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

High-profile reporters reject accusations of revelling in drama, saying politicians are the people ‘addicted to crisis’

Politicians, not reporters, are responsible for driving a decade of chaos in Westminster, prominent political editors have said, after accusations that the media have become addicted to political crises.

Britain could yet appoint its seventh prime minister since the Brexit vote 10 years ago, after the turmoil that has engulfed Keir Starmer’s leadership since Labour’s May election results.

It has led to accusations that political reporting has become obsessed with infighting and chaos, treating the coverage of politics as a form of social media entertainment.

However, journalists told the Guardian that the claims were misguided, pointing to the need to cover the very real infighting that has plagued Westminster.

Beth Rigby, Sky’s political editor since 2019, said: “When I see those criticisms, it stings a bit actually, because that’s just not my experience of what I’m trying to do and how I try to cover it. When you’re at the coalface, I’ve felt it’s unfair.

“I don’t see it as a game. It’s not entertainment. What we’re doing, what’s going on in the country and the leadership crisis, is really serious. It weighs on me.”

Her view was echoed by Robert Peston, ITV News’s political editor since 2016. “The idea that in some way I, or people like me, revel in this is just not right,” he said. “What we try to do is just tell viewers or readers what on earth is going on.

“The people who are addicted to crisis are not the journalists. It’s the players in the political game.”

Some journalists have backed the accusation that political reporting revels in chaos. Nick Bryant, a former BBC US correspondent, has argued politics has become a form of “journalistic entertainment”. “We, as journalists, are a big part of the problem,” he wrote on Substack.

Tom Baldwin, the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography, has said reporters should “have a good look at themselves about the way they’ve behaved” in recent weeks.

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.”