Thanks for saying this Douglas because it certainly needs to be said. There was a time when I broadly respected the media – well, parts of it. But I gave up on it all a long time ago and I now refuse to fund the MSM in any way whatsoever. No TV, no newspapers, barely any radio, no subscriptions. Even The Spectator (which I have read almost every week for 40 years) inflicts the wretched Peston on us, so no subscriptions renewal there for me. Needless to say, this crisis has brought out the worst in them all.

Yes, I’ll read sites like this, and I watch a lot of podcasts – from the left and the right – on YouTube. But no direct funding.

In my house we have just stopped watching or listening to the MSM. The BBC is so clearly lowering morale that it is a positive danger to the country,.The rest are not much better. The fault lies directly with the journalists. They should be ashamed of themselves.
A few days ago there was a segment on ITV , I think , about a care home manager desperately shopping for supplies in empty shelved supermarkets. My wife worked in many care homes and without exception all the food was delivered from wholesalers. The incident looked staged and designed to sensationalise the matter. That care home , if it had to do this , was inept. End of story. .
Our journalists are going to end up discredited.

Post Peterson it is impossible to take Cathy Newman seriously and, Douglas, no serious commentary should include the words ‘Piers Morgan’. Douglas Murray’s premis is spot on. Increasingly the press pack sound like desperados trying to be the cleverest in the class. There is not the slightest sign (yet) of a Bernstein Woodward moment but the reptiles scratch around the bottom of the cage trying to find it and breathe life into it. The role of the 4th estate has indeed been replaced by Gotcha journalism.

The gotcha journalist culture… A product of the times. Readers wanting entertainment over real in-depth news. Newspapers asking for an article from writers for the price of a cup of coffee or using an auto-bot to generate articles…

Fewer journalists than ever have the time or resources to do their jobs the way they should. It’s now considered a luxury to have an adequate budget and several days to thoroughly pursue a story to its logical conclusion.

Hence the ever-dive into ridiculousness. Expect cheap dives and mud-throwing for laughs. Who wears the bikini is anyone’s guess. As long as it goes viral nobody investors won’t really mind the content anyway.

We have some political guests and reporters in the UK, who are deliberately broadcasting and being invited on to news programmes to spout their idiotic views solely to create viral headlines on social media.

They need to be derided and given an appropriate all-encompassing term or collective noun that we can all use when talking about them.

I favour “Clickbait Clowns”

“why deride the country’s two leading experts on the virus in the same way?”

Obviously these two men, over their hard working careers, have not demonstrated anything like the same lack of honesty, integrity or diligence as Johnson. So why express any criticism of their performance to date as a key part of the UK COCID-19 response?

For starters, how about because they were leading figures on a response team that caused critical delay for weeks while dithering over adequate action? A team that having Prof Whitty, a consultant physician and epidemiologist to hand, nevertheless initially gave excessive prominence to a “behavioural” group (a Cabinet Office ‘nudge’ squad) and mathematical modelers. Using Neil Ferguson’s flu model written 13 years ago. Still computing please wait…” seems to have been the case at that time.

On 3rd March, when Johnson bizarrely contradicted Intelligence assessments, and publicly congratulated China on the speed at which he said they’d publicly acknowledged the outbreak, he also foolishly boasted about shaking hands at a hospital, then handed over to Vallance for his opinion on that.

Vallance had an ideal opportunity to say “Sorry Prime Minister but you ought not to be shaking hands currently and I would stress that everyone must avoid that.” Instead he merely smile-grimaced diplomatically and said “Wash your hands”. A glimpse of how the roles of (SIr) Patrick Vallance and Prof Whitty are not entirely uninfluenced by political considerations.

Less than two weeks after that press briefing, the favoured Imperial College model confirmed what scientists globally had been saying since February. It predicted a quarter of a million UK deaths if the government’s herd immunity strategy of necessity continued.

Cue a belated, panicky strategy U-turn by Johnson, Hancock, the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team, Whitty, Vallance, and all. A U-turn that would expose the stark lack of sufficient national preparedness and resources that had necessitated the “herd immunity” strategy in the first place… While properly prepared nations like S. Korea and Taiwan were proficiently suppressing the infection within their borders.

Government ministers have lied repeatedly about COVID-19 response matters and a whopper of a lie is their denying that “wash your hands – principally to slow the infection rate and unfortunately two thirds of the population will ultimately need to be infected for COVID-19 to abate in UK”, was their initial strategy. Unsurprisingly neither Prof Whitty nor Sir P Vallance are particularly keen to admit otherwise.