Oborne breaking the bad news to some TV reporters
Peter Oborne (Channel 4 news)
THE distinguished English journalist Peter Oborne recently made an important contribution to a theme which we had explored in this column on a few occasions — with the difference that when Oborne came out with it, he was hailed as a hero.
Admittedly I was among those hailing him, and anyway I don’t need that kind of adulation: I find my reward only in the Truth — which in this case was emerging in Oborne’s criticism of some of the UK’s top TV political reporters for their dealings with the Johnson regime.
In this column we have counted the ways in which the political hacks created this monster, with their juvenile insistence that Boris was a gas character — a bit of a card for whom it was always worth waiting with your camera crew in the cold outside whatever mansion he happened to be bedding down in, on any given night.
Oh how they would gaze with delighted eyes at the great Boris, agog with anticipation as they pursued him down the street waiting for him to land some absolutely killer line… and waiting… and waiting…
Yes they created him, they made the man who has done more than any other individual to reduce the United Kingdom to some sort of internationally reviled absurdity — and for this he has been rewarded and then rewarded some more until they eventually gave him everything that his black heart desired.
It is Oborne’s contention that they are still giving him more than they have given any other prime minister, serving his administration by facilitating the flow of stories from his “special advisors” — stories which are not actually true.
It was on Channel 4 News that Oborne told Krishnan Guru-Murthy that “it’s quite shocking that government sources inside Downing Street are allowed (to do this) without being interrogated in a proper journalistic fashion… they ( journalists) are just shoving this on, playing the role really of sewer for government smears and false news”.
No more than myself, Oborne accepts that journalists have always relied on anonymous sources, “but what is new — and it’s happened the moment Boris Johnson entered Downing Street and brought with him Dominic Cummings — is that a total unscrupulousness has developed”.
Like myself, Oborne is essentially a fair-minded man, noting that Beth Rigby and Lewis Goodall on Sky News have been keeping a correct distance from our old friends, the “government sources”.
It’s not that Rigby is greatly different to any other TV journalist in a superficial sense, it’s more that you don’t get the impression she is constantly contorting herself in the pursuit of a spurious ‘balance’ — indeed the reporters who have been called out by Oborne, usually end up being ‘balanced’ in favour of the most powerful.
I would merely add to his splendid contribution the fact that this problem arises not just because of the kind of journalists they are: it is ultimately because of the kind of people they are.
And the kind of people they are is terribly similar to the kind of people they are reporting on, the kind they are supposed to be observing with all due scepticism. Which explains why so many political journalists can blithely move over to ‘the other side’ to become handlers and manipulators themselves.
Indeed they may call it ‘the other side’, but in truth it’s not the other side at all — if you love being an insider, it is perfectly normal that you would regard a Dominic Cummings not as your natural enemy, but as the person you want to be some day.
Yes we have been concerned about this for some time, but with the rise of the far right across many platforms, it is becoming an emergency. It is just too easy for bad actors to barge through such fragile defences.
So we are happy to welcome Oborne to the fray; we are few but our number is growing.