It's getting close to my 7 year anniversary of beginning to become a journalist, and the 3rd birthday of @Byline_Media so forgive me if - by way of @johnmitchinson and @ColegaveInside I just explain why I've devoted this part of my life to journalism
I was married to a very senior journalist, but I was always worried about the profession. The reporters I got to know were always burned out by the profession, almost like battlefield trauma surgeons, developing a thick skin and sense of protective cynicism
I preferred to be a feature writer, a playwright, and at my core a poet. It seemed to me that poets were, as Shelley said, the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' and all the profound stuff happened in imagination and creativity
I never really cared about the press. I'd seen countless others bruised by it. Actor friends monstered, photographed on a night out with their wedding rings airbrushed out. But I took our feral press as normal, a cost of business
If anything, I just saw journalism as an extension of the 'industrialisation of the mind' - a kind of post modern phenomenon where significance is controlled by a small number of hungry companies and individuals. I didn't realise the cliff we were about to fall over.
But something has happened since that. Something profound and much more disturbing than any cultural analysis. I realise that the arts, and fiction and drama, are completely captured and relatively useless in this fight
Having written countless hours of television and fiction about scandals, nothing educated me more than the phone hacking scandal and subsequent trial about the realities of modern journalism
Forget the arts for a moment. The real battle is over reality. No one sues you for a drama. They go for you if you tell the damaging truth. And there are a lot of damaging truths around.
While Britain has some (fading) cultural cache as a source of creativity in fashion, pop, arts and design it has a major malfunction. A failure which will undermine all our achievements in other fields.
We now have a completely bankrupt media, led by a generation which either commissioned or were complicit in systemic illegality. Their only hope for survival is to co-opt a government through bullying and Kompromat
And while we cannot tell the truth about this systemic corruption, the system cannot tell the truth about this nation, whether in the field in politics, culture or sport. The messenger is a collaborator
I so wanted to return to fiction and drama after the phone hacking trial. Journalism is time consuming, litigious, vicious and - if you get it right - punitive. No good report goes unpunished.
But Britain is on the brink. Unlike Trump, Brexit is a permanent constitutional change. Unlike the US, our media - which includes broadcast aswell as print - is not fit for purpose. And we are much more lost than America
So, though late on in life, I realise I have to commit my dying breaths to redress the wrong I see. We can make no political choices, right or left or centre, without information
You, me, your kids, my kids, can make no informed choices with the callow, complicity or frankly criminal cabal who currently run most of the press and control the political debate
, against my wishes, against all my instincts, I'm going to have to devote most the rest of my life to @Byline_Media @BylineFest @BInvestigates and @BylineBooks to try repair some the damage to our sense of truth, trust and transparency
And it's this shell shocked and bombed out landscape that any malificent actor (currently Putin) can so easily exploit which we all need to slowly rebuilt (HT @Harryslaststand for some inspiration on that)
*Rebuild (but @Harryslaststand has better eyesight and understand than me and will forgive)
