In the year just passed, journalism, which sees itself, in the west at least, as beset by decline and closure, has vastly increased its power – to an extent in a desperate attempt to escape that decline. Three large developments have made the implicit, and huge, claim that journalism – our way of knowing what is happening in the complex polities and societies of our world – is essentially a simple matter of competing polemic and total transparency.

These developments are:

• the takeover of US politics by the broadcast media;
• the revelations about governments round the world from the WikiLeaks website;
• the undercover Daily Telegraph expose of Britain’s business secretary Vince Cable’s true feelings about his partners in the coalition.

Together, they ensured that the media ended the first decade of the third millennium with large victories over politics and politicians. What’s more, all three were claimed in the public interest. Yet it could be as easily said that they were morally indefensible. At the very least, all demonstrated that the line between public interest and moral indefensibility is a thin one, and getting thinner.

These journalistic innovations are seen by their champions as having greatly expanded the scope and power of journalism: and so they have. Yet they can also be seen as the three great reducers; each one reducing the worlds it describes to simple formulae and, consequently, ignoring or denying a complexity that journalism by its nature already struggles to capture. How has the media developed these new sources of power? What has the power come at the expense of? And can such a sudden increase of media power, used in such a way, really be said to be in the public interest?

Journalism began to exert real power from the mid-19th Century and its ethics were, from the first, held in low regard. Fictional representations, such as those found in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (of New York newspapers), Trollope’s The Warden and The Way we Live Now (of London newspapers), and Maupassant’s Bel Ami (of Parisian newspapers), were particularly scathing. These ethical norms – fraught at the best of times – are most tested in the coverage of politics and politicians, subjects that lie at the core of the democratic mission it claims for itself. The two professions are therefore bound to clash. They fish in the same pond, civil society, for the same fish – called voters by politicians, the audience by the media. Both now also fight for the right to define the public interest: a struggle that has grown more intense.

The public interest is generally defined as that which aids the citizen to be more fully a citizen – that is, everything from information, now routine (but once unavailable) on votes cast, measures proposed and public money spent through to revelations of state or corporate corruption. In more than 30 years of journalism, mostly for the Financial Times, I’ve seen that concept develop from a view that ferreting out as much information as possible was good for society (as well as for one’s career), to one which was framed in much more aggressive and polemical terms. Three of my colleagues in the labour and industrial correspondents group of the 1980s, Peter Hitchens, Trevor Kavannagh and Richard Littlejohn, developed – as their careers progressed from reporting to comment – popular, highly charged columns, which worked best when skewering ministers and other public officials, generally of the Left. The depth of contempt expressed in their opinion pieces was – at least in modern times – unprecedented: and they are seen as models to be followed.

At the same time, investigative journalism in some hands – as those of John Pilger in the UK and Michael Moore in the US – became not just revelation but condemnation, a show of evidence and a judgement (sometimes the other way round), with the targets mainly (not exclusively) of the Right. I was present at a meeting of Guardian journalists at which a distinguished investigative reporter, with a record of revelations which were on any criteria in the public interest, argued that British parliamentarians should be regarded with suspicion in principle – a view which the subsequent publication of MPs’ expenses must have confirmed. The public interest has, more and more, come to be defined as that which can be shown to damage public representatives, and officials.

The first of last year’s great reducers did not begin its work last year, but did reach a kind of apogee then. In democracies, political debate has for the past half century been dominated by politicians who have broadly – sometimes very broadly – observed rules of courtesy and some respect for facts: but in the US today a journalism of extreme polemics has progressively built broadcasters into major political figures under the rubric of free speech. What had been an – arguably stifling – practice of polite, if at time insistent, interviewing developed increasingly, under ratings pressure, into broadcast forums in which presenters would encourage guests – politician and commentators – into frenzied mutual denunciation. The stage was set for the appearance of radio “shock jocks” and TV polemicists in the guise of talk show hosts.

In August last year, Glenn Beck, the most prominent of the right-wing talk-show hosts on Fox News, organised a “Restoring Honour” rally for his followers in Washington, aimed at reviving pride in America and its values. In October, Jon Stewart, liberal comedian and host of the Daily Show, organised, as a counter to the sentiments voiced by Beck and his supporters, a “Rally to Restore Sanity”. These interventions into the nation’s capital, still the world’s most potent political centre, by two strongly contrasting media figures made for a quite unsubtle joint statement: it said that they, more than the parties or the leading politicians, perhaps even more than the President, represented the masses and their interests. In fact, Stewart’s political heft has increased since the rally: last month he was credited with playing a major – perhaps the major – part in getting a bill pledging federal funds for the healthcare of those who responded to the 9/11 attack pass through Congress.

