Hello and welcome to the UK column viewers and listeners.
A beautiful day here in Plymouth, really lovely.
And you can see from my backdrop that it's looking good.
We've got lots of blue sky, a bit of clouds, but it is really
a lovely day and of course that's always a boost.
Now each guest I have is always special, but I have a lady
today, Eugenie Vernie, who I have known for some time.
We've had some interesting conversations because she's had
an extensive career as a journalist and I'm really,
really pleased that today she's agreed to join me to talk about
her professional life and also how she sees things, sees things
in the press and media world. Eugenie, thank you very much for
agreeing to come on with me on the UK column.
Totally my pleasure Brian. Nice to be here.
OK, lovely backdrop you have there Eugenie.
Absolutely fascinating books and and the mirror in the background
works really well. I think I can see a little bit
of sunshine coming through your window now you're north of the
border and if you're happy to say where you are, that's great.
If not, but it it looks as though you've also got a nice
day up there. Is that right?
No, that's that's a trick of the mirror I suspect.
No, we have what I refer to as grey Dome here with light
drizzle and it is currently 16° so a bit different from down
South. Oh.
Dear All right, Well, I'm really sorry about that.
I, I tried some, somebody sent us a little card about a week
ago, I think, and, and it shows a poor cartoon individual
standing under quite a downpour and lots of grain, great clouds.
And the caption is, has, has every, has anybody tried turning
the weather off and on again to see whether it sorts the problem
out? And I thought that was quite a
good cartoon. Anyway, there, there we go.
Eugenie, I'm going to say again, thank, thank you for agreeing to
this because we've had lots of interesting conversations and
I've prompted quite hard for you to excuse me, come and join me.
Because when, when we've had discussions on what's happening,
you've always been going back into your career.
And I think it would just be so fantastic for the UK column
audience to hear a little bit about what a journalistic career
is and all the things you've experienced before before I just
give you a prompt to get starting on that.
Wary of discussing ages and things, but I did notice that
your start year is exactly the same as my start year.
Am I allowed to to mention that that year on on camera?
Is that OK? That's absolutely fine.
Yeah. I mean, we are, we are absolute
contemporaries. I think I'm a wee bit older than
you, but I think we are we are the same vintage.
Well, we're just sticking the year.
The year is 1954. So you were born in 1954, as was
I What a great year that was. The world was obviously
dramatically improved from that day on.
OK, OK, now you, you were coined enough to send through ACV,
which I I've read and I've found absolutely fascinating.
Just to pull out a few bits is that you come from a from a left
wing background and you describe yourself as being hard left
wired, but in certainly in the present day, you're marooned
politically. Just tell us a bit about how,
how it was that you, you not only went through school, but
you came into your journalistic career with, with such a, a
strong lean to the left. So much depends on the family
that you're born into and you, you can't choose that.
And I, I was born into a family. I'm I'm an only child, but with
parents who had come through the 30s and the 40s very much to the
left of politics. They'd both been members of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, at some point, members
of the Labor Party. My father was a walking
encyclopaedia on the Spanish Civil War.
I mean, when he died, I had to sort through about 50 books on
the topic. He knew a lot about the politics
from the 30s and 40s and that's what shaped their world view.
And so I was born into that. And so you kind of really don't
know much different until you, until you get you, you, you
start exploring a bit more. But I continue down that route
and I, and I, I kind of feel that and I still do feel that I
time, I, I'm on the side of the underdog, but my whole view of
what an underdog and an overdog, if you like, looks like has
changed. But I took that through into my
work and I dropped out of school and I joined the Labour weekly
Tribune for a year. The deal was with my mother that
if I, if I dropped out of school, which she was not happy
about obviously, and worked at Tribune for a year, then if I
after that I went to secretarial college, then we had to deal.
So that's what I did. I dropped out of school halfway
through my A levels because clearly there was nothing more
to learn. I knew everything, so why stay
at school? I had a brilliant year at
Tribune and learnt tonnes about how journalism works and about
how production works and then went to Secretary of college
which lasted for literally 2 days.
Two days sadly, because I realised that that was not going
to work, kind of. I kind of regret not getting the
shorthand, but hey. Eugenia, you started off off
there in in the days of literally lots of paper moving
and spinning and you're in the days of proper printing
processes. Just set the scene a little bit
about what was it like to to be inside a building in with people
involved with the press. You're in typewriter day,
telephone day. I can imagine a lot of people
smoking as they worked. This was real old school
journalism. Just tell us a bit about what
you remember about the environment and what it was like
and and the people. Yeah, parking to your weekly
paper and obviously a bit different and there was less
urgency about it. Working on daily newspapers back
in the 70s and the 80s was just just an amazing experience
because there was a really huge vibe about it all.
There were a lot of people, obviously lots of paper because
everything was paper, Telephones ringing all the time, people
answering phones. And as the night wore on on a
daily paper and you were getting nearer deadline, the whole
momentum speeded up and up and up and up and up.
And then when you were what was called off stone, which is also
to do with hot metal, because it was still hot metal in those
days, you could say I've gone from hot metal to AI if you
like. That's, that's my, that's my
career. The whole vibe would change
again because then you would hear the printing presses start
to start up and then you. Yeah, and the whole building
would move. Particularly notice that further
on at the Morningstar, I could notice that Guardian slightly
less natural career at the Daily Express in Manchester.
The whole building moving when the presses started up was
really tangible and you kind of felt that you were part of
something that was important. And I have no, because I haven't
actually worked in a newsroom for quite a while now.
I don't know whether that still applies, but I somehow suspect
that that particular vibe and urgency and sense of, I was
going to say carpus, but let's let's not go there, but sort of
a joint endeavour, I suspect that may have gone.
A real feeling of teamwork you're in in that environment.
And what came into my head, you're talking about those
printing presses firing up and the machinery.
