In the past week I’ve been bothered by a few instances of shitty press behaviour. And that’s without even really going looking. On Monday, the Daily Express ran two (starkly) different headlines. One for Scotland. One for England. The Scottish one mocked the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for having dished out a number of fishing licences to appease his aggrieved French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron . Meanwhile, the English variant suggested the French PM had 'backed down' after Liz Truss's "masterstroke". I think a master stroke is something we all wish to see in the same headline as the current Foreign Secretary, but readers were left wondering: Hang on, what the F**K? How can one newspaper be reporting, as news, on page one, as fact, that the French PM had 'backed down' while simultaneously reporting that Johnson had 'caved'? The answer is 'editorialised news', of course. Now, on the face of it, what’s new? Newspapers have always had biases when compared with one another. The Mail is Right-wing, The Mirror Left. But having a newspaper so schizophrenically at odds with itself feels new. I mean, I'm all for debate and objective analysis but something feels, I dunno, off? confused? utterly fucking bat-shit? When even the editorial line of a newspaper's Fleet Street board can't fucking agree with itself, media feels... disconnected. Though it is undoubtedly little comfort, even this is not new. The Scottish Sun famously campaigned for Scottish Independence. The English variant lampooned it. You can find Brexity examples of The Irish Sun similarly juxtaposed with the Blighty Blighty mainland edition. I know. It almost seems as though the billionaires who own these titles just print what they think will sell. Perhaps we should accept that, club together a KickStarter and - for the price of the annual turnover of The Sun - *pay* them to fuck off? But something feels weird about this, doesn't it?. Broadly speaking. It’s fine to have differing opinions from no doubt different editors who sit in different provences and countries. I disagree with my girlfriend and we live in the same house. But as the rot of political tribalism and the amplification of echo chambers and internet radicalisation continue to ripple effect in realtime, you have to wonder if there’s not some responsibility on the editors' part to, you know, just report the fucking truth? TWITTER ARE ALREADY COVERING THE BINARY POLITICAL DIVISION, LOVE, CAN YOU JUST TAKE A SHOT AT INTEGRITY? If Macron backed down, fine, say that. But if Johnson caved then make that the story. People might not want to hear it, but you’re a fucking newspaper. You’re supposed to be telling them what happened not some self-fellating fairy-story. This isn't Uber Massage. You don't always get a happy ending. I suppose it was always going to be this way. Once Twitter came along and robbed mainstream news of the ability to say “this is a breaking story…”; once people knew and accepted that what they were watching on the Six O’clock News was going to be largely a shit echo of what they’d read on their phones while they were taking a shit on their lunch break - the product of ‘news’ had to change. News was no longer new. News became punditry, opinion, ‘voices’; Put simply: why would you buy a newspaper telling you the same shit you’d already read on Facebook? It would be like catching up with your friend... twice. Who wants to do that? But to get ‘insight’ and ‘opinion’? Well, that was a different thing. Then you’d cough up like a double-jabbed, Johnson Variant patient outside the doors of a shuttered A&E. Fuck the breaking news. Give me thoughts and feelings. Give me some angry, white man on GB News telling me why, specifically, I should be fearful of brown people (I've been asking for years, no one's ever been able to tell me). And so from LBC to Owen Jones to Darren Grimes to Paul Mason; from Left to Right; Twitter would handle the in-match commentators, mainstream (/legacy) media would offer the in-depth, post-match analysis. Perfect, you might think. But that left journalists with an awkward, existential question. “Hang on, I trained to just *ask* people questions and report their answers - and maybe offer a tiny bit of objective thought here and there... Am I seriously supposed to offer my *opinion* on basically every fucking thing that makes the headlines now!?!” The answer was 'yes'. Junior reporters, who would've been glassed in the FACE with a double Jamesons twenty years ago for saying how they felt about something, were now being asked to provide insight and analysis on matters they were patently unqualified to do so. Hacks who already had a hard time drawing a distinction between fact and fiction, had to pretend they knew the ins-and-outs of everything. Trade Deals. Molecular Virology. The efficacy of vaccines. The Good Friday Agreement. The viability of Scottish Independence. The economies of the Rust Belt. School Shooters. The Opioid Crisis. Voter counting machines. HGV Shortages. Westminster. Washington. Knife Crime. The list is fucking endless. But here they were, every day and night, pretending they knew about everything. And the public lapped it up because... well.. "They're on the tellybox, aren't they? They wouldn't be on my magical hate box unless they knew what they were on about, Vira!" So there's that. There's also the fact that nationalistically we subscribe to this idea of British exceptionalism. This idea of "Well, we do our own thing". We've seen it most recently with Brexit and vaccines... Perversely, it's not far from "Why in the name of Dog FUCKERY is everything so shit