I'm Lord Tully. I take part in Lords as a blog,

an attempt to bring more people into understanding what the House of Lords does.

Today I'm interviewing Nick Robinson, the BBC's political correspondent,

on the nature of the relationship between politics and the media.

Profoundly important relationship because it affects so much of what you hear and see about the political system and how it works.

So I think we have some interesting discussion here and I'd very much like it.

If you can put your comments on the blog site, we'd like to know what you think.

24-hour media, immense impact it's had on politics and the way we do our politics in this country.

Is it a good or a bad thing?

My slightly glibalds are to start with is it's like the weather.

You know, given that we can't reverse it, I don't spend too much diagonising whether it's for better or worse.

It seems to me, clearly there are downsides to it.

At the speed with which stories move now means that there's a danger that people are constantly

looking for a fresh angle and that means you can move on from the facts too quickly.

All too often in the 24-hour news culture, you fill time before an announcement

by speculating about what it will be or by really out the handout that's been given by one

politician or another. You then very briefly say what's happened and then you spend the rest

of the day talking about, well, what do they mean by that and why? And it seems to me there is

a danger that the core content, what was actually announced rather than interpreting it or

anticipating it or talking about the reaction can be lost i think some of that had

before frankly 24 hours of media but that's a downside of it the upside of course is if people

are interested they really can engage for a long period and get a lot more than when I was a kid growing up.

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