This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
We are a print magazine founded late in the first quarter of the 21st century. So, when it comes to discussing the state of the press we need to show some self-awareness. But whatever our own notions of self-worth, what does the fourth estate do for wider society?
Is the media a voice? If so, for whom — its proprietors? Its journalists? Could it be claimed that the media is a voice for its consumers?
For a long time, the press told itself that journalism had a representative function and that by the act of consuming it, readers, listeners and viewers were mysteriously represented by their champions, the journalists.
It is not difficult to spot the self-serving cant in this pretence. The press, in its long since passed pomp, was bullying, hectoring, unfair, unkind and ruthlessly self-interested wherever and whenever it had power to command and self-indulgent when it did not.
Let us agree that for most journalists a sense that they were, however diffusely, serving the public good was a noble lie. Rough things happened, and not just at the edges. But a society which lacks a press lacks something more granular than simple abstract appeals to things such as “freedom”.
What’s missing when there isn’t journalism is life seen in the round. It’s a narrower and more obscure world without a wider sense of it all. Saying so is not to lament the absence of a healthy, sustainable press, it’s just an effort to note what’s different when things change, or, indeed, return to the way they once were.
So, how has this former primacy of the media in people’s understanding of their world so rapidly fallen away?
In this issue, Fred Skulthorp charts a tale of collapse and inadvertence. The parable of Sky News sets out how accidents will happen. It was an accident that an American conglomerate, Comcast, bought one desirable, entertaining thing, in the form of Sky.
And with that got another, unsought and uncared for, thing, in the form of Sky News. Possession of the latter supposedly offered some political clout, together with some regulatory headaches, for its new owners. But the cost of having it was for Comcast — in every sense — chump change.
Like most unwanted things in life, the best hope for Sky News was that it would survive by continuing to be unnoticed by its owners. Unfortunately, now it goes unnoticed by its audience too.
The story Skulthorp sets out is, at root, a collapse in the demand for news. On this fact we are on the side of realism. If the people do not want the news, there is no case for it being given to them like a side dish of unrequested but wholesome vegetables.
Yet what the case of Sky News shows is not simply its own failings, but what happens when the appetite for any and all journalism wanes. Skulthorp notes the absurdity of marketing cons like the BBC’s puffed-up “Verify” — the very thing every journalist should be doing, if there was any point to what they were doing. He details the dishonesty of it, when even the so-called best of the best of the BBC so often, so mysteriously, turn out to be blatantly ideological axe-grinders, and factually wrong with it.
We’ll come back to the BBC, as we must, given its overweening dominance and state funding, but the Question of the Audience can’t be evaded. If would-be consumers don’t want what journalists say is journalism, it doesn’t matter whether funding can be found for it or not. It will just be speaking into the void.
Many journalists are visibly affronted by a new age in which their sometime audience speaks back
Worse still, as so many journalists so sulkily seem to see it, the void has started to speak back to them. Paul Goodman — whose illustrious career spans such defining institutions of their time as the comment desk of the Daily Telegraph 30 years ago, and the indispensable trade website ConservativeHome 15 years ago — reflects on how political journalism has shifted from politicians condescending to hacks to vice versa.
Many journalists are visibly affronted by a new age in which their sometime audience, whom once they “represented”, speaks back. Every comment beneath the salt, we’re sorry, the line, every tweet aimed at a big beast, all of them are the presumption of the consumers to say something, to have their own voice. And not to read, listen and watch both their betters and their manners.
Again, in noticing this, we are neither advocating a course of remedial action nor offering any particular moral diagnosis. This is a steadily more democratic age — why shouldn’t making a joke at the expense of, say, Adam Boulton be something more than a niche activity?
But the point remains: the news, as conceived by journalists, is not Latin. By which we mean, it’s not the classics; it’s not a good in its own right. It’s not truly an end, the act of participating in which will both constitute and transmit civilised life.
It was just a means, and one to particular purposes at particular times. It is, seen thus, a thing that happened — and the desire for it to go on happening is not what it was.
Why should it? How could it? Did the consumers share the journalists’ news priorities? Did they read the papers for the headlines, let alone the leader columns? Or did they read them for the sports results, or even, heaven forfend, the things once necessarily advertised only there?
As new means have been found to distribute the information people are actually interested in, is it really any wonder, or a source of horror, that they have discounted the things they were never truly much bothered by?
The audience for political reporting is in freefall, you say. From what? An artificial high which was the consequence of the bundling of news with other, more desirable content, as much as it ever was there because of high or low-minded editorial choices?
The ever-sagacious Lord Goodman notes of audiences — such as the one GB News has skilfully garnered — that there are always new old people. That even if an activity is in managed decline, there’s a life and a consequence to it yet.
In no aspect of the British media is this more apparent than the example of the overwhelmingly dominant BBC. Its strength hardly surprises those of us in the private sector, looking enviously as we do at its poll-taxed funding. “Life support” hardly does justice to it.
Here we run up against the limits of fashionable concepts such as “disaggregation” and “everyone is a journalist now” just because they have a smartphone and social media to distribute their findings. A very real flavour of the old order is the smack of BBC power.
Which is why sneering isn’t enough when a fellow state entity, Ofcom, makes a clown of itself in court by saying that the impartiality of this one remaining bit of the media with influence is the task of the BBC’s own directors to ensure. BBC journalists would question this if any other part of the press offered it as a self-justification, and so should we.
The feeble, late government ought, however, to have acted. In the United States, a new government shows the difference between people with a plan and people with a pretence. Donald Trump gave the American managerial state a Russell Vought; Boris Johnson gave us a Dominic Cummings. The BBC is very much still with us in consequence.
Having boycotted it to begin with, the Johnson-Cummings racket then embraced it for its Covid mania. So much of what is wrong with modern Britain has the BBC as its greatest champion. Fixing our problems starts at least in part with getting rid of the last genuinely powerful part of the rotten old order.
Fourteen-year Toryism failed here. Others should take note that the only reason the BBC is still here, when all other forms of antique media are leaving the stage, is because the state wills it so. This is not a choice we need to go on making.
