Thread by @doctorow

If you think hyperpartisan media is unique to the internet age and yearn for the balance and sobriety of the golden age of newspapers, you have an unduly rosy picture of both the past AND the present, as the British press ably demonstrates.

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Maybe you've noticed the odd North American paper with titles that reveal their partisan history, like the Whig Standard and the Press Democrat, or you've heard of old-timey papers like the National Republican. You might think of the WSJ as Republican and the NYT as Dem.

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But in the UK, there's never really been the pretense of independence from political parties. The Daily Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Times are Tory; the Guardian, Observer and Mirror are Labour. The Independent is called that because it's notionally independent.

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The papers are partisan and so are their editors and writers, who generally hate one another and pick at each other in columns like Hamilton and Burr going at it in the op-ed section.

So when the British papers all co-sign a statement, it's worth taking notice.

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A new petition from @openDemocracy calls on the Tory government to end its stonewalling on freedom of information requests, and it's been signed by more than a dozen current and former newspaper editors.

opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…

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As @maryftz and @PeterKGeoghegan write, the government's "Clearing House" unit has been repeatedly caught lying about how it handles FOI requests, creating blacklists to deny access to journalists.

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Under the Tories, FOI response rates have plunged to their lowest level in 40 years, with the Clearing House repeatedly implicated in conspiracies to bury information of enormous public import, such as documents relating to the infected blood scandal:

opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

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Last month, leaks revealed that Clearing House was advising local councils to illegally withhold information on which buildings were sheathed in the lethal "Grenfell cladding" that resulted in the deaths of at least 72 people.

opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

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The petition has been signed by peers and MPs, "human rights lawyers, journalists, press freedom advocates and global non-governmental organisations including Index on Censorship, RSF, Greenpeace, Article 19, PEN and Transparency International."

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The Tory government has presided over a series of lethal shambles that nevertheless piled enormous amounts of public funding into cronies' pockets for government services in no-bid and secret contracts, transforming the UK into a chumocracy.

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The gutting of FOI service was overseen by archvillain @michaelgove. He's not hiding how the government works from its people because he thinks they'll love what he's doing and doesn't want to spoil the surprise.

eof/