The British journalist Henry Fairlie – a kind of “romantic Tory”, in Christopher Hitchens’ description of him – spent the latter part of his life in the US, explaining the country, mainly to its citizens. One of his distinguishing characteristics – and it is distinguished and rare – was to include in his criticism his own trade: journalists, he thought, got it wrong as often as politicians.

We should read Fairlie on this: because we have an election coming up. And some of our most prominent journalists believe that politics and politicians are crap.

In one important way, Fairlie thought that politicians were better than journalists. In an essay he wrote for the New Republic in 1976, republished in its “historical piece” series, he slammed the most notable of US commentators, in the press and on TV, for what he saw as their mix of listlessness, cynicism and toadying – evident in their coverage of the 1976 Presidential election, in which the Republican (and incumbent president) Gerald Ford was pitted against the ultimately victorious Democrat, Jimmy Carter. It’s a bracing piece – not so much because of its political judgment as for its comments on political reporting. The main burden of his criticism is that:

“There comes no word from them [the commentators] to suggest that democracy is the accumulation of the moral aspirations and decisions of vexed but hopeful individuals, and that their task is to reinforce the process with their intellectual commitment.”

“Everything about an election is reduced by them to so miserly an estimate of human motives that there can be no sense of the sheer hopefulness of a free people when they vote. Individuals are translated into units: that is all that they now know how to measure, humans as units measured by categories.”

“There is no way in which the newspapers and television can ultimately escape from the fact that they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered. The individual journalists whom I have mentioned may be at fault, but they are among the best; and their primary fault is not to recognize or acknowledge that their — my — whole profession is trapped in a diminishing concept of human aspiration.”

The supremacy of the political realm is what Fairlie most cherished – as he wrote, “There are necessary things to be done which only politics can do.” He continued, “We have no other defense now against the dominance of the economic realm than the determination of the political world to assert itself. The task of the political journalist—and of the newspapers or television companies which employ him—is to strengthen that assertion. He may criticize an individual politician; he has no right to diminish the political function. He has no more right to do so than an art critic in criticizing an individual artist, has the right to diminish the function of art, or a music critic, in criticizing an individual composer, has the right to diminish the function of music."

Fairlie believed that “most politicians are believing and honest men. Carter believes something. Ford believes something; each true to himself”. He went on, yet more optimistically: “In fact, it may well be true that our politicians are today among the few who really believe anything at all. I have not reported politics for 31 years in 26 countries to imagine that politicians are innocent and guileless. But equally I have not reported politics for all those years in all those countries without being certain that politicians as such, however many individuals amongst them are venal or stupid, are the most hopeful messengers of a society's will to improve. But journalists, seduced by a view of politics which was increasingly bent to see it as debased, have been seduced into believing that politics is probably if not necessarily ignoble.”

He ended with a crash, as he normally did: arguing that the major democratic politician, whatever his failings and evasions, normally was powered by a faith, a “deep conviction, as trustworthy as it may be in a priest or an artist of their own worlds, that the political world is there to be used to alter our perceptions and our condition”.

And thus -

“If political journalists do not also believe as much, they should get jobs as fashion writers, or movie critics; or abandon journalism altogether and be satisfied to be interior decorators. If revolution is not a picnic, the politics of a free country is not a boutique. The political world today needs an imagery of grandeur equal to its own measure: to excite that imagery may well prove to be Jimmy Carter's most lasting contribution to our times. He should be encouraged to attempt it.”

I reproduce so much of this essay in part because it’s so good; in part because we in the UK have an election coming. And the signs for the coverage of that event are not good.

Last week, Newsnight broadcast a self-congratulatory piece about its 30 years of existence – founded, in 1980, in the second year of Margaret Thatcher’s first government. It was a deeply uninspiring programme: it spent most of the part of the programme devoted to politics in showing vignettes of interviews and confrontations between its reporters and politicians – in which the reporters were shown as fearlessly investigative, the politicians as slimily evasive.

That happens: politicians do evade, reporters do expose. But to sum up the major news analysis programme on British television by a series of clips of that kind is to debase both politics and political journalism. There was to be sure a discussion between Jeremy Paxman, the main presenter, and a group which included two retired politicians – Lords (Chris) Patten and (Neil) Kinnock, and the writers A.S. Byatt and Martin Amis – in which some comments were made about the negative effect of the news media on politics, in particular – a point of Patten’s – in enforcing a rigid regime of reaction to everything which the omnipresent media throws up. But the overall impression was of a media class determined to pursue the same course: to see politics and politicians as "probably, if not necessarily, ignoble".