A bold plan for the new UK Government? Journalists need a bold plan.

Oh For **** sake, here we go again. What was it Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Today the UK had a new conservative leader, Liz Truss. Now this piece would run far too long if I tried to set out the flaws that have stuck to her shoes like that thing her government have allowed to blight pristine beaches.

Click Guardian article if you’re at a loss of what I mean. Yet my ire is not targeted at this government ( though many have every reason to; I’ll come back to this at some time), but the professionals who have access to Truss and her government and write for public interest. Yes that’s a definition for a journalist.

Firstly, will you stop doing this stenography thing. Of course she’s promised a bold plan. Could you find the necessary independence to critique this. Otherwise, we’re no better off in the [ Guardian article] we find ourselves.

Journalists really don’t do twitter well do they?

But the worst of the transgressions is this.

Andy Dickinson is spot on

In the ole days slogans amongst spin doctors and propagandists were a route to memorisation, fixating an idea into the collective conscious of the population to revive during an election. It’s amply written about in Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” and is parodied in Wag the Dog (1997).

Today this strategies bears more pernicious tendencies. It’s not so much as to fix an idea, but to act as if the idea has been completed once a period has passed. “Get Brexit Done” is an archetypal example. Brexit isn’t done, by a long stretch, and continues to wreak havoc on the UK economically and politically.

But if you travelled the length and breadth of the UK, you’d find a generous number of people who believe the government “Got Brexit Done”.

So here we are in a new ecosystem; what are journalists to do? Pull the question apart, interrupt if you must, but for Pete’s sake, hold the politicians to account by not letting them squirrel this nonsense in front of you and to viewers.

It’s bad enough that rhetoric and lies have come to dominate politicians’ speech, but for journalists to be sucked into this [ Guardian article] vortex is really shit!