THERE seems to be a new trend among States departments which is childish at best and worrying at worst.

I refer to the habit of sending elements of the media to Coventry if the department concerned gets in a huff over the treatment of a particular story.

With the Environment Department it was an entire medium which they refused to talk to because they got upset with the Guernsey Press.

Now it seems as if Commerce and Employment has meted out similar treatment to an individual Channel Television reporter because of his report about its minister being booed at a tourism conference.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. While I was working for Radio Guernsey back in the 90s the Board of Administration got upset with one of my colleagues and refused to deal with him. This was back in the days of faxes and we had the ludicrous situation of the department sending through communications marked ‘not to be seen by Chris Ledgard’.

The only trouble was that it was often Chris who happened to be the one who took the fax off the machine. He then had to avert his eyes and rapidly pass it on to a fellow reporter. By the way, Chris Ledgard went on to be a very well respected national broadcaster working for Radios 4 and 5.

I think the real worry today is that we’ve seen two of these ‘no talk’ retaliations from States departments within a couple of months. If this becomes a trend it will be very worrying. What this island definitely doesn’t need is a tame media always deferential to the States for fear of being cold-shouldered. It’s not direct state control of the media as we see in some countries but it’s still an attempt to influence their behaviour by implied threats.

I suppose we have to ask the question – ‘do States departments ever have the right to get angry with the media for the way they report issues and events?’ Of course they do. The media aren’t perfect and sometimes their reporting can be sloppy, misleading or even mischievous. But we have to distinguish between two different causes of States anger over journalistic treatment.

The first reason is when the story is plain wrong or wilfully twisted in its interpretation.

In those circumstances righteous indignation from hardworking States departments who are doing their best, only to be misportrayed, is understandable. The question is how that anger should be expressed. A blistering release giving the other side of the story is understandable. Sending an individual medium or reporter to Coventry is not.

For example, when I was at HSSD I was very frequently contacted by a particular reporter over a range of health issues. She was very probing and persistent, as any good journalist should be. I never minded that. In many ways it was refreshing to be put on my mettle by a reporter who was clearly very well across her brief. But one day I got really furious with a story she did claiming, wrongly, that a residential home was going to be closed down. What annoyed me most was that it caused huge and unnecessary upset to the residents’ relatives. But I would never have considered trying to blackball the reporter concerned. After all, if politicians were cold-shouldered just because they made mistakes then they would have a very lonely existence.

The more worrying reason why departments get angry with the media is when good, investigative journalism unearths facts which they would much rather were not made public. I don’t mean those facts which are rightly kept confidential to protect the confidentiality of service users.

I mean the facts which departments want to keep to themselves because they are embarrassing to the department itself. That could be exam results, overspends, service failures or ministerial gaffs.

If the States start punishing this sort of legitimate, probing, investigative journalism, then we really are on a bad road.

Of course, all branches of the media sometimes overstep the mark in a somewhat tabloid and sensationalist fashion. But I far prefer the current approach to the tame, overly deferential media which we saw many years ago. A medium is just that. It’s a conduit between the States [among others] and the public. So if the politicians lose their temper and refuse to engage with parts of the media it is actually the public they are disadvantaging. We should not put up with such arrogant and unacceptable treatment.