In the days when newspapers set the daily news agenda much was made of the \u2018church and state\u2019 argument. This made clear that advertisers had zero impact over the judgement of Editors, that Editors\u2019 decisions were sacrosanct and not for sale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same rule applied to TV \u2013 advertisers had no right to pressurise those responsible for content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consumers bought, read, and believed the newspapers they chose not on the basis of who was advertising in them but on the editorial content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
This did not always work, as two examples separated by over forty years show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1972 thalidomide scandal and the role played by what was then Distillers, was a \u2018The Sunday Times\u2019 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 \u2018Good Times, Bad Times\u2019 Evans recalls Barrett pointing out: \u201cDistillers are our largest single advertiser \u2026. I know that won\u2019t stop you and it shouldn\u2019t.\u201d Distillers duly pulled all their advertising from \u2018The Sunday Times\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contrast \u2018The Sunday Times\u2019 stance with that of \u2018The Daily Telegraph\u2019 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 \u2018Swiss Leaks\u2019 broke. The story was uncovered by a group of investigative journalists organised by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and involving \u2018The Guardian\u2019, the BBC\u2019s Panorama team, and \u2018Le Monde\u2019 amongst others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oborne maintained he was stopped from writing about the scandal in \u2018The Telegraph\u2019 as a result of that paper\u2019s commercial relationship with HSBC and duly resigned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018The Telegraph\u2019 denied this, although they didn\u2019t cover the story at all on the day it broke; 5 days later they buried six paragraphs at the bottom of page 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Cog Blog covered this story at the time<\/a>, and made the point that this episode would weaken \u2018The Telegraph\u2019 in the eyes of its readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBy allegedly giving in to an advertiser and downgrading a news-story everyone else seems to think is important \u2018The Telegraph\u2019 will have diminished itself in the eyes of its readers. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Journalists aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The church and state division was a factor in the existence of a strong, independent media sector. Something everyone, including advertisers welcomed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peter Oborne\u2019s current home is \u2018Byline Times\u2019, a bastion of breaking stories others chose to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another out of the same mould is \u2018The Nerve\u2019 set up by five journalists unhappy that their home, \u2018The Observer\u2019 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 \u2018The Sunday Times\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carole\u2019s piece is here<\/a>, and is very well worth a read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those interested in maintaining a free, quality, varied press might consider subscribing to titles like Byline Times<\/a> and The Nerve<\/a> to ensure that voices like Cadwalladr\u2019s and Oborne\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To those who argue there\u2019s no appetite for the long game, consider \u2018Private Eye\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started with Harry Evans, one of our greatest ever newspaper editors. To paraphrase him from many years ago (he died in 2020): \u2018the coming of native advertising makes it even more important that Editors should have the final say over what goes in the newspaper\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re all editors now, or so say those championing \u2018freedom of speech\u2019, a concept that shape-shifts when it leads to exposing certain factions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of us are as unsuited to be editors as we are to be copywriters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The church versus state notion matters. Advertisers shouldn\u2019t influence journalists. Nor should politicians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to reporting the news, details change; principles endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the days when newspapers set the daily news agenda much was made of the \u2018church and state\u2019 argument. This made clear that advertisers had zero impact over the judgement of Editors, that Editors\u2019 decisions were sacrosanct and not for sale. The same rule applied to TV \u2013 advertisers had no right to pressurise those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1965"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1966,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1965\/revisions\/1966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
It seems more than likely that readership will drop, across all platforms.
\u2018The Telegraph\u2019 will thus lose ad revenue.
And all because \u2018The Telegraph\u2019 didn\u2019t want to lose ad revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n