And then the thing begins to go. It's a bit like firing up a ship
to go to sea. And the moment you feel that
vibration through the vessel, the whole thing literally does
come alive. And, and, and you know, you're a
team of people, Eugenia, that that time, well, actually
through its career, I think the Morning Star, the Tribune and
the Morning Star, although they've been small niche
publications, have actually done some pretty good journal
journalism in their day. And they've certainly been
fearless in going into areas that the Porsche papers wouldn't
get involved in. Can do you have any particular
stories back from those days that you can remember and you
think, gosh, we did a good job or was that, is that a bit too
far in the in the distant past? I think that probably is to try
and pull out anything in particular, but that is
absolutely the case that both Tribune and the Morning Star,
the quality of journalism was exceedingly high as it was on,
on, you know, when I went later I moved to the Guardian and, and
on the Daily Express, I mean the Guardian over here, the Daily
Express over there. But I think what what United
Newspapers, whether indeed the Morning Star, the Daily Express,
the Guardian in the 70s and 80s was just the quality of the
journalism. You would start with the same
ingredients and of course all proprietors would spin later.
All had their agendas. And as journalists you were
completely aware of who your proprietor was and what their
spin was. But what I sense has changed
from the quality of what's being sort of churned out now is that
there's no discernment, there's no desire to find what we could
loosely label the truth, although truth is one of those
words that is very, very difficult to actually define
because everybody's truth looks very slightly different.
You can pick up the facts and you can move from about.
But I think if I give you, if you, if I give you an example of
of the process that took place together to get a story into a
paper back then compared to what's happening now, I think
that that probably gives you some context.
Would you like me to do that? Absolutely.
I was going to try and prompt you to head in that direction.
You've got onto it now. Let's go for it.
This is this is really what we want to know.
What what was it like then And and what was good, what was bad
and how do you see it now? This is yeah.
Great area. OK, so, so the process, and this
was the same process that give or take with with, you know,
nuances and adjustments, that was that that applied to the
Morning Star. Not so much at Tribune because I
said that was a weekly, but let's look at the Morning Star,
look at the Guardian and then later I joined the Daily Express
in Manchester. So you've got three very
different publications. The thing that really united
them was how the the news would actually end up in the paper and
parking the spin. OK, it's just the process.
So you have a story. Now this can either originate
from the news desk or it can originate from the reporter.
Either way, you have a story, and the story would be written
by the reporter, researched. They would go out of the office,
which hardly ever happens anymore.
They would go out of the office, they would meet people, they
would put the story together. They would write the story.
They would then file the story with a typewriter and hand it
across to the news desk. The news editor would then look
at it, look at it against the brief they'd been given, see
whether it covered everything, if there were gaps, go back to
the reporter and say, well, you've missed this, this, this
and this, and can you stand that quote up?
Because I don't think you've stood that up.
Where's that come from? Where did you get this from?
Make it stand up. It it needs a bit more
substance. Reporter might have to have
another shot at it. And then the story would go back
to the news desk. And when the news desk was happy
with it, they would pass it across to the production team,
which is where I came in because I worked as a production
journalist on all these titles. I did a bit of writing as well,
but that was mainly features writing.
We're talking about hard news production now.
So it would go across to a journalist known as the copy
taster. And this is exactly what the
copy Taster would do. And I've had my share of that.
So you look at the story and you would assess whether it how
newsworthy you thought it was in terms of the space you got and
so on and so forth. And you cross it off your list.
Basically, you were expecting it.
You would then hand it across to the chief sub editor.
There will be other people as well, but let's simplify it.
Chief sub editor would take it and say, right, that's going to
be a page lead. So the main story on an inside
page, not on the front page, but on the inside page.
So they would then decide what style it had, how long it had to
be, etcetera. At that point it would be put
out to down what known as down table sub editors, which is
where obviously I started out as a down table sub editor.
And it is with some pride that I can say that I was the youngest
female journalist on the Guardian when I got that job.
Very happy with that. It was good.
Well done. Yes, it was good.
And so you then get the story and, you know, depending on the
time of day, you have more or less time to turn the thing
around. You know, if it's the start of
your shift, which would usually be early to mid afternoon, you
had plenty of time to play around with it, Polish it.
Often it involved rewriting things.
Often it involved going back to the the reporter.
It usually goes direct to the reporter.
And you know, among the people whose copy I, I edited were the
likes of the woman who defines grumpiness, Melanie Phillips,
and also Alan Rusbridger, who went on to become the editor of
the Guardian. But I was there in Peter
Preston's days, very different. Anyway, so you, you go through
this piece of copy. This is, remember, there's no
computer screens, nothing, nothing, none of that, just bits
of paper. You then have to cut it to
length. So you have to actually do word
counts on it. There are ninja ways of doing
that. So you have to maybe cut 10
centimetres out of it, but keep, keep the sense, keep all the
best bits and so on. You do all that, write your
headline, etcetera. And then you'd hand it over to a
very, very important person who as far as I'm aware, has long,
long, long since gone. This was the revised sub editor
and this was the province of Grumpy Old men.
Wherever I wrote Grumpy Old Men and they would, their job was to
basically do a quality check on what the sub editor had done to
make sure that the job had been done properly and to pick up on
anything that had fallen through the net.
Most of the time you were fine. But if you cocked up then you
would be called across and and say come here.
The one on the Guardian, his name is Morris.
And he had a pipe because yeah, everybody smoked in those days.
So have fun of his pipe. Come over here.
And it's oh God, now what? So did you mean that?
No, I didn't mean that. It's and there we go.
Finally, finally, after he'd had to go at it, it would then get
into the system and it would be set in hot metal, which is a
whole different story. And and then it had may have to
be cut again. And that would be the job of the
stone sub editor. And that was a really
interesting experience as a woman on a very, very, very male
dominated, very misogynist environment.
But it has its moments as well. It was good fun as well.
So you, you that would be real pressured, but very, very
different from what happens now, obviously.
But at that point you'd get what's known as galley proofs.
