I am in a twitter spat with ex Fleet Street editor Neil "Wolfman" Wallis who is concerned - rightly - that new legislation (Section 40) will restrict the ability of non national newspapers to pursue investigative reporting. But in begging sympathy for journalists, a man who has now turned to the dark side, to PR, fails to accept how low our profession has sunk in the public esteem.
I attempted to put that point to him with a cheeky tweet suggesting that the deadwood press holds no-one to account any more. Poodles who are part of a corrupt establishment have no bite. Wallis replied with insult ( fair enough who am I to criticise?) and then went onto assert that I could not have been a journalist for a quarter of a century because he had done a google search. Wallis shows the true quality of investigative journalism in 2017. Better stick to PR old man.
I reckon working for the Evening Standard, AFX, etc counts as journalism even for a luddite PR tosser like Wallis. I think his real problem is with this "interwebby" thing. I earn a living from writing in a commercial set up which appears on a website not in the traditional press. We break stories and expose financial frauds the "traditional press" don't touch. To me that is good solid old fashioned journalism but because of the medium ( a profitable website not a loss making paper) Wallis cannot accept that.
Okay he is a patronising old fool. So what? The problem is that he is of a generation of journalists who trashed little people with hacking and horrible doorstepping. I really don't care about the celebs Fleet Street harassed and hacked it is the little folk who were exploited that concern me. The press has been shown in both its political and in financial reporting ( my world) to be corrupt in that it is in bed with those it is meant to expose. If you accept a drip drip of "exclusives" and hope for a job on the dark side in due course, from those you are meant to challenge you become a poodle of the establishment. And that, largely, is how the mainstream press stands today.
No wonder, more and more folks turn to the web for news. Old farts of the Wallis era insist that the web is all "fake news" but we see time and time again (the BBC & C4 on the US election being a case in point as I demonstrated repeatedly on this website) that the Old media serves up vast amounts of fake news too. Meanwhile if Wallis could open his eyes he'd see some fantastic truly investigative journalism on the web.
Wallis is right about Section 40. But he fails to understand that my profession ( which used to be his before he went for the easy money on the dark side) has disgraced itself so badly in so many ways that it will find it hard to rally support in this its day of need