The British press was born free but it is everywhere in chains. Some of those chains are financial. As the internet takes away our readers and advertisers, news organizations struggle to find the money to pay for basic news gathering and even more so for long, complicated investigations. Instead, they lapse into recycling PR and propaganda served up in neat packages by governments and corporations.
Other chains are political. In every limb of the British state, the activity of the public sector is concealed by a blanket of official secrecy which is enforced by politicians and which means quite simply that civil servants, police officers, care workers and others are banned from talking to reporters. We are expected to take our information from their press officers.