So the, the story would just be in a long piece of news printed
on a long piece of new Sprint. And at that point it would go to
the lawyer. Yes, lawyers looked at stuff in
those days and particularly anything.
They would crawl all over stories that were going to be
controversial, but they would look at everything.
And so from the reporter to it actually appearing in the paper,
you had all these quality control mechanisms going on.
That's gone. And you can see it in what's
what's in what gets published. You can see what happens now.
There is no quality control. Whoever is putting the story
together, and for a lot of a lot of stories that's now press
releases which are barely changed, it just goes from or
loosely call it the reporter straight on onto onto your
screen. Eugenie.
Into your paper. Eugenie It makes that move very
often with with typos and really crass mistakes and all all the
papers are doing this. I mean, UK column team,
obviously for a long time we would have to qualify, classify
ourselves as amateurs. But even, you know, we hated it
when we realised that a, a typo had gone through or you'd spelt
something incorrectly. And if you're just handling your
own work, that can be very easy to do.
But I've over the last, certainly over the last five
years, there seems to me to have been a dramatic increase in the
in the in blatant mistakes and and incorrect spelling, typos,
sometimes blocks of text have been left in.
And this is not just, you know, the smaller, cheaper papers.
This is the big boys doing this. And it must indicate that the
overall professional standards have dropped and their own due
diligence inside the papers dropped.
Absolutely. I mean, quite recently there was
a story in the Telegraph which got quite a lot of coverage
everywhere else, which is about this, this power couple who were
complaining that they that because VOT had been bunked onto
private, private school fees that they could no longer afford
5 holidays a year. And it was accompanied by stock
photos it emerged. But then it emerged that the
entire story was fabricated. I'm probably generated by AII,
don't know whether that's actually been nailed or not, but
the whole thing was a complete lie.
This is the Daily Telegraph, which not.
It's never been one of my favourite publications, but you
know, it used to have a reputation for being reasonably
good newspaper of record. But this was a complete lie.
And they had to, and, and they actually said in the, in the
apology that they had to publish, which was in the last,
in the last week or so, they, they said we've now checked the
facts. Well, hello, I've just explained
how facts used to get checked. Do you not do any of that
anymore? So I'm now at the stage where I
actually don't believe anything I read in the mainstream media.
And one of the things that I, I truly respect about UK column
and and and and and and other independent sources of news is
that you, you provide your sources, you know, you actually
list them. So, you know, if I'm looking at
something, say what, what that, that, that, I'm not sure about
that. And I'm not sure about the spin
so and so has put on that I can go away and check it.
And you used to be with, you know, newspapers used to
attribute far more than they do now.
It was much harder to find the source material.
Of course, now, because now you can actually find the source
material, ironically, much is much more easily than you could
say 30-40 years ago. But there's a massive mismatch
now. And I honestly think that
mainstream media is spiralling down the plug hole so fast.
And yeah, it and I just, yeah, there's a yes.
Is there some rose tinted glasses stuff going on here a
bit? Because we do tend to philtre
stuff and we pick out the good times.
And yeah, there was, you know, there were things about how the
media worked then, how it worked in the interim that were not
good. You know, you look certainly
look at the history of some of the tabloids, you know, and
looking at it from a woman's perspective, there was a lot of
misogyny. There was a lot of issues around
that. But overall, as you say, you
just look at this stuff. It's so badly written, it's
sloppy. It's not been checked, and you
can't trust it. So that's where we are.
That's where we are. And then of course we're in a
big pond where we have the media itself complaining and warning
about the dangers of misinformation and
disinformation and how we need accurate truth.
And then we have an army of so called truth checkers, fact
checkers, most of whom seem to be completely self appointed
with qualifications to their own satisfaction and not necessarily
anybody's out also. So the papers go downhill in the
quality of the reports and the accuracy of the reports.
And then those same papers as sort of talking to us, the
general public and warning about the dangers of, of poor
information. It's it's obscene really to see
this this happen. Having made that comment and
while it while it's in my head just to press on the business of
of the earlier days and reporters going out.
This to me seems to be one of the key things that each paper
down to local fam, excuse me, family owned local papers was
sending a person out, man or woman, a reporter to go and find
the story. And finding the story meant
actually being able to talk with the individual connected to that
story and then going to talk to other human beings in order to
build the story. It was all absolutely around
interacting with people in order to get the story.
And we we know today that particularly young journalists
who've perhaps just come in from university and they've got their
basic journalistic qualifications.
They are sitting in a room and they're tasked with producing so
many stories a day and they only source information for the story
from the Internet itself. That's that's what I have been
led to believe and you can correct me if if I'm wrong on
that. No, that, that, that is exactly
how it would appear to be working in, I'm not going to say
every single case because obviously there are still
examples of, of journalists who who do dig and delve and do find
good stories. But the whole cost cutting, cost
cutting, cost cutting and, and moving away from print, which is
inevitable, sadly. Although interestingly, what is
interesting is that there has been a big upsurge in sales of
what I would call specialist print magazines, You know,
hobby, hobbies and special interests.
That whole area of print journalism continues to thrive.
But in terms of news, it's quite clear that nobody gets their
core news from newspapers anymore, whether that's local or
national. And yeah, I mean, what, what?
And, and, and the whole, the whole the COVID recorded that
the COVID, I think put further nails in various coffins, one of
which being newspaper proprietors say, whoa, all these
dudes are working at home. We can get rid of our offices
now. We can have them all sitting at
home. So not only do you have
journalists not going out unless they're freelancers and and
trying to find stories, but if they're employed journalists,
you have them sitting at their own laptops because they no
doubt will have provided their own kit now.
And as you say, just getting all that information from elsewhere
on the Internet, not going out and meeting anybody, maybe
making a few phone calls. And crucially, which circles
back to, you know, what I was talking about before about the
whole atmosphere of being in a newsroom.
One of the things that was so important was bouncing ideas off
other people. And if you're just sitting at
home and that's all you're doing and your, your, your output is
virtually measured by the centimetre, you haven't done
enough. You haven't done enough.
