One of the things that has come up at #cp4d (workshop on innovations in Parliaments around the Commonwealth) is how the media framing of politics-as-horse-race devalues the work of Parliaments and committees around policy-making and -shaping.
Linked and probably related is the demise of the policy-focused rather than politics-focused political reporter, which is perhaps most obvious in the UK when it comes to Brexit. Brexit is not simple, but it is comprehensible.
A reasonable understanding of EU regulation, trade deals, etc, take a bit of reading-in but nothing beyond the wit of humankind. However, we’re sixty days from the detonation point of the biggest crisis in British politics since the War…
And large swaths of the political-journalist class (often the ones who told us how easy it would be) have still not done the reading. It is a real disgrace – but Brexit is just the cardiac arrest that followed years of eating a chips-only diet.
I don’t know what we need to do to build up policy journalism and better political coverage (though I’ll share if anything comes up here) but I do know that political and democratic reform can’t happen without it.
Originally posted as a thread of 5 tweets on Twitter on 28 January 2019. View the original thread.