Today is yesterday

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The 'why it matters' debate is already taking on different strands. One is about democracy itself, see the passionate post from Stephen Taylor below. Another is the Dog and Duck question about how to communicate it to people who have been deprived of constitutional and democratic language by our royalist culture (see Tony Blair). A third, is how the media itself reports the issues. All are taken up in the post by Guy Lodge and now Gavin Yates and my comments on it. But Benedict Brogan of the Mail in his lively blog makes a very strong point about the Today programme following the one I blogged. He says they refused to cover Brown's constitutional agenda because it was 'yesterday's story'. In other words, they punished the government for not announcing their intentions on the Today programme first, before parliament. Apparently it is not their job to be mere reporters of the news, they have to be the makers of the story.