Sunny Hundal has a very interesting post at Liberal Conspiracy about how out of touch the press is in it’s unbalanced reporting of where Ed Miliband and David Cameron are seen by the public on the ideological spectrum.

(I won’t go off on one about the fact that due to the statistical tool used, journalists reporting this story are routinely able to overdose on describing the left as negative and the right as positive because life is too short.)

Sunny rightly points out that much of the coverage of this follows a pretty slavish “can Miliband shake the ‘Red Ed’ tag” message without focusing on the fact that Cameron is considered one point more extreme than Miliband (43 to 42 respectively) I accept that these are completely within the margin of error, but the point is not that Cameron is considered more extreme, but that despite this evenness, Ed is nearly always portrayed as the extreme in contrast to a centrist Cameron.

Sunny has called it right to say that the press are “out of touch with public opinion”. But beyond this there is an interesting narrative to draw out about the current and changing role of the press, and the effect that is having on politics and politicians.

Politicos take the press very, very seriously. We fear them, we worship them, we live and die by them. We do so because they have always been the conduit for our messages to voters for the moment, they remain so – I’m not arguing that the game is already up. Sometimes that conduit is clear and direct, but most often it is filtered through the experience, prejudices, hopes and fears of the journalist reporting or commenting on the story.

‘Twas ever thus. But could these figures be – in part – an indication of the public’s increasing awareness of this? Trust in journalism is plummeting And was falling sharply even before this summer’s explosions in the hacking scandal. Perhaps the public’s refusal to buy Miliband as more extremist than Cameron is indicative of a wider public unwillingness to take reporting at face value?

If this shift is real, it is not one that is reflected in the attitudes and behaviours of the main parties. Labour’s activists at Liverpool seemed extremely united, but united by an understanding of the mountain they have to climb and the obstacles in our way.

If I’d had pound for every activist I heard bemoaning our treatment in the press I wouldn’t have had to return to work on Monday morning. Equally the staff strategy seemed to be a confusingly skittish mixture of boldness followed by wild amelioration, which didn’t betray a confidence a perception of this power shift might have allowed them.

Meanwhile reports of the Tory Party conference say that despite predictions, it too was a flat occasion. I apologise that I can’t remember whose conference round up I’m quoting when I say that I read that overall the Tories were – like Labour pretty united. They were happy to be in Government despite the presentation of the splits from the Tory right and that they weren’t at all worried about Labour under Ed Miliband. That sounds like a nice way to feel but an extremely poor way to campaign to me. If you aren’t a little bit afraid of your opponent, you don’t know where he’s going to find your weak spot. You aren’t watchful. The Tories seem to have been lulled into a sense of security for which there is no guaruantee of truth or falseness by a media who largely see themselves as compliant and friendly without either of them noticing that the public might, just might, have different ideas.

The media’s relationship with the public is changing. If we grasp that we can change our relationship with the media. But we aren’t the party in the biggest danger from this. Unless the Tories stop sleepwalking through a pre-crash dream, they will not become the formidable electoral force they are capable of being. By being content to listen to the unprovable flattery of friends, they are condemning themselves to be deaf to new lessons.

This is not a post that makes a definite statement about the shifting relationship between our media and our politics. But it is a post which asks why we aren’t thinking more about the way this relationship is and will change. I don’t offer answers, but I do offer questions I haven’t yet heard asked in this way.

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