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.