Hi everyone and thank you so much for joining us for this special Navara Media live session

straight from the World Transformed Festival. Before we get going, the World Transformed

needs urgent support to safeguard its future until the end of 2022. So make sure you head

to their website and donate to their funders if you can. Let's get into it.

For tonight's session, we are joined by Maurice MacLeod, who is chief executive of Race

on the Agenda and a former journalist. Adam Biankov, who is political editor of Byline

Times and Ava Evans, who is politics correspondent for Joe Media. And tonight we will be asking,

is political journalism broken? And I just want to start with an audience poll. So raise

your hands if you agree with the statement that political journalism is broken. Now raise

your hands if you don't agree with the statement that political journalism is broken. One alone

hand. And raise your hand for anyone who's not sure yet. Okay, cool, tough crowd. So we'll

do this again at the end and see if anyone has changed their positions. So that is the

question we're going to be tackling. Is political journalism broken? And I'm going to start

with a bit of a rogue question for all of our panel, which is, how did you get into

political journalism? What are your paths and backgrounds? Essentially, are you representative

of the kind of people who are currently mostly in political journalism? So if we start

with Maurice. Hello, my. So how did I get, I feel like that's, I feel like I'm, I'm

being fake in even answering that because I don't feel like I ever got into political

journalism. I've never been a lobby journalist. I was political editor of the voice 25 years

ago. But even then it didn't feel like we were doing political, you know, we were sort

of accepted as part of the crew, the cohort of proper political journalists. So, and

my background, I turned down going to a private school when I was 11, I went to a comprehensive,

...