When I was interviewing Dominic Cummings recently, we chatted a bit about political journalism. He was unsurprisingly not impressed by most journalists, saying that they are not actually interested in government or how government works. “They have never had a position of responsibility in a complex organisation … They spend time with people who are very much like themselves. They sit at the top of parliament for decade after decade talking to each other. Inevitably that means they are cut off from reality in all sorts of ways.”
Some may say this is rich coming from Cummings but I agree with his general point. We also talked about Twitter, and he complained about how some political editor tweets something untrue and other pundits retweet it and then when this thing does not happen, another story is created about how No. 10 has backed off something. After the 2019 election, he said he tried to persuade Johnson, Kuenssberg and others to just get off Twitter but “obviously failed.”
I didn’t expect Cummings to have any love of journalists. He was rude enough to me in the days when he was Gove’s bag carrier. Via Twitter of course. Whether Cummings is a reliable narrator is for you to decide but I can only tell you about my experience, and if I have always felt that there was something wrong with the entire politico-media complex, I feel it even more lately. Indeed, the point that we ended up so badly governed by an ex-journalist who was known to fabricate his stories, and has fabricated his way into power, is so self-evident it hardly needs making. Still, it is astonishing.
We can always go back to a fairly crude GCSE Media Studies version of media ownership to explain everything bad that happens. Newspapers and TV stations are owned by tax-dodging billionaires that pump out propaganda on behalf of capitalism/neoliberalism/the man/the establishment. No one should work for any of them as I am always being told by strangers using social media platforms owned by billionaires harvesting data.
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