‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’
But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.
Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.
– Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked
It’s going to get worse before it gets better but they can feel their power slipping away. We need to be merciless in 2029, implacable, grinding them down the way they’ve done to so many.
Apart from in the Jeremy Clarkson version of Top Gear, I wonder if the word “stonking” has ever been uttered on the BBC ? It seems like a very Toxic Male sort of word.
“Stonk” is derived from a technical military term used to describe a certain type of artillery barrage: a “Standard Regimental Concentration” 😉
“Pimples, slightly seedy and bald”.
The fact that Marr, who looks like a Tenniel illustration, can still criticise the appearance of others confirms his stratospheric level of self-delusion.
It is indeed a stonking article, skewering some of the most poisonously useless people to infest British public life in the past couple of decades or so. Marr, Aaronovitch, O’Brian, Maitliss etc etc. All promoting ruinous policies, which they will never suffer from, thanks to their wealth and status
This tendency is widespread amongst the idiot middle classes. I ventured on X today, to see some fool pontificating along the “refugees welcome” line. His bio mentions that he lives in Norfolk, that’s 94% White British Norfolk. Of course he does.
I remember reading something by Rod Liddle in which he recounted a conversation with one of his editors. “Why do you keep using the phrase ‘middle class bien pensants’, Rod?” the editor asked. “Because you won’t let me use ‘c**ts’,” Liddle replied.