À quoi servent les correspondants? →

Le carnet de Chris Dillow donne lieu à une intéressante conversation sur les correspondants politiques :

For one thing, they are redundant. All worthwhile issues could be as well or better covered by specialist reporters in other fields. For example, the junior doctors dispute could be covered by health or industrial relations correspondents; the local elections by local government reporters; the Brexit debate by economics, foreign or diplomatic reporters. And so on. The relative standings of the parties could be reported simply by comment-free reports on opinion polls or on Oddschecker’s election odds, in the same way that daily changes in the FTSE 100 are reported without comment. Which poses the question: what do political correspondents add?

Chris Hanretty rétorque :

This is the Saint-Simonian approach to journalism, isn’t it? I think it’s a mistake to reduce politics to policy. In part, politics is about articulating conceptions of the good. It might be helpful to have someone around to tell us what political parties think that involves. You may believe that political correspondents perform that role poorly or not at all. That doesn’t mean the role shouldn’t exist.

«Guano» aussi :

It is the prominence of political journalism that is the issue, because evidence and expert opinion is crowded out. If we are to hear about the spin that political parties put on an issue, that can be after we have heard an impartial discussion of the issue.