Come on. More stories, more.
We need more clicks. We need more click bait.
You're never going to. Your skills are never going to
grow. Except your skills for actually
turning out crap faster, I guess.
But you're not having any, particularly if you're a local
newspaper, you have nothing to do with the community in which
you're based. And that's even exacerbated
further by big proprietors like Reach, which is an ironic name
for it because they now consolidate their news
operations in hubs which serve enormous geographical areas.
So you'll have reporters, you know, based in city A covering
city B who know, absolutely sold all about City B and yeah, and
and it's it's and the other, the other crucial.
I just checked this in as well. The absolutely really, really
important thing when you're looking at in terms of
maintaining any semblance, semblance of local
accountability and local democracy is the demise of the
local court reporter and the local council reporter.
Gone, gone, gone, gone don't exist.
We have this amazing situation where the BBC, which is such a
huge monopoly, is now putting the so called democracy
reporters into into local papers.
So when you're dealing with the local paper, you can't even be
sure it is local because if you delve behind it, you can find
the behind the title is the name Breach.
And and then you can have ABBC reporter embedded as the local
democracy reporter, which now means that the BBC's got its
fingers right into the local community with all of its
processes. So we're seeing, it seems to me,
you know, a massive grouping up a centralisation of, of news in
the country that actually instead of having and your day
when you started out there would have been at the lowest levels
still quite a lot of family owned local papers producing
papers, maybe at a District Council level.
Of course they would cross the sort of administrative borders,
but very local catchment areas. Those family papers were still
there. Then we had a selection of
smaller titles and then we started to go through the grades
up to the big boys, Telegraph, Guardian Telegraph and and
Times. But at least there was a
spectrum. Now this is all being gathered
together with fewer and fewer people in control.
This is this has got to be dangerous Is well, isn't it?
I don't know. What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, you know, my, my route into journalism, as you
will have gathered was, was unusual.
But back in that day, back in the day, the normal routine
would have been to start out on a local newspaper and you would
have been doing the council, you know, going to the council
meetings. You would have been doing some
court reportings, which means that you had to have a, a basic
understanding of how magistrates courts or sheriff courts,
etcetera, in, in Scotland, how all that would work.
And you would also be expected to do the really unpleasant end
of of it, which is death knocks going and knocking on the doors
of people who've experienced sudden deaths or, you know,
tragic deaths and so on. You would learn a lot.
You'd learn a lot about how people respond, how, how, how
to, how to craft questions, how to look out for patterns and
you'd make contacts. So if you were, you know,
certainly I witnessed this because I also worked for the
pressing general in Aberdeen for some years.
And yeah, I mean, I was, I was, again, I was a production
journalist because that that's just the trajectory in my
personal career took me on. But you know the the guy who did
all the council reporting, who ironically eventually to judge,
jump ship and go and work for Aberdeen City Council.
But at the time that we were both working for that paper, his
knowledge and understanding of how the local councils in
Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire worked, who the key players
were, where the power lay, crucially where the power lay,
where the decision, real decisions were taken was
absolutely outstanding. And that's all gone that that
the media's ability to say with any degree of confidence that
this is actually what's happening inside your council.
And I worked at Aberdeen, this is connected.
So I'm going to go off on this little tangent.
I also worked at Aberdeen City Council as a corporate
communications officer and the local evening paper that the was
on our case day in, day in out, day out.
You know, every single day would start with another call from
from the evening paper asking we've just heard this, we've
been tipped off about this, is this true?
Can you tell us about this? Because their reporters had
contacts within the council who were telling them about things
that they felt needed exploring. Now, you know at least 50% of
them are wild goose choices and really annoying for us as
corporate communications officers.
But quite often you were doing an awful lot of reputation
management because local journalists had actually
unearthed stuff that the council didn't want you to know about.
Nobody's doing that as far as I can see anymore.
It's certainly being done less. And as, as you're talking
through that, I was thinking back to sort of my earlier days
of challenging Plymouth City councillors to what was
happening with money in the city.
You know, my story is I, I became aware that large amounts
of money that was coming into the city, principally as
regeneration grant money, much of it from the EU, was being
misappropriated. And it was never getting to the
project it was designed for. Or it was sort of syphoned off
to support some, some other project or indeed in some cases
what seemed to be personal initiatives.
But at that time, local papers had enough.
They were strong enough, they were robust enough that their
journalists, investigative reporters, they had
investigative reporters were also asking questions.
And, and so when I was in the midst of this, and it did get
quite heavy at one point, but it was reassuring when you actually
started to see some of the truth coming up to the surface in the
local paper. And then I was to watch as to
how this was closed down. And we, we won't mention
anybody's names, but one of the journalists who was clearly
doing his job as an investigative journalist was was
taken away from investigative reporting and moved across to
another specialisation. So I read into that, that
clearly there'd been some underhand dealing bully boy
tactics probably between the local council and the local
paper. So I, I'm going to say that
when, well, when am I talking? I'm talking probably 2005 up to
2015, that sort of period. I absolutely saw the power of
the local newspapers squashed. How that was being done.
I didn't understand all of it, but it was clear that the local
council seemed to have the power to, you know, stop things being
published or if they were published, the article was
greatly toned down. And that was then.
And since then we've moved on hugely and we've got these huge
single organisations like Reach controlling the whole of the the
media. Yeah, so this is, this is a sad
loss because it gave us an outlet for the truth, didn't it?
Yes, it did. And I and I, and I think I mean
again, you know, let's take taking my roast tinted glasses
off here. All media organisations have
been, how shall we say is subject to external pressure,
all of them. And of course, you know, we, we
have the official, the official, what can we call it, device of
the D notices which are just slapped on stories that you're
not allowed to touch. That's more at national level,
but certainly at at local level. Yes, there would, there would
be, there always have have been compromises made, stories that
have been pulled. But I think the key thing is
that the stories were written in the 1st place.
