Were politicians and the press to establish a more cordial, consultative, consensual relationship with each other it would be a matter of weeks before they found themselves accused of conspiring to mislead the public, Robert Pinker, international consultant to the UK Press Complaints Commission, on which he sat between 1991 and 2004, concluded in a lecture.
Asking whether the relationship between the media and politicians could one day become less confrontational, he argued that the issues that have shaped the relationship between politicians and the press were inevitably fraught with passion.
Prof. Pinker was speaking on politicians and media ethics during the fifth George Sammut Memorial lecture, held at the University of Malta on Thursday. Mr Sammut was editor of The Sunday Times between 1956 and 1965.
Prof. Pinker referred to books and studies which questioned standards of journalistic conduct, saying that many claimed journalists were irresponsible while the media, generally, rejected such allegations and accused their authors of not checking their facts.
He also referred to accusations levelled at the media by politicians, namely former US President Richard Nixon and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. After being defeated in the election for Governor of California in 1962, six years before he was elected President in 1968, Mr Nixon had berated reporters and reminded them that they would not have him to kick around anymore.
And in 2007, Mr Blair accused reporters of hunting in packs and behaving like a feral beast. He said there was a rise of impact journalism with journalists allowing their personal views on policy issues to take over their duty to report the news. As a result, a significant amount of energy was being spent rebutting claims.
Prof. Pinker pointed out that if relations between politicians and the media were as bad as purported to be, both sides needed to share part of the responsibility - the media had lost the politicians' trust while politicians employed communication and public relations experts to spin their releases, exaggerating successes and sidelining failures.
The outcome of this was that the public was cynically disenchanted with all things political. This could be seen by a general trend of a downward decline in voting patterns in the UK.
However, nationwide demonstrations against certain issues, such as the hunting ban and the war against Iraq, were still attracting vast amounts of people. So were newspapers setting the agenda or reacting to a shift in public opinion? Probably, he said, they were doing both.