Corporate media admit; we’re far too close to power

This speaks for itself (via the Guardian):

Politicians and journalists have had an unhealthily close relationship to one another, according to… Chris Blackhurst, editor of… The Independent

He told a Bath literature festival audience that MPs and reporters formed “a giant club” at Westminster.

Successive governments had courted newspaper proprietors, said Blackhurst, and told of his time at the… Daily Express… where he was deputy editor to Rosie Boycott.

They were appointed by Lord Hollick, a Labour peer, and the paper was moved away from its traditional Conservative support.

Blackhurst said: “We were trying to turn the paper into a more liberal and upmarket paper but management lost its nerve. They sold the paper toRichard Desmond

“Within a fortnight, the heavy bulk of the Labour cabinet was fawning over Desmond. We were really shocked by it.”

Two other panellists, Labour MP… Tristram Hunt… and Lib-Dem MP… Don Foster, also referred to the political-media nexus.

Hunt said a “symbiotic relationship between the press and politics” had always existed.

But Foster said the relationship between Westminster and the media should be regulated. “Politicians are trying to manipulate the media and the media is trying to sell papers… It’s got to change.”

A fourth panelist, the former Guardian staffer Malcolm Dean, pointed out that those “newspapers… with the lowest level of trust have the highest circulation and papers with the highest level of trust have the lowest circulation”.

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