
The ‘naive cynicism’ of Russell Brand’s hasty defenders
I can’t imagine that Channel 4’s investigative slot Dispatches has had such an audience in living memory. On Saturday evening, many thousands of people who seldom if ever watch terrestrial television – I was one of them – will have tuned in at 9pm, just like the old days, to watch a conventional broadcast. Most of these people will already have known the substance of what was in the programme, because it was a joint investigation with a good-old-fashioned newspaper – whose version of the story was published a few hours earlier and was eagerly and widely read online. Quite a moment for the so-called ‘legacy media’. The gist of the