here!?". They're two cheeks of the same arse. "It could never happen here" is the ugly, older sister of "How has this *happened* here?". The critical thinkers among you might ask: why are France or Italy or Poland not clambering to leave the E.U.? Why are they not wrestling with the same collective insanity as Britain? And the answer to that (IMO) is simple: It is Britain who carry the cross of rabid, frenzied tabloid culture. Sometimes it's an asset, if you enjoy reading cheeky, titilating, celebrity gossip. Sometimes it's a hindrance to democracy and an obvious asset to the overarching, godless oligarchy that our nation is now subservient to.. I mean, I love a cheating footballer story. Maybe sacrificing my worker and human rights at the alter of Brexit is the price I have to pay for that? And suuuure, other countries have tabloids. But are they taken seriously? Do other countries include their equivalent of The Sun in their "What The Papers Say" segments? Does CBS' Morning News show include the National Enquirer? I'm not suggesting for a second that there are zero tabloids included in any breakfast sofa shows across the Western world, outside of Britain. But I don't believe it's anywhere near as bad as it is here. And the outputs and ripple effects of that are obvious. Now, you might say "Our free press is something to be treasured, nay celebrated!" And that's' true.. You'll recall that in the Leveson Inquiry, journalists and editors lined up to profess how essential it was to keep the papers unregulated, such was their responsibility, lest their passion, to hold the Govt to account without fear or favour. "We need to be kept free!" they wanked. "If we're regulated, we might not be able to bring you such sensitive and necessary reporting as... Charlotte Church's fucking tits wwaaaaaa-hey!" I'm paraphrasing. Now look, I don't think you have to be wearing a foil hat to wonder why it is that they cry "State Controlled Media!" at the very mention of 'regulation' but habitually fail to actually hold the Govt to account at almost every opportunity. Why did former-Express owner, Richard Desmond, for example, support Boris Johnson so rabidly? Was it because he genuinely loved the idea of horsefucking the economy? Or because he was secretly being greenlit for his housing development by (now deceased) Tory housing minister Robert Jenrick, against the wishes of the local authority? Why does the Daily Mail demonise immigrants when their staff are largely metropolitan, 20 or 30-somethings who must know that immigration is a net benefit to the UK? Why does The Sun bash the European Union in matters it must know to be factually incorrect? If they wish to be free to hold the Govt and its policies to account, why are they not holding the Govt and its policies to account? I suppose the current example of this is European labour. We desperately need foreign workers. From Pret, to fruit pickers, to social care and beyond. But not one Right-wing tabloid can bring itself to admit this, or challenge the Govt on its (quite obvious) colossal fuck-uppery. We need these people to work here, but simultaneously do not because we're Britain and we're different and victorious and it'll be fine, it could never happen here etc etc. The Leveson Inquiry focused so heavily (ironically through newspaper exposure) on individual abuses. Celebrities getting their phones hacked. Dead teenagers. Lots of it was gross and important to expose and to hear. But I don't recall hearing much about whether it was right to have opinion on page one rather than what happened and I think it was too early, before the term 'echo chamber' had really taken off, to consider the democratic impact of having newspapers side so vociferously with one tribe of political debate. The recommendations of Leveson were that an independent regulatory body would be created, and that newspapers should voluntarily opt-in to it. The idea was that this would align editors to a common set of standards and practices and it would technically be voluntary, thus escaping the tagline of "State-controlled media". Also, the regulator would have teeth. If they suspected conduct unbecoming of the Great British Free Press, they could launch an investigation and - if a publisher were found to have breached the code - it could table a fine as a percentage of the paper's turnover, up to a maximum of £1,000,000. ONE MILLION QUID. Fuck me. That sounded encouraging. But the subsequently-established IPSO (Independent Press Standards Organisation) is chaired by an ex-Tory lord and (according to HackedOff) has existed over 2,600 days without having launched a single Press Standards Investigation. I wonder if that's where we're headed. An OFCOM headed by Paul Dacre and an IPSO that cares dick-1 about pro-Tory tabloids. Who cry "BIASED MEDIA!" at Emily Maitlis while campaigning for a pro-Brexit BBC Political Editor. But I also wonder if, in a week where Owen Paterson has been politically shanked up by The Mail, where it's climaxed in his resignation and crescendoed in a bruised Boris Johnson administration - whether things might, and I stress might, be about to change? Have newspapers lost their influence? Has the decline of Print Revenue and emergence of online media like Huffington Post, The I, Novara Media and Byline Times impacted the traditional reach of tabloids and broadsheets? Or was this just a blip of momentary outrage where a Tory Govt sailed too close to the sun? Obviously I can't tell you. That's just what happened. But if you want my thoughts and feeeeeeelings... well obviously grab the fucking podcast, you f**ks. Love, Me Have You Checked Out The Podcast Yet?
