Robert Peston Robert Peston

Inside the relationship between politicians and the media

Global system breakdown has defined all our lives for 13 years. From the banking system’s boom and bust to the rise of a new anti-globalisation, the populist generation of politician and political leader, to the mounting cost of global warming, to the exponentially charged proliferation of a jumping-the-species virus. 

There is definitely no sleep till Brooklyn, or for the wicked. And we have a choice, as people, as nations, as culture. We can try to understand what is happening in a balanced, calm, rational, scientific way and rebuild some sense of control over our destiny. Or we can continue shouting at each other, in social media’s Tower of Babel, and turn Call of Duty4: Modern Warfare into the model of our future. Or, to put it another way, journalism we can trust, impartial journalism, matters more than it ever has so that as citizens we have the information that allows us to make those reasoned choices.

Having been mugged by Roy Greenslade into giving this lecture in honour of the legendary Hugh Cudlipp, this will be performance catharsis for me, very public psychotherapy even – after 35 years as a journalist, living on the adrenalin of reporting on events and trends that are no respecters of a normal working day and that have shaken and changed our world. But mostly what I want to do – with some trepidation – is talk about why we have to rescue impartial journalism from possible oblivion and fight back against the pernicious ideas that impartial journalism either doesn’t matter, or is just what I or you happen to think it is, that there is no distinction between the objective and the subjective, and that to argue otherwise is a fatuous exercise in impossibilism.

Even our leaders, with their deeds as much as words, show contempt for the idea of impartial news.

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