Image: Line 18

By Jonathan Levy, Head of Newsgathering

There is an old Buddhist parable about a group of blind men trying to identify an elephant. Each of them feels a different part of the giant mammal and then describes the elephant based on their own partial experience. Unsurprisingly, the men disagree on what the elephant actually looks like.

The moral of this rather hokey tale is that partial experience is an unreliable guide to the truth - that the whole cannot be adequately described without a proper appreciation of all the parts.

As with the elephant, so with the world. Journalism's recent poor record in identifying what's really going on is a sorry story of not seeing the whole for all the parts. The Brexit vote, Donald Trump's victory and Jeremy Corbyn's electoral durability took most of the news media by surprise. Clearly, journalists need to get out more.

Well, Sky News is getting out more. Throughout this year, our journalists will be reporting from along "Line 18" - a route through the UK plotted in search of the surprising truth of a fractured Britain on the threshold of a new future and at the mercy of forces both destructive and liberating. They'll explore the impact of automation on communities, the social attitudes of the millennial generation, religion, secularism and race, extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty.


The Brexit vote, Donald Trump's victory and Jeremy Corbyn's electoral durability took most of the news media by surprise. Clearly, journalists need to get out more.

The balance we're trying to strike is between the coverage of institutions - governments, parliaments, think tanks - and the views and experiences of ordinary people and their everyday lives. Stick too close to the former and there's a real danger of missing what's really going on with the latter. It's a recipe for getting caught out.

Take Brexit. There's no doubt that journalists, including those from Sky News, were swayed by the assumption on both sides of the referendum debate that British voters would ultimately heed the alarmist warnings of the Government, the Bank of England and the City and put their apparent economic interests ahead of emotional impulses to break from the EU.

Looking back, we'd have been better off paying more attention to a brilliant piece of journalism by Sky's Lisa Holland in the run-up to the poll which exposed attitudes to immigration on the Dorset coast. When it came to voting in the referendum, concerns about EU migration trumped the threat of Brexit hitting people in their pockets.

Image: Journalists didn't expect Hillary Clinton to lose the US presidential election

It was a lesson that we took into coverage of the 2016 US presidential election. Again, received wisdom was that the experienced machine politician Hillary Clinton would beat the political ingénu Donald Trump to become America's first female president.

Our US Correspondent Amanda Walker, who was covering the Trump campaign, did a number of stories with Joni Horne, a dental nurse and single mother from Mississippi. Ms Horne dismissed Mr Trump's alleged misogyny and considered him uniquely qualified to restore American greatness.

I remember Amanda telling me that whenever she returned to Washington DC - to the typical "beltway" view that a Trump presidency just couldn't happen - she'd use her experience with Ms Horne as a corrective. It turned out to be the support of people like Ms Horne - white women without college degrees - which helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

Access to senior politicians is an essential part of political coverage. The chance to question them face to face is key to holding the powerful to account. But access also has its drawbacks and over-reliance on time in the company of political leaders can distort.

Image: Being banned from the Conservative battle bus meant Sky had a different perspective with Jeremy Corbyn

During last year's General Election campaign, Sky News was banned from the Prime Minister's battle bus after one of her senior aides took umbrage at a story we'd broken. This was challenging and liberating in equal measure.

Denied the traditional daily face time with the PM and her officials, our coverage became more focused on what was going on beyond the parties' campaigns. It helped our journalists gain a better understanding of the fragility of the Tory vote and the surprising resonance of Jeremy Corbyn. It was a perspective that others lacked.

It's these experiences that lead us to Line 18, which runs from Essex to London, through the Midlands to Manchester, to Glasgow and across to Belfast - a line along which almost half the British public live. The stories that Sky News finds here aim to give a clear and balanced picture of what's going on in our country, more so than the normal dividing lines of north and south, town and country, young and old.

We hope to see the whole elephant.

Line 18 launches at 10am today on Sky News.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Adam Boulton - The importance of re-mapping Britain