They were researched and written in the 1st place before they
were pulled. What I see very little evidence
of looking at my own local paper.
The local ones where I'm based in Perthshire, I look at them
and I I can't see any evidence of digging below really the top
layer the the, the the top soil. I can't see anybody digging
underneath that. Now, that is also a function of
the fact that there aren't enough bodies, you know, there
isn't the luxury of time to actually go away and investigate
this. But if I cast my mind back again
going up to national level, I think the time that it took to
unpick, you know, for example, I was at the Guardian when the
whole Jeremy Thorpe story blew open with, you know, with with
his his affair, which would nobody would.
I don't think batten eyelid really too much out now.
But what was his name? Norman, Norman, Norman car,
it'll come to me. But you know that all that was a
lot of a lot of that was guardian research and the whole
story, you know, blew open and eventually it went to trial.
But you know, that took them I would say six months to a year
to actually actually, how should we say cement that story and
that I can't see that happening anywhere anymore.
Just doesn't doesn't happen. Eugenia, there is so much to
talk to, sorry talk about. As we're as we're discussing
these things, there's more and more bits popping into my mind.
So I'll do this, this one just because it's a bit of fun.
Is that on the one of the walls here in the UK Com studio we
have a framed letter. And that letter came in from
Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail.
And the reason we have this very nice letter from him with a, a
lovely wet signature, which is another thing that seems to have
gone, is that back in the day, we're talking about 2010, we
sent him information about the political charity Common
Purpose. And that of course was a charity
that we'd been doing considerable investigation into
their activities and warning that there were many areas where
we thought it was up to no good. So the reason we sent this to
Paul Dacre is he was being challenged as things started to
come to a head with the Media Standards Trust.
So this is when suddenly we started to see the idea that the
press wasn't working properly and there needed to be greater
controls on the press and they'd they'd been unethical by
breaking and hacking into people's phones.
So there was a lot of controversy Where that came from
would be quite interesting to discuss, but I'll stick with the
story. So we, we read that Paul Dacre
had been given quite a grilling by these people and we sent him
a little package of information saying, are you aware that
there's a, a connection between many of the people who grilled
you? They're all.
Part of a specialist organisation called Common
Purpose and we of course had done our research and so we sent
in factual documents, documents mainly that we've received as a
result of Freedom of Information requests.
And it all went off. It went quiet for a couple of
weeks and then we received this very short but very polite
letter back thanking us profusely for the information
that we sent. And it was signed by the man
himself with his ink pen. And it was such a nice letter.
It's on the wall. But of course what happened was
everything went quiet for about I think it was about 3 months.
And I thought to myself, well, I sent all that information off
and nothing happened. And then one Saturday morning I
went over to my the local shop and to buy a paper.
And there on the the counter was the Daily Telegraph.
And the front page was a massive headline about common purpose.
And I had to buy the paper. And when I got it home and was
looking with at it with my cup of coffee, inside was no less
than 10 full pages on common purpose.
And the Daily Mail had really, really got stuck into the
article. I'd never seen 10 pages on one
particular a topic like that from the Mail.
And I was absolutely over the moon because that was clearly
going to do a lot of damage. And just coming to the end of
this later, I, I was able to meet an independent journalist
who'd worked with the Daily Mail team on producing that article.
And I said it's fantastic article.
We did give you quite a lot of information.
It would have been a nice to have had a mention.
And he looked at me and there was a pause and he said, well,
you know how it is, Brian. So.
And that was of course that we weren't quite in the club.
The UK column was was there, but we weren't in the club.
But the point I really want to make out of this is that when
the Daily Mail was given factual information and a lot, a lot of
it, they were not frightened at really ruffling, ruffling the
feathers. But I I sense that now papers or
even more scaredy cat of actually getting in and doing
the business when they find something's wrong.
Or is that is that a bit unfair, Eugenie?
To be honest, I don't know, because I'm not part of that
world anymore. My sense is that journalists
the, the, the most courageous journalists are the freelancers
like Vanessa, like Vanessa Bailey, who, you know, perform
proper brave journalistic functions.
There's an awful lot because I'm, I should say that I've,
I've, I've was an energy National Union of Journalists
activists for a long time as well, while I was a working
journalist and I'm in fact a life member.
And what I see now in my union is an awful lot of attention on
DI and equality and protecting people and being nice to people
banging on about misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.
We must, we must support the BBC as a public service broadcaster
and a kind of really top level naivety about how the world
actually works. And you know, and despite my
best endeavours, I've still to get my union to explain to me
what their different, what their definition is of misinformation,
disinformation, malinformation. Nobody's provided me with that
yet. And I think that even among
those who are not members of the NUJ, because it's, it will be
the minority who are there, is this kind of, it's there's a
lack of, I think there's a lack of bravery and I think there's a
lack of rigour. And I don't, you know, I'm very
glad that my daughter did not decide to be a journalist, let's
put it like that. I wouldn't have ever discouraged
her. And I think she would have made
a very good, very feisty journalist.
But I'm very glad that she's chosen a different half because,
and I know every generation will say this, you know, about what's
come since. But I think in terms of the
media, and that applies to broadcast media as well, I think
that we are in a, we are in a definitely in a, we're
definitely in a worse place. I mean, I was listening because
I forced myself to do it. Marianna Springs takedown of
Kate Sharima Shamarani Shamarani on her Mariana down Marianna in
conspiracy land thing. So basically they've they've
unpicked the Panorama 1 and repurposed it as as A5 parter B
for BB for Radio 4. And I was just listening to that
and thinking, where's your basic journalism here, Madam?
