Three minutes after ten is the time. Good morning. How are you? I'm off next week, so this is your last chance to get a bit of O'Brien before the summer holidays, or rather the spring break, shall we call it.

I, where is the line, by the way, between me realizing something that is probably bleeding obvious and and and and it seeming quite

charming and self-deprecating and it just seeming really ignorant and stupid I don't know I

tried to walk that line most days but I've often wondered I think I've shared this with you

and it really is obvious when you think about it but I've only just it's literally just

occurred to me in the

little news bulletin then, why we still are so enthralled to newspapers, why it is still

newspapers that have such a stranglehold upon the news agenda. And of course, in this country,

it's a horrible relationship because so many of the newspapers are completely morally corrupt

and doing the bidding only of their non-dom billionaire owners, funnily enough, although, as we'll discover,

there's some interesting divisions today. And so I often sit here thinking, why are we still doing it?

You know, Twitter's got loads of power. Why do the right-wing papers hate Twitter so much?

Answer, because they can't control it.

But why did newspapers still have, and just a quick glance at today's front pages?

I hope I realized this before, but I'm afraid I can't guarantee that I did. It's just about access, isn't it? It's because the political editors, the political journalists of national

newspapers, and indeed national

broadcasters have access to politicians. And even when the government is populated by liars,

truth twisters, spivs and charlatans, it's still really, really important to find out what

they're up to. It's still going to be,

arguably the most important story in town, what emanates from Whitehall or Westminster or, of course,

more pertinently Downing Street, where another mega-rich non-dom currently resides. So there it is.

Why do we still, I mean newspapers have been in decline for

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