Owl says: the article DOESN’T mention those local newspapers (they know who they are) which simply print council press releases, only supportive articles and “good news only” items from councils that keep them afloat by giving them a monopoly on printing their official notices and job vacancy adverts….. becoming quasi-council newsletters.
“This month, with the announcement that Johnston Press, the third-biggest group in the local news industry, had gone into administration, this building in Hendon, along with hundreds of other empty newspaper offices across the country, became a monument to the fragile and shrinking world of regional reporting. More than 300 titles and 6,000 journalists have been lost in a decade, creating what many see as a democratic deficit, never mind a future dearth of trained reporters.
The Times, part of the Newsquest group, still exists, but these days there is just one edition and much of the action happens online. Its webpage invites readers to send in their own news and photos, and the phone number for the news team is harder to find than the GRU’s in Moscow. When I do get through to a reporter, he is silent when I ask where he is. “Do you still have a base you can use in the borough of Barnet?” I persist, at which point he tells me to email his editor.
Newsquest, like Johnston Press, is at the centre of big changes in local journalism, not all of them bad, and it is more than anyone’s job is worth to speak off the cuff to the press. But as Barry Brennan, former group editor of the Hendon Times and my old boss, confirms, all coverage of the boroughs of Barnet and Hertsmere is now run from Watford.
“Councillors and crooks must surely feel relaxed,” Brennan says, “now that so few weeklies have sufficient space or journalists to cover councils and courts. It may sound trite, but we really are missing out on big chunks of knowledge, and that’s bad for a community.”
More cheeringly, Times reporters do still get to some Barnet Council meetings, although not many, according to Labour councillor Claire Farrier: “We don’t see them much any more; maybe when there is a big planning story. They do their best, but they often repeat the press releases we put out fairly closely – which we quite like, of course.” …
Perhaps when the Cairncross report comes out next year it will propose something radical: something akin to a series of tax incentives launched in Canada last week. Over a decade, more than 250 Canadian news outlets have closed and since 2012 newspaper revenues are down by up to 40%. Now the federal government has stepped in, offering C$600m (£350m) in new tax credits to the media industry for the next five years.
Whatever Cairncross recommends, her committee must bear in mind that it will always be hard to show exactly how local reporting aids democracy. Because you can never find out exactly what people have got away with when no one was looking.”
East Devon Watch 
I spent 4 years actively campaigning for accountability including hundreds of FoI requests, and several attempts to hold public bodies accountable for failing to disclose information as required under Freedom of Information laws.
At the end of those 4 years, the only conclusion I could come to was that it is now impossible to hold public bodies and elected representatives to account – mainly because most of the safeguards that used to exist to protect democracy by ensuring accountability have been destroyed or neutered by the Conservative government.
For example, the Audit Commission was somewhere that you could go to hold local government to account for e.g. poor financial decisions. The Conservative Government abolished the Audit Commission in 2015, a decision made in c. 2011 by Eric Pickles, the minister for local government at the time. His view was that the Audit Commission’s role would be taken up by members of the public acting as “Armchair Auditors”.
Well, I actually tried to be an “Armchair Auditor” and reviewed the EDDC accounts one year. Unfortunately, I was not able to recruit the team of “Armchair Auditors” that would be needed to do the job properly, and I was not able to have access to some of the documents that a real auditor would have access to due to Data Protection rules, which made my attempts rather pointless. So no chance of holding anyone to account by trying to be an Armchair Auditor.
I also made a general complaint of EDDC behaviour to the Local Government Ombudsman, who ruled that they could only look at individual complaints of maladministration against me as an individual and not any more general complaints. So no chance of holding anyone to account through the Ombudsman.
A fellow campaigner took EDDC to the First Tier Tribunal for failing to disclose information under FoI laws. They prevaricated providing information to the court to the point that the court called them “Obstructive” – but yet there were no negative consequences to them. No one was forced to resign, no one was held accountable.
As far as I can tell, if you want to hold anyone accountable today then you either need to have (say) £20k in small change to spend on a Judicial Review OR hope that a local investigative journalist will dig and dig and eventually publish something that is so embarrassing that someone is forced to resign.
Unfortunately, these days local newspapers are so lacking in financial resources that they cannot afford to pay journalists even to write fluffy articles about the local fetes and have to rely on tweaking press releases – which is why articles in several independent newspapers often look so strikingly similar – so there is certainly no money to be spent on investigations. And when there are no local newspapers left, then there will be no possibility of investigative journalism restarting either, and the Conservative Party objective of making themselves unaccountable will be complete.
THIS IS AN EXTREMELY SERIOUS SITUATION. Any democratic society relies on investigative journalists to hold politicians and public servants to account. Without accountability, there is no incentive for politicians to be honest and transparent about what they are proposing and the reasons for it. Without transparency there can be no real debate, because the facts and the arguments cannot be articulated. And without information and debate there is only propaganda for people to base their voting decisions on. So, no investigative journalists = no democracy.
Don’t believe those who point to elections every few years as being the be-all and end-all of democracy – for when the election propaganda is controlled by who has the special-interest groups with the deepest pockets, and when the press is dominated by media-barons who have their own (get even richer) agendas dictating what gets covered and the slant it is given, then democracy is only a veneer on the surface of autocracy.
And that, my friends, is a pretty good description, of where politics is in the UK in 2018. Democracy is practically dead.
LikeLike