{"id":273,"date":"2007-07-26T09:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-26T09:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/26\/news-is-news\/"},"modified":"2007-07-26T09:03:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-26T09:03:00","slug":"news-is-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/26\/news-is-news\/","title":{"rendered":"News is news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>May I show you something? This came up in a discussion I was having about newspapers: it&#8217;s a quote from the book Yes, Prime Minister &#8211; The Diaries of the Right Hon. James Hacker by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. It&#8217;d be quick to say this is the novelisation of the TV series but that hides the fact that that books are excellent political satire all by themselves.<\/p>\n<p>But you know the characters from the TV show. So in A Conflict of Interest, Prime Minister Hacker is nervous about how the press will report the latest debacle and Sir Humphrey thinks this is trivial:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Humphrey knows nothing about newspapers. He&#8217;s a Civil Servant. I&#8217;m a politician, I know all about them. I have to. They can make or break me. I know exactly who reads them. The Times is read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country should be run by another country. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Independent is read by people who don&#8217;t know who runs the country but are sure they&#8217;re doing it wrong. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who still think it is their country. And the Sun&#8217;s readers don&#8217;t care who runs the country providing she has big tits.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>May I show you something? This came up in a discussion I was having about newspapers: it&#8217;s a quote from &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/26\/news-is-news\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-4p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}