Having posted yesterday on the question of local council-produced newspapers, I’ve just seen a piece in London’s Evening Standard by Andrew Gilligan.
“In the past few years, a total of nine London boroughs have ditched low-key, factual publicity material and started high-frequency, in-your-face tabloids, full of good news – even if, as we shall see, it’s not always quite true.
Most are fortnightly but two are actually weekly. A Standard investigation has found that in London more writers are now employed by these official papers than by the local independent press.”
The questions that deserve asking around this issue are being asked elsewhere, but the fact that Andrew Gilligan is asking them illustrates what a potent political question this is. Gilligan’s political antenae are telling him all sorts of things, and his only omission is that he ducks the question that his own particular brand of partisan journalism foregrounds:
If local authority press officers aren’t the right people to offer an objective assessment of the performance of a local authority, why does he imagine that journalists such as himself are any more suited to the job?
In that article, as in so much of his writing, Gilligan is a partisan figure who feels able to brazenly advance the commercial and political aspirations of his editors and newspaper proprietors.
Roy Greenslade broadly agrees with Gilligan – and I suspect, if the argument came from elsewhere, we’d be able to play the ball rather than the man on this one. I don’t know about you, but I find that journalists are fairly unreliable witnesses on this one…
