chaplin

Sunday, May 10, 2009

MPs expenses: let's hear it for muckraking journalism and ink on paper

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of MP's expenses, one thing is clear. Without a newspaper, in this case The Daily Telegraph, this story would never have surfaced. The only one of the broadcasters that might have been bothered with it, the BBC, would have required balls of steel to take it on. All the bloggers in the world wouldn't have been able to access the data and, if they had, they wouldn't have been able to make the same splash about it. It's a grubby story but newspapers are, at their best, a grubby trade. Maybe you won't miss them when they're gone. That could be the most disturbing thing of all.

2 comments:

  1. Grubby, maybe. But in the public interest? Absolutely.

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  2. Added to the banking fiasco the implications for our society are quite frightening when we get a look into the strange detached world of our business and political leaders.

    Thank God for journalists.

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