Here's something I've been thinking for a while.

A lot of the political dysfunction we've seen over the past decade from Brexit, Boris Johnson

to runaway inequality is basically the result of a chronic dysfunction in the media.

We get bad politicians because their reputations are buffed and ballooned by pundits and hacks,

and we lose good ones because political journalists decide to drum them out of public life.

UK political media operates on a herd mentality.

When something gets identified as a story, everyone charges after it until something dramatic

happens.

The Daily Mail, the Westminster Lobby, the Today programme all stampede in the same direction

for a while, and it's the stuff that they choose to notice and pursue that we call news.

But all the other stuff, the big questions like why living standards have gone into reverse,

just gets ignored.

What gets covered and what doesn't is determined by the law of political expediency.

It was expedient to pretend that Jeremy Corbyn was the devil, Liz trusts a serious politician

and that there was no alternative to austerity.

Then when those pretenses can no longer hold, the herd just moves on to some new ones.

That's not a glitch, it's a feature.

Media in the UK is designed to allow the rich and powerful to hoard extreme levels of wealth

and status at the expense of ordinary people.

It's not meant to inform us, it doesn't want to share the truth, it exists to protect

the interests of an elite few.

So today I'm joined by my brilliant, intrepid, beautiful colleagues, Moyalothian McLean

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