How big a role do the media really have in drugs debate?

And every year, like a cracked record, I find myself denying it. The situation is altogether more complex, I write, patiently arguing that what is published between elections is of far greater
significance.

It is obvious that the reporting of and, most importantly, the interpretation of election campaigns can change people's minds. But these changes occur against a background of previously assimilated perceptions about politicians, politics and policies.

These views are garnered largely from a complicated mixture of persistent media coverage and the interplay with people's own daily realities, which include conversations between them, of course.

The intricacy of this opinion-forming process, and the difficulty of analysing how it works, must be conceded before we attribute our problems to newspaper content alone. Editors may begin, quite literally, with a blank piece of paper. Their readers, however, are far from blank.

I want to make that crystal clear before I consider the thesis advanced by the former Guardian leader writer Malcolm Dean in his challenging new book, Democracy Under Attack (published by Policy Press at £19.99). The telling subtitle of Dean's book is "How the media distort policy and politics". In outline, it's hardly a new argument. Down the years, plenty of veteran journalists disappointed with their trade have taken issue with national newspapers' output, viewing it in pejorative terms. John Lloyd's much-discussed 2004 polemic, What the Media are Doing to Our Politics, springs to mind.

The difference with Dean's is the way - having asked a simple opening question, "How big a role do the media play in formulating social policy?" - he goes on to analyse coverage in seven specific policy areas.

They include some of the most controversial topics, such as asylum, crime, drugs and immigration. (For media, incidentally, read newspapers, and for newspapers, read Right-of-centre tabloids.)

He argues that they have perpetrated a set of journalistic sins in such a pernicious and malign way that they have damaged the democratic process. Among them are the narrowing of debate - plus, too often, a complete lack of debate - trivialisation, misuse of statistics, overall dumbing down, the consistent concentration on the negative and playing to the gallery, also known as the lowest common denominator.

These sins are only one side of the equation. What stands out from his book is the way government both responds to press coverage and tries to anticipate it in a reciprocal process which leads to the dilution of sensible policies and even their abandonment. Second-guessing how editors will react is itself a problem.

Take for example, drugs policy and drugs coverage, which I have also studied, though not as methodically as Dean. He dissects the lengthy reasoning and logic behind the 2000 Runciman Report into the Misuse of Drugs Act, which called for the classification system to be more closely based on scientific evidence of relative harm.
It said cannabis should be reclassified, from class B to class C on the grounds that making cannabis possession a non-arrestable offence would reduce the number of "otherwise law-abiding" youngsters being criminalised. It also believed such an initiative would reduce friction between the police and the wider community.

Similarly, it argued for the reclassification of LSD and MDMA from class A to class B, and suggested a reduction in the maximum sentence for possession of class A drugs from seven years to 12 months.

Tony Blair's Downing Street, fearing the press response to these proposals and citing "political imperatives" in the face of newspaper hostility to any liberal reform, let it be known to reporters that there was no question of drugs reclassification.

There were newspapers - including the Mail on Sunday and the London Evening Standard - that saw some wisdom in the measures. But several papers, having accepted the government's spin briefings, stuck to their inflexible, antagonistic line about the dangers of "going soft on drugs".

Within days, however, as Dean points out, the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Express greeted the report with an open mind, seeing it as an opportunity to open a public debate about the issues. The Daily Telegraph was very enthusiastic indeed. Home Secretary Jack Straw began to back-pedal, finding himself to the Right of a press he regarded as Right-wing.

Eventually, four years later, cannabis was transferred to class C status and the threat of arrest for possession was removed. But the old agenda returned in the 2005 general election campaign, with the Tory opposition pushing a get-tough-on-drugs line that papers, including those which had supported Runciman in 2000, acclaimed. Drugs, all drugs, were demonised in headlines once again.

The inevitable result occurred in 2008 when the Gordon Brown government recanted and - despite opposition from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs - cannabis was classified again as a class B drug. When the council's chairman was sacked, five other members resigned.

Why did Brown do it? Dean argues that, with the popular papers having changed their stance on cannabis, the then prime minister was searching for tabloid brownie points. Yet the people, the voters, had greeted the previous change. So the politicians and the press were surely out of step with public opinion.

It was, though Dean does not say it as baldly, a classic case of policies being carried out by a political and media elite without due reference to the popular will. There lies the real problem for our democracy. But I cannot finish without pointing to another bad example of the genre.

As we all should know, but it appears we don't, Home Office crime statistics show that, in virtually every category, there have been successive and, in some cases, spectacular falls
in crimes. Dean reminds us that a Daily Telegraph reporter, asked to account on Radio 4's The Media Show for the refusal to report that fact, answered: "Our readers do not want to be told by the Government that violent crime is falling."
Has there ever been a better definition of the word "reactionary"?

Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London and writes a blog for the Guardian