Guido Fawkes : From Blowing Up Parliament to Blowing It

An excerpt from my most recent Byline column:

Maybe Fawkes and his blog may still have a role in some future Tory leadership meltdown in years to come. But they can no longer claim any anti-establishment iconoclastic identity. More likely his employees will become further absorbed into the declining tabloid world, and lose traction because of it. I’m sure Staines will not be badly off. Retiring to well-padded obscurity in Ireland to raise his family is hardly a disaster.

But whatever happens, these words should be hung around his neck:

“Journalists are there to “speak truth unto power”.  Not trade favours for tittle tattle, not report spin as truth… That is not journalism, that is copy-taking.”

Staines has become the thing he most despised. Rather than speaking truth to power, he’s a mouthpiece for power. He has traded favours for tittle tattle, and reports spin as verity. He’s not a journalist. He’s a copy-taker.

Read the whole thing on my Byline column: GUIDO: From Blowing Up Parliament to Blowing It.

Three Way Gunfight in the Last Chance Saloon

Why does the newspaper that has consistently backed the winning prime minister for the last 36 years sound so panicked?

Last weekend Britain’s best selling paper, the Sun, finally told the truth about the British general election.  Urging its favoured candidate for prime minister to steel himself against adverse polls and a torrid week of coverage, the Sun Says column retweeted by the tabloid’s political editor Tom Newton Dunn, told David Cameron to ignore “left wing social media.”

 

Sun editorials regularly rail against ‘Twitter mobs’ while its new SunNation blog, taken out of the company paywall, seems to have failed to pick up any online momentum, and gets a sad handful of retweets, mainly from fellow employees of News UK

But why does the newspaper which has consistently backed the winning prime minister for the last 36 years sound so panicked? Is it the threat of a tougher complaints system under a threatened Miliband government? Or something deeper in the system of the modern media?

Read more at my crowdfunded regular column: What are They Lying about Now?