‘We’re not making it up’: UK political chaos is not media’s fault, say journalists

One veteran political journalist said structural factors were also at play. While social media had sped up the news cycle, he said the sheer volume of outlets – as well as the ease with which MPs could now be reached via WhatsApp – had made it impossible for parties to control the narrative.

“Hacks have always liked drama,” he said. “That’s not a new trait and I don’t think we caused it … Given the huge reader bias in favour of process stories, I think we do OK at bringing stuff back to policy where possible.”

Rigby said she had not been able to start properly researching the king’s speech – the government’s official agenda – until the night before it took place, because of the “rolling leadership crisis”.

“We’re not confecting the news; we’re not making it up,” she said. “It’s what is happening and we report it. If there wasn’t a rolling crisis, we wouldn’t be reporting a crisis.

“It’s not my desire to create drama … I spent a couple of weekends in a row phoning dozens of people just to make sure that in a really uncertain environment, at least I understand to the best of my ability, to inform the viewer in a way that’s not hyperventilating, it’s not highly speculative.”

Peston said he had regularly faced accusations that what he put into the public domain was “somehow irresponsible”.

“It’s tedious,” he said. “At the end of the day, if we know stuff and we don’t put it out there, then rightly people would say that we’re playing God or being paternalistic. That’s not what journalism is about. Journalism is about giving people the information and then they make up their minds.

“The notion that anybody thinks this [political chaos] is anything but bad for the stability and prosperity of the country, bad for our mental health, is wrong. It’s awful. It’s as straightforward as that. What I try to do – and I’m pretty confident pretty much all my colleagues try to do – is to give voters the information that they need about what the hell is going on.”

Rigby and Peston both said journalists were having to adapt to an accelerated news cycle because of social media.

“There is a kind of intensity now about the news cycles that there was not 10 years ago,” Rigby said. “We’re all on 24/7 platforms in which there’s an intensity in which news is consumed and received. But that’s the environment that not just we’re working in, but politics is working in. Again, you just have to adapt to that.

“Good journalists know that and they still work on the principles of how they’ve been trained.”

Peston said: “What you have to do is use social media responsibly. I’ve been on X now for well over 15 years. I was quite an early adopter. There have been times when I put stuff out quicker than I should have done, but I’ve learned from that and I’m sure we all have. You now think very hard about what you put out.”