You can ban the journalists but you can't stop the scrutiny

The mayor of Bristol has banned Local Democracy Reporters (LDRs) from attending his press briefings after he and his external communications officer took umbrage at a question about his Ted talk from an LDR.

The council’s initial press release about the situation stated: 'It's completely false that the local democracy reporters have been banned. All mainstream local media outlets are invited to the mayor's media briefing. There's been a longstanding mutual agreement between the mayor's office and the Bristol Post, who sponsor the local democracy reporters in Bristol, about personnel attending press conferences whenever they are announced and held, and that LDRs would not be sent due to the narrow definition of their role as an impartial service.'

I have looked through the press briefings available on the YouTube channel for Bristol City Council and have found that LDRs feature in most of them. I can’t ask the council for an explanation because they have had me blacklisted since July 2019 when I wrote about the mayor’s faith advisor and his links to Evangelical churches.

Because the LDRs provide content for more than just the publication that sponsors them, their ban affects other media too; often these are small media teams with only two or three editorial staff.

And so we have a collective action boycott by local media of the press briefings, supported by the NUJ, until the LDRs are allowed to take part again.

The mayor of Bristol was asked about this ban, recently, at Full Council and said:

“The whole press conferences were set up by me. There had never been a practice like that in the council of setting up press conferences on a regular basis to give the city’s journalists easy access. Every press conference I say ‘you can ask me anything you want, anything’. Often at the end of the press conference, when the journalists run out of questions, I say ‘do you have any more’ so everyone gets a chance.

“Nobody’s been banned. I didn’t invite you to my birthday party, but I didn’t ban you from it. It’s up to me. It’s not statutory, I’m not required to do it, we do it to give journalists easy access to me to ask whatever they want, and we can invite whoever we want.” (link)

There are so many points in the various statements, which seem to be deliberately missing the essence of what is going on here. It’s like the Carl Sagan quote, 'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe'.

And so it is with Bristol. We must first invent democracy so we can explain how it needs to be held to account.

From local to national news, it feels like we’ve lost sight of why we have politicians and who they are accountable to.

When the people we pay to represent us are able to ‘disinvite’ questions by comparing them to personal celebrations then we need to rethink and start from scratch.

A mayor is not a person who is being celebrated. They are an elected representative being paid by public funds to run the public’s council; this is the council to which we give money every single year so they can run our services.

The mayor represents us, all 465,000~ residents. He has power over decision-making and resource allocation. There may be one or two things he isn’t responsible for but when asked by a national journalist, he said:

“Whether people know it or not, visibility is one of the core requirements of political accountability. Fair or unfair, I’m accountable for everything.” 

So why is it so easy to make himself seem accountable and open and accessible to journalists outside the city but hostile and aggressive and censorious to those within it?

We don’t pay him £80k a year because he has a wife, three kids, siblings and parents. He isn’t doing us a favour. The balance is the other way around. He answers to us. He is accountable to us for the public functions of his role; the money spent, the decisions made.

We, the public also pay the BBC, through the licence fee, and part of this money goes to the Local News Partnership (LNP) so that local residents can be informed of what is happening with their councils. Another effect of the LNP is that local newspapers, which earn millions in profit, also get free staff. (This is a legitimate point and one that the Media Reform Coalition has raised as evidence in parliament. But it’s not relevant right now.)

The mayor went on to criticise the newspaper that employs the LDRs in Bristol, calling them an advertising network. Aptly enough, this is the company to which his electoral campaign paid £31k of their money and £5000 of public money to run advertorials for him rather than have him be subject to interviews by journalists.

But he hasn’t banned Reach employees. He used to meet with Reach monthly. What he has done is specifically banned publicly funded-LDRs who sometimes used to be the only journalists in meetings such as by the Audit Committee.

This isn’t a birthday party and we are not bearing gifts. We have not come to praise Caesar. Journalism is scrutiny by the public, for the public, and in order to ensure that we can make the appropriate choices about our lives in the future.

The mayor often likes to tell journalists what they should be writing about and his cabinet members have been known to also try to suggest what is and isn’t news.

That’s not their job. Their job is to set policy, oversee officers who implement policy, and face accountability for their choices. They are paid by us to do just that. When they fail, they should resign.

If the papers and the mayors office only want to see good news written, then there’s a whole bunch of people not doing their jobs. But luckily for the city, Bristol has always had a strong political alternative media and engagement from residents.

The scrutiny will come regardless.

"Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera." — They can cut all the flowers, but they can't stop spring from coming".