00:09:32.740And I think they're doing it okay online, but certainly not making huge.
00:09:35.960Well, The Guardian, I mean, their section at the bottom begging people for money is now bigger than half their articles.
00:09:40.640But, you know, I was asking you about the technological point, because I guess one of the things we've explored quite a bit on the show is what you might describe more broadly as the kind of decline of the mainstream media more generally.
00:09:52.540And the feeling among many people that the mainstream media don't seem to be offering the substantive stuff that they're used to, which is where stuff like this comes in, where people actually have the conversations.
00:10:04.920And that's obviously not a newspaper thing.
00:10:06.500It's more of an online, the radio, all of that stuff, TV.
00:10:10.420A lot of people now feel like the mainstream media is no longer doing the job that we think of the mainstream media as being there to do.
00:12:04.600Honestly, it's a series of things, isn't it?
00:12:06.900You know, phone hacking, which erodes that sort of trust.
00:12:12.080It's the close links between the police and the government and the newspapers, which again erodes that trust.
00:12:19.940It's the sourced quotes where you don't know where they come from and they're not named and that erodes the trust.
00:12:27.200Yeah, there's just a series of things.
00:12:29.220But you've also got lots of people like Donald Trump and other people, Boris Johnson, not necessarily Boris Johnson, but Dominic Cummings, whatever,
00:16:31.260They want power, influence. They want to make change.
00:16:36.180And so, therefore, you have to reflect what your owner wants sometimes.
00:16:42.060Now, sometimes you reflect what you think that your reader wants.
00:16:45.120So the Sun was very much leave because most Sun readers were leave.
00:16:48.740But there are factors that influence why a paper writes certain things in a certain way that are beyond just its politics.
00:17:00.320Well, let's pick up on that, actually, because that's a thing that I think most people don't think about, which is all of these broadcasters or most of the broadcasters other than the BBC, radio stations, newspapers, tabloid newspapers, they're all owned by somebody.
00:17:15.580And those people usually own them because they have very strong agendas.
00:17:19.300To what extent do you think that influences the kind of the direction of the publication?
00:24:06.460I mean, I'm on Facebook, but only just.
00:24:09.540It's my mum, it's my auntie, it's not young people anymore.
00:24:14.900They're the ones that are driving the numbers, so is it democratisation?
00:24:18.520So, you know, it's an interesting sort of thought or discussion to have
00:24:23.480about is it pure journalism, actually, or is it slightly bastard?
00:24:28.680I don't know. The honest answer is I don't know the truth. But what I do know is that selecting things purely on the basis of one person's view of what is a great story and the best story of the day is not necessarily reflecting what the readers want.
00:24:42.480But the downside with that, the other model, which, you know, I write for a couple of opinion pieces for a couple of papers online and they talk to me all the time about, oh, this article did this well and that article did this.
00:24:53.680i suppose the problem with that is uh it kind of we talked about echo chambers for last four years
00:24:59.760particularly since brexit and trump and stuff like that it pushes people i think and that's
00:25:04.880the danger is it pushes people into more and more of the same thing that they already like and also
00:25:10.500if you look so i don't know what articles you've written and how they how well they did but i
00:41:08.020But I think, let me ask you this, because I think part of it may be the undermining of trust had happened with the news of the world, with the phone hacking, with the Leveson Inquirer, which unveiled quite a lot of other wrongdoing, not just phone hacking.
00:41:23.500You know, one of my schoolteachers was, I've forgotten his name, Christopher Jeffries, right?
00:41:56.820There was one thing after another where I think people felt like, oh, this is this dark, nefarious world, which I'm sure always was.
00:42:04.820But that was never really revealed to the public in quite that way.
00:42:07.760I think more is coming out regarding the sort of dark arts that was used on newspapers over the years.
00:42:17.960I mean, you've seen there was a Channel 4 documentary recently that we've seen it, but Murder in the Car Park, which featured the Daniel Morgan murder.
00:42:25.220He was a private investigator who was murdered in a car park of a pub
00:42:30.560who was apparently just about to blow the lid on police corruption
00:57:06.980And they feel certain things, but they don't necessarily know why.
00:57:10.140And I think the point you made particularly about the fact that it's becoming harder and harder to hold people to account for things that are going wrong, I think that's so true.
00:57:20.260Well, the government, right, would have fallen.
00:57:22.440In normal times, the government would have fallen again and again and again.
00:57:26.120There would have been resignations all over the place if they still had that power.