Where is it you refer to? I've spoken to experts and they
say, well, sorry, who are these experts and why aren't you
quoting them directly? And it's it's this, this is the
level that we seem to be at now that it's people pick an agenda
and they. I mean, yeah, as I say, it's
complicated because back in the day that Guardian or the Daily
Express would pick an agenda and to a certain extent you would
manipulate the news into it. But it was always underpinned by
much higher standards of research, writing and common
sense, frankly. Yeah, Eugenie, if we may, can we
just go a little bit into ownership and bias of, of the
media? Very early on, as we started
talking today, you, you mentioned proprietors and, and
that they had a natural spin and you, you, you, the newspaper was
aware of that. And I, I think we'd all say yes,
we, we understand that. So we, we can have sort of
political spin across the papers.
So we could be left left wing with the Star or the Tribune,
and then we can, we can move supposedly right wing across to
whatever you want to choose the Express and the Daily Mail.
And then we have the, I'm smiling as I say this, but the,
you know, the Times and the Telegraph that try to sell the
idea that they're above all that and what they're saying is
absolutely true. But of course they're also
controlled. The Guardian has, has has long
sat and said, well, we're controlled by an independent
board that that that was the Scott Trust if I remember
correctly. And therefore you can trust the
Guardian because because we're not pulled in One Direction or
or the other. But there has always been
control, particularly through powerful individuals such as
Murdoch for example. But now we've got something
else, it seems to me at work. I've mentioned the grouping up,
but it's as though there's a unified political control coming
over the press and media so that it's not even going to go in the
direction of left and right, Conservatives, Labour.
It's simply going to go on what we should believe.
And this is if we take global warming as one subject, it's as
though all the papers now will only print the line that the
United Nations or the World Economic Forum say we should be
following over climate change. So the control of the papers
seems now to not even be a fragmented control.
It's a centralised control, not even in UK, it's higher than
that. It's a global control.
Is that a bit of a, is that a bit of an over over the top
analysis? How do you see the the press
today in this issue of Bias and Control?
I It's really difficult to know how much of that has always been
there. I mean, certainly there have
been stories and certainly around the topic that the UK
column, you know, you have, you have been pursuing forever,
which is, you know, about child abuse, paedophilia, etcetera,
etcetera. The the reluctance of UK media
to go anywhere near that left or right in the middle.
That has certainly been, you know, that that has been my
experience of that, not necessarily first hand of seeing
stories being buried, but just an awareness that we don't go
near that. OK.
So I think that that has there's always been elements of this,
what's really, as you say, in your face now.
And of course, we experienced it first with, with during the
COVID years. Well, we didn't know, we didn't
experience it first, but we most really starkly when literally
literally every media outlet, digital print, whatever was
saying exactly the same thing and questioning nothing, which I
think, you know, I, I had been sceptical and wondering about
what how the world works all my life, but that really shook me
to to the core. Oh my God, it's just this is
just 100 karat propaganda with nobody making any effort to
disguise it. And as you say, now we have the,
you know, the boiling climate and, and, and this extraordinary
narrative where, you know, it's going to hit 30°.
You've all got to stay indoors and close your close your
curtains because you're going to die.
Yeah, next week you're going on holiday to Turkey.
Don't get it. Again, what I don't know,
because I'm not an insider and haven't been for a long time, is
whether this is just an understanding or whether it goes
deeper than that. And there is, yeah, as you say,
it's being fed down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down,
down. And it's coming from, as so much
else appears to be, is coming from somewhere that is, that is
well outside our control. You know, I've worked for
various proprietors. I've worked for Robert Maxwell.
I've never worked for Murdoch. I can never bring myself to work
for Murdoch. And I worked for Maxwell, I
worked for various iterations on the Daily Express because I was
there for five or six years. I've worked for the Guardian,
which has always been the Scott Trust and still is the Scott
Trust, although it seems to have compromised itself massively
with the sell out of the Observer to Tortoise.
And yeah, I mean, it's, but now it's yeah, everybody's.
And you almost think, well, OK, has somebody put out a press
release somewhere that says you've all got to publish this
about the global warming today? This is today's spin on We're
going to boil. And that's how that is actually
how it now feels. The other thing that I was
talking about was somebody quite recently is the stories will
appear and then completely vanish.
Does nobody ever follows up anymore?
Nobody follows up. Back in my day, if you had a
good story, you'd follow the bloody thing up, you know, you'd
find out, you know, a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks down the line.
Well, what became of that story? Did it, did it come?
Was it, was that the outcome or was that the outcome?
Now they just disappear. Nobody follows up.
I've challenged mainstream journalists on that, that, that
subject and said to them, yeah, but the problem is you never,
you never follow up, you never stay on the subject.
And in fact, the Daily Mail did not follow up on its 10 pages
on, you know, on common purpose because their 10 pages
demonstrated that they'd clearly seen risks and, and problems
with the organisation of what it was doing.
And if you, if you put 10 pages into a Saturday, I'll qualify.
I think it was 9 1/2 but I've called it 10.
But we're talking a lot. If you've done that on a
Saturday and you've really grabbed people's attention.
There should have been spin off stories for the next two years
but it didn't. It all it all went quiet to the
extent I wondered whether even Paul Dacre and his team had been
bought off or pressurised. Listening to you saying that, I
was thinking, OK, quite possibly they ran it and obviously kept
it to themselves in the run up to running it.
They ran it and then possibly it hit the fan after that and
whoever was pulling the common purpose strings at that
particular point said to to take care.
Isaiah, Paul, Oh boy, none of no more of that.
Thank you very much. We'll just call draw a line
under that, but please don't revisit.
I'm sure you're right, because common purpose at that time was
was absolutely involved in creating what I regard as
censorship organisations for the press.
Full fact was in there, the Media Standards Trust, and that
was the whole reason that the Daily Mail printed the article
in the 1st place. But yeah, wheels within wheels.
The other thing which I can't resist mentioning is because
you've talked about the child abuse subject and there does
seem to be a wall of silence over this.
You'll get isolated reports, but nobody takes it any further.
