Read on Twitter
Here's the former editor of the Sun asking on Saturday why so much of the British press supported Brexit: "serious questions have to be asked."
Is it such a mystery? On Thursday the same former editor of the Sun had already cracked the case.
It's been 10 years now since I took time out of my busy schedule to explain why media system based on public service values or market forces are bound to mislead the populations they pretend to serve. As a treat I set out the principles that would underpin an alternative.
It was a candid, and perhaps naive, attempt to persuade centrist liberal opinion-formers that the system in which they were prospering personally had already incubated disasters, and would only create more if left unchallenged.
Rather than acknowledge and address the causes of the dysfunction in the UK's media system they preferred to commiserate with their audience of well-meaning middle class liberals about its effects, and to throttle the one political project willing to *consider* media reform.
The project of media reform remains; to democratise decisions about how public subsidies for journalistic investigation are spent, and to create spaces in which both information and analysis can be discussed and 'made sense of' by people enjoying effective equality of voice.
Until this becomes mainstream in efforts to steer the UK away from it current, disastrous course, we will only be tinkering at the edges. I now understand why this is so unpopular with liberal elites; their status relies on the ideas of intellectual inequality.
They are the enemy, and we must separate them from their base among the well-meaning, but politically naive, middle class. A left media it must not reproduce the competitive logic of liberal media. It must have as its goal a different communicative regime altogether.
