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Telling Stories: Sociology, Journalism and the Informed Citizen 173

The most significant feature of the centripetal society in this context is the
growth of the public relations state. All states seek to promote the best view of
their policies and practices. But in recent years the UK media have been under
unprecedented pressure to reflect and disseminate government views. [...] At the
same time, governments have been engaged in a build-up of their own publicity
and press relations activities on an unprecedented scale. [...]
But public relations has both negative and positive elements. The growing
unease felt in many areas of public life about the use of government information
as a tool of secrecy came to a head in the publication just over two years ago by
that madcap radical body, the Royal Statistical Society, of a report (1990) into
official statistics, suggesting their preparation and form had become too much an
instrument of state public relations. The Society declared itself no longer confi-
dent that ‘the organisational framework in which [government statisticians]
work offers the best protection against undue pressure ... we are clear that the
indirect result of the post Rayner reforms have been harmful to quality’. There
has been, it said, ‘a serious erosion of public confidence’ in UK official statistics.
The Rayner report had declared that government statistics were for the benefit
of government, not for the public. In its wake the government statistical service
moved into the dark clutches of the Treasury. [...]
That the elementary accounting of public life can no longer be made available
for public and independent scrutiny is one of the most serious blows to critical
social science in the post-war period.
The barriers this places to innovative and profoundly important work investi-
gating the dynamics of benefits and incomes are inexcusable. Instead we have
the panglossian evasions of Social Trends, an official survey of good news statis-
tics sufficient to gladden the heart of television newsreader Martyn Lewis (who
has campaigned for more ‘good news’ to be included in bulletins), but recently
disowned as misleading and incomplete even by its distinguished first editor.
We live, then, in a society increasingly ignorant of itself. A society not self-
informed is not an information society.

Witness to History: Sociology as Trustee

But what then of sociology, for this is my final story. I write primarily of socio-
logy, but what I say holds, I hope, for the social sciences as a whole. For the need
for independent and critical inquiry into social conditions has never been more
urgent, nor more threatened, than today. Sociology stands as witness and story-
teller or it fails completely. We must insist on that task in a society which is
otherwise denied the means for self-reflection – indeed, the means for people to
be citizens.
It has often seemed to me that we sometimes labour, as sociologists, under a
false modesty – when gathered in throngs, sociologists seem a seething mass of
humility. How wonderful it would be, we sometimes feel, to be able to come
to the podium at some prestigious conference and announce a startling medical
breakthrough, a staggering advance in technological ingenuity. Too often our