But I recently was able to talk to, well, it was actually a
couple of journalists in the Telegraph and one of them was
following up on a a family court case, horrific, where a mother's
lost her twins. And they, they were clearly
interested in the in the case, but in, in our, you know,
discussion, what what then took place was them saying, well,
yeah, but the trouble is that the, the mother's evidence is
all contained within family court documents and we're not
allowed to read those documents. And I said, well, isn't that the
start of your story? The fact that that the mother
who's trying to defend herself can't defend herself because of
family court rules on what, what can be said and what can't.
And the fact that you, as a national newspaper can't report
the truth because it's been censored by the Family Court,
isn't that where you start? And there was this pause.
And I thought, yeah, that one hit home, but I didn't get it.
I didn't get a response. And then when we discussed a
little bit more, of course. Well, the trouble is, even if we
do get through that barrier, then we've got to get through
the editorial team. And then we're going to have to
get through the legal team. And the legal team are going to
say, oh, no, we can't break. We can't break the law.
We're going to have to ask the the local authority to release
those family court papers, which of course they're never going to
do. So I just, I just found it
bizarre that I was there talking with heavy hitter journalists
for the key newspaper and and they knew something was wrong,
but they couldn't seem to get a story out of it.
And the second journalist was really interesting because they
contacted me because families had said if you want to know
more about the subject, you talked to Brian Garish from the
UK column. So I get a call.
We had a very nice discussion. I tried to be really helpful,
but I got to the point where I said, well, the problem is you
can't deal with the story because you don't even know the
questions to ask. Their knowledge was so limited.
And, and at one point there was a bit of a rebuttal and they
said to me when I'd said, well, there's no reporting from the
courts. Oh, yes, journalists can go into
the family courts. And I said, well, they can now
occasionally, but their reporting is still controlled by
a solitary judge in a court with no jury, so it's censored.
I provided them with a lot of information, you know, to help
them. I didn't even receive a thank
you back. So I'm going to say at the
moment the Telegraph has dropped very low in my, my, my book.
But this is this is not unusual, Eugenia, I don't think.
I don't think it is as again, I will just caveat to say that I
am not obviously in the midst of that anymore.
But certainly, you know, that sounds pretty spineless.
And yeah, I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking, well,
there's the story right there. The fact that you that you can't
you can't you can't investigate the story you want to
investigate because you're not allowed to.
By the way, the family courts are configured and what's
allowed, you know, what's sub judice etcetera.
There's a story isn't that isn't that worth an investigation?
How do we get here? What happened?
At what point did the law change that this had, you know, that
family courts basically became private.
Why? Whose decision was that?
You know, it's a massive story there.
But no, they they will not touch that.
And partly they won't touch that because they don't have the
resources enough bodies to do it justice.
But that is exactly the type of story that possibly not that one
for the same reasons that it never got looked at properly
back in the day. But those sort of questions were
the sort of questions that investigative journalists in the
70s, eighties, 90s would have asked that type of probing
question. And those are the questions that
you guys ask. You understand investigative
journalism in a way that I don't see any evidence of.
You know, as I say, circling back to Marianna Spring, she's
supposed to be an investigative journalist.
I don't see any evidence of that.
And I'm trying to be generous here because she, no, she's
incredibly irritating to listen to, but I don't see any, any
evidence whatsoever that she understands what being an
investigative journalist and looking in every direction you
can for your for the evidence before you start compiling your
story. I don't see any evidence of that
She got. It seems to me that what she's
done with Kate is basically it landed in her lap.
It sounds to me as though that it's all personal family
dynamics going on in the background here.
No idea. Guessing she was The story
landed in her lap and she's made the facts fit into absolutely
well. The facts fit the narrative that
she has been tasked to deliver and there is no, it's not
underpinned. You know, I, I have no issue at
all with people coming to conclusions that I don't agree
with, none at all, provided the evidence is there that they have
actually researched it and they've stood the story up.
And this is there seems to be so much of this way something
appears to be an investigation and then when you actually look
at it, it isn't. Yeah, I was at a music festival
at the weekend. Sounds beautiful in Dorset,
really lovely weather, lovely environment, lovely people
there. And amongst the people there,
there was a lot of discussion going on at various points about
Marianas, Marianas Springs attack on Kate Chamerani and
people were I, I, I was surprised people don't like
Marianas Spring because they regard her as underhand in the
way she does things. But my goodness, people really
did not like the way what they they believed is that she'd gone
in and manipulated what was a highly personal thing for Kate
Chameroni and her family. All families have problems and
divisions at sometimes, but Marianna Spring twisted that and
used it to get the story she wanted, and people picked up on
it. So if Marianna Spring was
unpopular previously, I picked up a new level from from just
that environment over the weekend where people said what
this woman did was outrageous. So maybe people are beginning to
get tougher and, you know, call this thing, this sort of thing
out, which would be really good news, I think.
It definitely would if if people out, you know, sort of out with
the the, you know, the the more, the more the better informed
among us if people, people did listen to that.
I mean, I'd say I haven't seen the TV programme and I actually
don't need to now having listened listened to her drivel
on for five episodes. But yeah, I mean, hopefully
people will, will, will who, who do listen to, to, to, to what
she's been saying will think, well, OK, fine and dandy.
But you've, you've basically positioned yourself in the
middle of a family tragedy and you've found reasons to use it
to pursue your own agenda and nothing more, you know?
And yeah, let's just hope that there are, even if it's a few
dozen people that they merge with that that would be good.
That would be good. We're heading for the top of the
hour, but just a couple more questions because I can't resist
it. You, Jimmy, what's the first
one? The first one is colleagues,
other colleagues of, of your of your year, maybe younger that
you're still in contact with. Are you a completely lone voice?
Are you alone in the way you see things?
Or have you got other former journalists and reporters who
who are starting to see the world as you see it now?
I'm actually not in touch with that many people who who I
worked with, I tended always to be among the youngest.
And so unfortunately, chronology has seen off quite a lot.
But what I have noticed and what I find incredibly disappointing
among among those of my contemporaries with whom I am
still so connected on Facebook and where I've stuck my head
above the parapet, which I did a lot, particularly in 2021 going
into 22. And still now, you know, I still
do it. Now I get shot down.
