In America, this column would be required to run with a disclosure that noted that the author’s wife has just been appointed as official spokesperson for the Prime Minister. Here? Ah, who cares, right?!
The baked in corruption in the British media is maddening. It’s just accepted. We have a major broadsheet columnist who STILL hasn’t acknowledged that her influence got her partner a lighter sentence for possessing child sex abuse images. And most of the media is silent.
The media class — by which I mean a specific set of well-to-do people in London who went to the same schools and universities, fuck the same people, and go to the same dinner parties as politicians — is rotten to the core.
It has been made abundantly clear to me that I will “never work in this town again” for the blunt criticisms I have made of the newspapers, their columnists and owners. I also have received a deluge of abusive emails, several of which came from Telegraph IP addresses 😂😂😂
In many countries where the government is corrupt, there is still a corpus of committed journalists who wish to tell the truth. That is the case in Britain. BUT the editors are bought and paid for and there are few columnists who can or will break from the consensus.
In the local press, the @yorkshirepost and @EDP24 being good examples, there are still publications putting politicians under pressure. But on a national level our political media is zombie-like and addicted to the sweet drug of access.
We have to build independent media but the difficult side of that is that you have to do it from a grassroots level. I run my newsletter purely by asking people who like it to subscribe and fund the newspaper reviews on Twitter and Twitch through contributions. That’s hard.

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More from @brokenbottleboy

7 Oct
I’m watching Lost In Translation for the first time in ages. The style of it was beguiling when I saw it at 19. At 36, I find it a really uncomfortable watch. It others Japanese people in practically every scene, as if only the white ‘couple’ are reasonable.
That a woman directed the “lip my stockings” scene is really depressing. It centres on a 70s racist sitcom premise that Japanese people cannot pronounce words in English and that sex workers are clowns to be used or dismissed.
Bill Murray is an exquisite performer and his ability to be bemused at the trappings of fame is harnessed well by the film, and ScarJo is perfectly cast as a woman trapped in an expensive cage BUT it’s the hyper-gloss style that paints over a moral vacuum.
Read 7 tweets
6 Oct
You’ll be glad to know that the first episode of the new Spitting Image is full of weird racialised characterisations and it’s most ‘cutting’ jokes are reserved for people who, for instance, think the world could be a little better.
And the sketches featuring a Greta Thunberg puppet are a) crap and b) horrible in the context of her age and neurodiversity.
The one okay bit is the Dom Cummings puppet.
Read 4 tweets
3 Sep
In ‘Left Out...’ Pogrund and Maguire tell on themselves in every other paragraph. They see politics as a game to be played and are baffled that Corbyn sees it as something else. Image
Iain McNicol is honestly a giant baby with a constantly filled nappy. Image
People like Neil Coyle — who sent Corbyn ‘barrage(s) of dozens of abusive texts...” — are not ‘moderates’ and should never have been described as such. Image
Read 34 tweets
15 Aug
I’m listening to @steve_lamacq’s Album Club on The Great Escape, a record I used to devour whole on my ever-skipping DiscMan. The thing people seem to forget with all the Country House hoopla is how sad it is. Not just The Universal but bruised things like Best Days.
Damon Albarn was 27 when Blur recorded The Great Escape. He was already so sad and so jaded. But then, he’d been famous since he was 23. Fame is possibly the shittest drug.
The Great Escape is a deliriously weird record. Fade Away is like the output of a haunted Wurlitzer, with the operator coming over the tannoy to talk about dead carnival patrons who still dance in the dust where the big top once was. But sure, Damon Albarn just did mockney shit.
Read 14 tweets
12 Jul
This. Is. White. Supremacism.
Does Dan genuinely believe I hate my uncle the electrician or my cousins working in all kinds of trades? They are financially better off than me. And they are white working class workers.
I went to Cambridge and work as a journalist so I am the ‘elite’. Only I earn less money and my views are seen as less worthwhile by people like Dan who fetishise white workers.

How many electricians are there in his family?
Read 8 tweets
18 Jun
It’s hard not to think about the case.

I got a legal letter sent to Sarah Vine personally because I want an apology and my costs.

She replied via Associated Newspapers legal department aka the Daily Mail’s legal Rottweilers.

A power move.
The reply letter itself is long and seems to me to make arguments that are unsupportable.

But all those words don’t mean anything. It’s about two sentences that hold the sword of me having to pay their costs over my head.

That’s the intimidation.
I don’t get a penny of the money raised via CrowdJustice. This time is time I should be writing to earn money.

I’m fighting this case because powerful people shouldn’t be able to rely on bully tactics to silence people.

I’m not the first. I won’t be the last.
Read 5 tweets

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