Quintin Jardine's blog

By now, I’m finding that my eyes go indistinctly bleary whenever the name Leveson is mentioned. As a chum of mine remarked in  the pub  last night, I wonder how much the lawyers are making out of all this. However I was struck by part of Rebekkah Wade Kemp Brooks’ evidence, her story of her disagreement with Rupert over her insistence on ramping up celebrity content over serious matter, and her reason for doing so. She looked at the audience for TV talent shows and other such crap, and determined that if there was such a public taste she was going to feed it for  the purpose of selling more newspapers. Commercially that can’t be faulted. Journalistically, it’s crap. It was based on following trends not setting them, and that to me is the death knell that is being rung over the corpse of most of British journalism. Our great newspapers have always been leaders. They used to call The Times, ‘The Thunderer’, and its editor was a great figure on the land. Today, along with the other broadsheets, its tone of voice is whinge, whine and whimper, and very few people have a clue who its editor is.