Following last autumn’s ASI seminar on blogging, the institute now puts the spotlight on the mainstream media. It is holding a seminar on Monday March 14th on the changing relationship between print and broadcast media, the political world and the informed public at large. The speakers include John Lloyd, editor of the Financial Times magazine, and Nick Robinson, the political editor for ITV News.

John Lloyd, who will open the discussion, has developed through a series of insightful articles and speeches an expertise on the interaction between the modern worlds of media and politics. Specifically, he has written that the media and its celebrities have positioned themselves as superior, morally, socially and financially, to the political class they are supposed to report.

He touches on this theme in a column in the current FT magazine, dealing with the self-promotion of Christiane Amanpour, the world’s highest-paid reporter, in a CNN commercial depicting herself as brave, investigative and caring. He writes:

This kind of stuff confirms one of journalism’s most treacherous trends. That is, moral superiority: its steely determination to take the moral high ground and deny it to everyone else, especially the political class - except to the wretched of the earth, on whom it bestows the benediction of its sympathy and attention, and to whom it attributes a moral purity which Christian tradition made the prerequisite of the poor.

Space at the seminar, which will take place in the ASI’s Westminster offices, is limited. Those wishing to apply for a place are asked to e-mail events@adamsmith.org

The event, which opens at 6.00 pm for a prompt 6.30 pm start, will be followed by a champagne reception.