once put it: the thing about Establishment conspiracies is that you don't have to organise them - everyone knows what they have to do.

The stories are rank journalism - even the Daily Telegraph's which at least had some new facts in it and showed something close to journalistic endeavour. But it was, at best, 'good investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting' ... to coin a phrase.

The Daily Mail's 'Nazi' story was, as we know, years old and culled from another newspaper's website archive. It was also subsequently disowned by one of the Mail's best known journalists, the formidable Anne Leslie.

Its second salvo was largely armed by the Spectator - so a comprehensive hoovering job, then, if nothing original.

The same was true of the Sun's portmanteau assault - the Lib Dem leader is wobbly, confused and sleazy - a kind of journalistic version of collecting everyone else's empties.

The Daily Express produced the kind of front page that can have surprised no-one - while the Telegraph's 'sleaze' story was close to journalism - but not close enough. The innuendo of the headline was brutal: Nick Clegg's fingers so deeply in the till he should be in prison rather than Downing Street.

Of course, as the lower reaches of the article itself make plain, that isn't the allegation the facts support. It's clear that this is all about a donor/staff funding arrangement that was unusual, ill-advised, inept and wrong ... but a long way short of the dishonesty implied by the headline. And by the second par which nudge-nudged, wink-winked that the money went into:

"The same account ...used to pay his mortgage, shopping and other personal expenditure"

And so the Telegraph charges on: Labour Ministers defending Nick Clegg are those "who stand to gain most" from any Labour/Lib Dem arrangement. While this morning, the top of their Clegg/funding story is the Lib Dem leaders "admission" - note choice of word.

The Mail charges on too, with stories about Nick Clegg's expense claims when he was an MEP and about his atheism.

Former Tory cabinet Minister Michael Protillo this morning mused that these Conservative supporting papers may have made a big mistake - from their own and their favoured party's point of view - by putting an opponent so prominently on their front pages. And if the Twitterssphere's derision - take a look at the #nickcleggsfault hashtag - is anything to go by, he could be right.

On The World at One on Thursday, the Lords Mandelson and Ashdown blamed the Conservative press chief - former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, the man who was unaware that his reporters were spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of his paper's money to hack iknto royal and celebrity phones - for feeding then unleashing the Tory press attack dogs.

Nick Robinson is sceptical of that - and with good cause. That's to say, on account of the total lack of evidence ... which is always a good place to start

This morning, the de-facto Tory deputy leader William Hague dismissed the claim as "absolute nonsense" and said it was "normal" that the Lib Dems would face critical stories. While Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt told BBC News:

"Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are finding it very hard to cope with the scrutiny that the other two parties have had to cope with for years."

Scrutiny? Is this scrutiny? Really? Perhaps we've become so de-sensitised to the awfulness of some parts of the British press that journalism like this passes as scrutiny.

We - mere readers, mere voters - are left with two unattractive possible conclusions.

Either the press really does think that these stories amount to genuine scrutiny of the men who want to run the country - that this is exactly what we need to help us choose our next government. Hysterical bawlings from the sidelines on dog-whistle issues like immigration and sleaze.

Or that parts of our press are proving once again that they are totally incapable of fulfilling their most basic function - supporting our self-government with reliable, honest news and information. And that they don't care since they place their commercial and ideological interest in a particular result above the democratic process they claim to support.

I am writing this after reading most of this morning's election press online and while watching party news conferences and interviews on live and continuous TV - I cannot reconcile the two.

They are glimpses of different universes.