The UK media conspiracy

From our contact in Fleet Street :

The mainstream media in the UK has always prided itself on its reputation for high quality unbiased journalism. Even within the tabloid sector there is an belief in reporting stories based on sound journalistic principles. This has, of late, been tarnished by the hacking scandals at the News of the World and the links to widespread police corruption, but this, I am here to tell you, is just the tip of an incredibly dirty, somewhat seedy iceberg. With a few notable exceptions there is little integrity left in print journalism, and the commercial interests of newspaper owners has such a significant impact on editorial decisions that any chance of getting a story that doesn't fit that ethos is strangled at birth. I know from my own experience that stories that would have run fifteen years ago as genuine news are now routinely spiked. Anything that is too controversial is slapped with a government D notice or pulled by the editor citing legal or ethical constraints. To any journalist worth their salt there should be no higher authority than truth, but apparently the truth does not sell papers.

I'll give you an example that may surprise you a little. Do you remember the MP's expenses scandal? Great piece of investigative journalism, right? Really? Did you ever wonder who leaked those oh so incriminating documents? Did you ever question why some politicians took far more of a kicking than others? The whole thing was a set up from the outset. Sure the Telegraph was instrumental in getting hold of the information, but from 2004 to 2009 MPs consistently blocked the release of information. Why, suddenly in 2009 did the information come out? I'll tell you. The labour party knew that the game was up. The economy had tanked, and was going to get much, much worse. They knew that their only chance of regaining power within 50 years was to do a runner and let the tories carry the can for the cuts that would have to be made to try to balance the economy. Now of course the tories tried desperately to fight back and make themselves unelectable but that didn't work and Gordon Brown was left to put the Liberals in a position that they had no option but to form an alliance with Camerons tories, something that would have been, and indeed was, considered impossible before it happened.

Lets look at the phone hacking scandal itself. When the story broke it was an isolated incident by a rogue reporter. I can tell you that it wasn't simply endemic, but was the preferred method of establishing a story. As a reporter, bringing a story to the editor, the first question would be have you got the phone records to prove this? The answer would, of course, be yes. It was just the way things were done. Does that make it acceptable? Of course not, no more than the fact that every MP was shown how to make fraudulent expenses claims doesn't make it right. As a consumer of news, you are completely at the mercy of a network of interconnected press barons and their editorial mouthpieces. There is no freedom of the press, there is no truly impartial reporting. The money behind the press is king and that is not going to change any time soon. Anyone who fights against this system is torn apart, destroyed by the very mechanism that they work within. Anyone outside the media who questions its operations and ethics stands to be excoriated on the front page of every tabloid, but I guess that is just the way things are.

Of course, the odd story is allowed through, just to maintain the illusion of a free press, but those days, if they ever truly existed are long gone. If you want any chance of finding out what is really going on it is up to you to research it yourself.....and the best of luck with that!

The author of this article has worked as a journalist on several daily national newspapers and presents a credible account of the decline in journalistic integrity.