Crusading Journalists

Such is the fearless freedom of our cantankerous Fourth Estate that the reporting of Her Majesty's Government's antics is being left to the New York Times. In the course of exacerbating an anti-Muslim witch-hunt in Birmingham some years ago, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove relied on an anonymous letter, which he was warned contained "serious factual inaccuracies and, in a number of areas, contradictions." Even if the jabbering homunculus were not a former Murdoch leader writer and long-serving Conservative minister, this pedantic concern with mere facts would doubtless have sounded suspiciously like the judgement of experts. Gove was apparently further radicalised by Tumbledown Tessie, then the coalition's Minister for Wog Control, who accused him of insufficient environmental hostility and betraying the values of Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell and David Irving. On the free and fearless side, Britain's leading liberal newspaper has condescended to summarise the matter at second-hand, though without inflammatory use of terms such as institutional racism or Conservative Islamophobia crisis, which might provoke unwarranted accusations of bias or lack of nuance.