And these are by people who I worked alongside who've come
through the same, the same environment, you know, learning
environment as journalists as I did.
And they shoot me down the, the, the whole vaccine debate in
particular. And, and I personally, I've been
a, a vaccine sceptic actually since before my daughter was
born and she's 32 now. And I was doing my research way
back there and I'm actually writing, I was doing research
for articles that I was writing for sort of the health press,
consumer press back then and asking questions, which was
much, much, much harder to do this sort of research back then
because there was no Internet or a very basic one.
And you know, now whenever, whenever I put anything
questions safe and effective, I will get probably one of these
former colleagues. We've never complete, we've
never formally fallen out over it, but one of them will jump
all over me. And they're publishing all kinds
of things at the moment. Particularly they're picking up
the inevitable tropes on RFK Junior and just publishing them
without comment. And that's the other thing that
I find really depressing is the number of, of, of journalists
who will just run with other stuff.
They've seen people stick on Facebook or Twitter or whatever
X or whatever and just cut and paste it.
Sorry. Well, we taught to actually go
and check your sources, which I always do.
I, I will not, I will not cut and paste and copy anything
without checking the the core sources and the number of times
I go back into Facebook and say that's wrong and nobody really
takes any notice because the moment has passed.
You're still clearly seen as a rebel, which is where we, we
started in the interview. I, I'd like to say I've you've
got a background there, left wing background and and
Communist Party. I particularly look back and
think to myself, well at least when we had the left wingers,
the genuine left wingers, and particularly when they were very
strong left wing MPs, you've used the expression that you've
always supported the underdog. But that's what I sensed about
them. I might not agree with all their
politics, but at least they did have some strong values and they
were trying to do their best for the ordinary man and woman, the
ordinary family. So I I still have huge respect.
And I think the fact that we've lost some of those strong left
wing people in in parliament, certainly we've lost them
within, you know, the limp, limp wristed Keir Starmer type Labor
Party. I think it's a real loss.
We need some of that that drive. I agree absolutely.
I mean, you know, you will remember the Dennis Skinners of
the of, of you know, of your and these were, I mean, I think the
absolutely key thing about the the yeah, the limp wristed a lot
right across the board is that most of them have never had a
proper day job. So, you know, back in the 70s
and 80s and, you know, and I have, as you will not be
surprised to learn that I was not exactly over the moon when
Margaret Thatcher was elected. But what I do remember about her
is at least she's had a day job. She had some experience of
industry. I mean, albeit I don't think her
policies serve British industry at all well, but she had, you
know, she had that experience and, you know, and on and, you
know, within the Labor Party, you had the likes of Dennis
Skinner, who'd been a working miner.
He knew what he was bloody talking about.
Now they, they get their, their, their degrees from uni, they
start off as researchers, they become spads and suddenly their
MPs. And that is right across the
board. They have never had day jobs.
They do not actually know what it's like to run a small
business to, to run, to be part of a big organisation, to do
some do manual labour. I mean, they, they don't know,
they have no idea. So it's which I think is in
large measure explains why there's a a real lack of empathy
between MPs and the people they purport to represent.
Absolutely. And finally.
Well this is absolutely true. I, I regard it as an honour to
be here talking to you because you are the full career
professional journalist. I, I'm here very much as a, a
self taught person who still can't quite believe that I've
ended up doing what what I do. And so for you to be engaged
with the UK column is yeah, it's an honour.
So I'd like to thank you for that.
My question though is how did he actually find the UK column and
when? When was that?
Oh goodness, it was sometime. It was sometime, sometime in
2020, and I can't remember exactly how.
I mean, I rumbled. I rumbled the whole COVID thing
pretty early. And I have AI, have a master's
degree in employment law, which is a whole separate story.
And I had a look at that coronavirus bill and I looked at
it and I thought, this guy over 400 pages, there's no way
somebody wrote this over the weekend, which was pretty much
what Boris Johnson was suggesting to us.
Oh, we've put this together and it's all ready to go.
I thought, no, you haven't. That's been sitting on a shelf
waiting to be dusted down and tweaked.
And it flowed from there. And I started and I real and I
was being bombarded with propaganda.
And what am I? What am I listening to?
What am I reading here? This is, this is nonsense.
You know, where, where's the other side of the story?
There must be another side to the story.
So I started digging and delving and at some point I obviously I
came across the UK column and you know, my, my hardwired lefty
thing, say, oh God, are these all right wing extremists?
And then I realised, no, you're just looking to see if you can
find out what's going on, basically what is actually going
on in this country, what's going on in the world?
Why are we following this insane agenda?
You know, the insanity of where, where you had intelligent grown
up people wearing a mask to go into a pub, taking the mask off
to sit down, standing up to go to the loo, putting their mask
on. Yeah, you were the you.
And yeah, not just you, but others were the ones asking the
questions. And so I gravitated to that and
I did, I worked with Dan Aston Gregory for a while as a
volunteer doing some of some of the the grant work on his, on
his episodes when he was doing the pandemic podcast.
And it was just really that, and I've, and this is this is where
I so quite Oh my God, I found my tribe in this world of insanity,
but I can't tell you exactly when.
I don't know what the trigger was.
Well, whatever we are, we're very glad that you did find us,
Eugenie. And it's it's been great to talk
to you today. Really interesting.
Lots more questions we could ask.
Maybe there will come a point where maybe we should have a
look at a Part 2 or something. But yeah, the press media, very
important. The so called 4th estate, isn't
it? And, and we do need to know
what's happening to it, what it's doing and who's controlling
it. So I think there's probably a
lot more questions to ask. Thank you for joining me.
Well, thank you very much for inviting me.
Let's not play the angered out honour you, but it has been an
honour and a privilege to to be able to share some of this and
hopefully throw a bit of light on what it was like then, on
what it's like there, what it's like now.
Great. Thank you.