Blair: press like 'a feral beast'
Updated on 12 June 2007
The outgoing prime minister accuses the press of operating "like a feral beast", tearing people and their reputations to bits.
A left-wing government battling a right-wing conspiracy? Or a ruthless marketing machine that worshipped at the altar of spin?
In a speech to the Reuters news agency, Mr Blair today admitted his administration had focused too much on trying to influence the press.
But in the dying days of his premiership, he clearly had no such need to impress.
'Ferocious hostility led to inordinate attention'
In the analysis I am about to make, I first acknowledge my own complicity. We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media.
In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.
But such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question.
It is also hard for the public to know the facts, even when subject to the most minute scrutiny, if those facts arise out of issues of profound controversy, as the Hutton Inquiry showed.
- Read the full transcript
To discuss Labour's relationship with the media, Channel 4 news was joined in the studio by David Blunkett, himself the focus of intense media attention surrounding his two departures from the cabinet, and by the Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne, whose latest book is called The Rise of Political Lying.
