Church and State

27 July 2026

In the days when newspapers set the daily news agenda much was made of the ‘church and state’ argument. This made clear that advertisers had zero impact over the judgement of Editors, that Editors’ decisions were sacrosanct and not for sale.

The same rule applied to TV – advertisers had no right to pressurise those responsible for content.

Consumers bought, read, and believed the newspapers they chose not on the basis of who was advertising in them but on the editorial content.

This did not always work, as two examples separated by over forty years show.

The 1972 thalidomide scandal and the role played by what was then Distillers, was a ‘The Sunday Times’ Insight Team exclusive. At the time the paper was edited by Harry Evans. Evans met with his Advertising Sales Director Donald Barrett ahead of the story breaking. In his 1983 book ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ Evans recalls Barrett pointing out: “Distillers are our largest single advertiser …. I know that won’t stop you and it shouldn’t.” Distillers duly pulled all their advertising from ‘The Sunday Times’.

Contrast ‘The Sunday Times’ stance with that of ‘The Daily Telegraph’ in 2015, edited at the time by Chris Evans. Peter Oborne was Chief Political Commentator at the paper when a global story concerning the banking group HSBC and a tax avoidance scheme known as the ‘Swiss Leaks’ broke. The story was uncovered by a group of investigative journalists organised by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and involving ‘The Guardian’, the BBC’s Panorama team, and ‘Le Monde’ amongst others.

Oborne maintained he was stopped from writing about the scandal in ‘The Telegraph’ as a result of that paper’s commercial relationship with HSBC and duly resigned.  

‘The Telegraph’ denied this, although they didn’t cover the story at all on the day it broke; 5 days later they buried six paragraphs at the bottom of page 2.

The Cog Blog covered this story at the time, and made the point that this episode would weaken ‘The Telegraph’ in the eyes of its readers.

“By allegedly giving in to an advertiser and downgrading a news-story everyone else seems to think is important ‘The Telegraph’ will have diminished itself in the eyes of its readers.
It seems more than likely that readership will drop, across all platforms.
‘The Telegraph’ will thus lose ad revenue.
And all because ‘The Telegraph’ didn’t want to lose ad revenue.”

Today, 54 years after thalidomide and 11 years after HSBC the line between church and state has blurred, an inevitability given the changes in how and from where consumers receive the news.

Journalists aren’t angels, as Leveson showed, but at a time when the very concept of truth seems at best elastic, we need investigative journalism, committed to uncovering the facts more than ever.

The church and state division was a factor in the existence of a strong, independent media sector. Something everyone, including advertisers welcomed.

Peter Oborne’s current home is ‘Byline Times’, a bastion of breaking stories others chose to ignore.

Another out of the same mould is ‘The Nerve’ set up by five journalists unhappy that their home, ‘The Observer’ was to be sold. One of these is Carole Cadwalladr, whose investigations include breaking the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook story of 2018, and unearthing details around the funding of what is now Reform UK, its leader Nigel Farage and the role played by George Cottrell. A story that has now been picked up by ‘The Sunday Times’.

Carole’s piece is here, and is very well worth a read.

Those interested in maintaining a free, quality, varied press might consider subscribing to titles like Byline Times and The Nerve to ensure that voices like Cadwalladr’s and Oborne’s are not buried by those with something to hide. Investigative journalism is time-consuming and expensive, hardly fashionable in an era of squeezed ad revenues and diminishing attention spans.

To those who argue there’s no appetite for the long game, consider ‘Private Eye’ – a physical title that sells over 230,000 copies (all paid-for), has a readership over 1 million and which has been banging the investigative drum for over 60 years.

I started with Harry Evans, one of our greatest ever newspaper editors. To paraphrase him from many years ago (he died in 2020): ‘the coming of native advertising makes it even more important that Editors should have the final say over what goes in the newspaper’.

Today, many get their news from platforms that go out of their way to avoid being held responsible for what appears on their sites. We’re all editors now, or so say those championing ‘freedom of speech’, a concept that shape-shifts when it leads to exposing certain factions.

Most of us are as unsuited to be editors as we are to be copywriters.

The church versus state notion matters. Advertisers shouldn’t influence journalists. Nor should politicians.

When it comes to reporting the news, details change; principles endure.