QotD: the uselessness of Nick Robinson

D-Squared on the uselessness of Robinson and other supposed insiders in covering the coalition negotiations:

The fact that Labour and the LibDems were involved in negotiations all weekend seems to have come as a total surprise to political journalists. Shouldn’t this be the occasion for some serious carpetings by their editors? People like Nick Robinson, Adam Boulton and Andrew Rawnsley don’t cover stories and they don’t have specialist analytical skills. Their entire value-add is meant to be that they are “in the loop” and connected to all the big important players. If something as important as this can be happening without them knowing about it, that’s actually very embarrassing.

It should come as no great surprise that Robinson et all, for all their supposed connections, missed this story. The point about their connections is that they only ever are used to leak approved stories, usually semi-anonymously, with Robinson as conduit rather than active investigator, to influence whatever debate is taking place at a given moment. The value of a Robinson for politicians lies in the way in which they can make their positions clear without making them official, while to the news media the value lies in getting easily digestable news chunks with little risk of offending their news sources.

But if Robinson only reports what he gets given and is too polite to dig around on his own, the fact that he and others like him didn’t hear anything about these negotiations until they were made official is significant. It makes it likely that there were no rebels on either the Labour or the Lib-Dem side willing to leak this story in order to sabotage proceedings…

As an aside, the naivity with which the whole post-election negotiations are reported is charming if infuriating. There are plenty of European countries with experience of this sort of thing, why oh why can’t BBC or Sky News learn from their experiences what roughly to expect? Why pretend that the Liberal Democrats negotiating with both Labour and the Tories at the same time is shocking or wrong, when it’s perfectly normal to do so?