The effect on politics is clear. The prominence of these broadcasters reduces government by comparison: more importantly, the implicit message – especially from Beck – is that governance is a simple matter of political will, and that once this is in place, reform can be achieved with ease. In this environment, journalism becomes a high-decibel slate of complaint, tenuous assertion and aggressive victimhood, much of it directed at President Obama. It is, as its protagonists constantly assert, a way of holding power to account – and is, therefore, in the public interest. Behind all this lies a vision, more on the Right than the Left, that represents a kind of Tea Party Leninism, where once the revolution is effected, all political, economic and social life can be organised with mechanical simplicity, all barriers to the people’s will having been removed. No question, these rival polemics have stirred up much public interest: yet increasingly, the more centrist of those the public elected now worry that they are being displaced not just in rhetoric, but in function: that representative politics itself is being represented as inherently a betrayal of a free people.

In November, the WikiLeaks website, which had earlier in the year revealed huge troves of documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, published its latest glut of revelations. WikiLeaks is not journalism: but it works under its rubric – of free speech, of the benign effects of revelation, of holding power to account – and it depends on established institutions, as the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, for publication of its material. That material provided fascinating glimpses into both the views of US diplomats and of those on whom they reported. The ideology that inspires this not-for-profit “media organisation” – developed by its founder, Julian Assange – also claims the high ground of the public interest, holding that governments are essentially (as Assange believes) inimical to serving this. Officials and politicians, he wrote in a kind of manifesto in note form as he was preparing to launch WikiLeaks, work “in collaborative secrecy to the detriment of the population”: the weapon with which to fight them is exposure. Yet in the case of the diplomatic cables, the revelations blew apart the convention that some diplomacy must be secret because – for example – it pursues ends that cannot be spelled out until all actors are marshalled separately and secretly into the possibility of an agreement. As Michael Fullilove, the Australian foreign policy commentator and head of Sydney’s Lowy Institute put it in a recent piece on the Drum website:

“With this dump WikiLeaks is not uncovering a particular secret; it is outlawing secrets altogether… Would the world be safer, saner or more pleasant if nothing could be held in confidence? How could wars be averted in such a world? How could peace negotiations take place? Would news sources talk to journalists?”

That last question is more than rhetorical: journalism has depended on a web of private comments, understandings and leaks. Without these, it withers.

Investigative reporting has been one of the strongest developments of postwar journalism, illuminating crucial areas of government deceit, corporate fraud and corruption and criminal activity. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post on the undercover and criminal efforts to destabilise the Democratic Party undertaken from within the Nixon White House remains the apogee: but with such exposures as the Sunday Times on the effects of Thalidomide, The Guardian on bribery scandals in British Aerospace and the New Yorker’s revelations of Abu Ghraib, there has been a long roll of honour, many of which produced huge effects in public revulsion and government reforms. Now, a global mechanism – described as a journalistic tool – publishes confidential information on the grounds that government is a conspiracy, and that publication redresses the balance in favour of the public. By its sheer volume, however, it reduces investigative journalists to bit players, redacting the output and setting it in context. More, it arrogates to itself the right to decide what might, or might not, be dangerous for the individuals named or identifiable in the revealed documents: itself a perilous power to have.

WikiLeaks sets a high bar for ordinary journalism – tempting it to shock and awe through more intimate revelation. Last month the Daily Telegraph revealed that Vince Cable, the business secretary, had given frank and pejorative assessments of his Conservative coalition partners and had declared himself “at war” with Rupert Murdoch. These, like WikiLeaks, were undeniably interesting – but perhaps not as interesting as the fact that Cable’s thoughts were given to two young women reporters posing as constituents of his, who encouraged Cable’s boastful statements with flattering giggling and cooing. Their journalism invaded a space assumed to be largely private – that occupied by MPs and their constituents.

Journalists have used undercover disguises before – the BBC did so in 2003, sending a reporter pretending to be a police recruit to uncover racism in Manchester’s police force. The result was a series of suspensions and resignations. The News of the World’s ‘Fake Sheikh’ (Mazer Mahmood), usually posing as a wealthy Arab businessman, has left many embarrassed and exposed. But the disguised intervention into the relationship between a member of parliament and his constituents pushes these tactics further into the upper levels of political power than Mahmood ever went – posing a question to politicians more insistently than before: with whom can I say what I think?

The newspaper, and others, argued that to know a senior government member’s private views is in the public interest, since it allows citizens to understand what the real tensions and strains are within the government that they elected and pay for. The grounds for this view have been prepared: increasingly, for politicians, the private space has shrunk to a few defensible areas, as family grief. But it is still an innovation: editors and political writers have understood and accommodated some wriggle room between the public statement and the private sigh: not now. The implication of the Telegraph’s journalism is that having its reporters lie about their identity is justifiable where it reveals that a politician’s semi-private statements clash with those he makes in public. The further implication is that private doubts, boasts and assurances ought always to accord exactly with public ones, and that when they do not it is shocking enough to require exposure with the aid of deceit. This definition of the public interest would hold that we – the public – should know as much as possible but as many facets as possible of our representatives: after all, nothing which is private could not be shown, under some conditions, to have some public consequence.

In one view, both the revelations of WikiLeaks and of the Telegraph would, if they became the norm, encourage a more truthful public sphere. We – and especially our leaders – would, conscious that all was potentially transparent, develop into houyhnhnms, the race of super-rational horses discovered by Gulliver on his travels. These creatures were so uncomprehending of the notion of mendacity that Gulliver had to describe a lie as “saying the thing that is not”. In this world, politicians would give the whole range of their thoughts on every subject, whether in support of their party or government or not; officials would make public their policies and plans at every stage; diplomats would reveal all conversations, unofficial agreements and proposals and everyone would reveal all aspects of their personal lives on demand from anyone – while the public would have the maturity to understand and take no unfair advantage of these disclosures. Such a development can only be a fantasy: no conceivable society composed of conceivable humans could live in such transparency. More likely, a transparency culture simply causes a displacement of the semi private into the wholly private – with public figures relying more on public relations to act as a shield, and turning a face of bland blamelessness to the outside word.

There is no question that WikiLeaks, and the Cable and other liberal democratic indiscretions, engrossed a vast audience: whatever about the public interest, they interested the public. In conversations about these revelations – especially those on Cable – I was struck to find that almost no-one criticised the journalism: the object of interest was the content, and the behaviour. Fox, and the other networks which employ polemicists, see their ratings rise. With these, journalism has struck mother lodes, which at a time of falling audiences and failing business models, it surely needs. These innovations will not go away.

Journalism is, of course, a great reduction to begin with. Any journalist not too full of himself to admit it realises, sooner or later, that the trade demands a facility for simplification that squeezes the most complex events, trends and characters into a limited form with limited, stereotypical narratives. I have realised over the past 30 years that we could get some of the facts, some of the time; a few of the surrounding details and an insight or two into the reasons for action and the consequences. We could produce, at our best (and it is important that we do) an honest outline, a tentative analysis or a temporary opinion. Within the labour and industrial correspondents’ group – a club of reporters covering British industrial relations and policies, now disbanded through lack of members – there was a self-deprecating joke, adapted from the concluding line in the old US cop series The Naked City: “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City,” it went, “and we can’t get one of them.” It was a wry recognition of the smallness of our efforts in the face of the deluge of facts, claims, declarations, private discussions, secret understandings and contradictory data.

Journalism has, in the course of the last century, acquired great power: a power which, now, is under pressure because of technological change, the loss of long-profitable business models and the fracturing of audiences. Yet its search for new sources of power and influence has produced a more reductive vision of itself, and of politics, than we have previously had. The common claim of the three great reducers is that the public can gain a greater grip on the actions that are taken and the money that is spent in their name through being an audience for their untiring polemic and huge revelations. In different ways, each holds conventional politics in contempt – either explicitly, or implicitly. As such, they are very much the product of contemporary media mores, though they appeal directly to the classic, centuries’ old ideas that underpin journalism – the right to freedom of speech and the press, the duty to expose falsehood in public figures and institutions, the need to hold power to account. In the way they have done this, however, they are redefining the relationship between political and media power, and giving a new and radical redefinition of how the public interest is served by journalism.