British politics is in uproar today because a senior cabinet minister, Business Secretary Vince Cable, made a whole lot of indiscreet comments published in The Daily Telegraph about Rupert Murdoch (“I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win”) and the country’s controversial government cost-cutting.
Sounds like a great story for The Telegraph, until you realise how it got its scoop …
“The disclosure is the second revelation in extracts from a covertly recorded conversation between Mr Cable and two undercover reporters from this newspaper posing as Liberal-Democrat supporters in his constituency … the undercover reporters posed as mothers concerned over changes to the benefits system …”
This story comes a few months after another British broadsheet, The Sunday Times, revealed that a Nigerian member of the world football governing body FIFA’s executive committee asked for a bribe of $US800,000 to endorse one of the candidates bidding to hold the 2018 World Cup.
That nice little scoop was also the result of “undercover journalists” at work, in that case “posing as lobbyists for a United States business consortium”.
So this is what high-brow journalism has come to: “undercover reporters” posing as “concerned mothers” or “American business lobbyists”.
Gotcha, indeed.
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You forgot to mention that most of our “journalists” are only posing as “journalists.
I find it somewhat ironic that the Murdoch press complains about having war declared upon it by a political party when The Australian (isn’t this an arm of the Murdoch Empire) declared was upon a political party & quite publicly stated so.
This bloke is a hero in my opinion.
I have said many times the gutter is the level of the majority of todays journalists, obviously the gutter is not low enough for these incompetent frauds.
What a relief it is not to be high profile and living life dodging stings by ten–a-penny hacks.
Sure, the internet is one reason newspapers are dying off – the other reason is News Limited’s publications (as I ever so politely call them).
Hopefully the world is slowly changing for the better, keep the fingers crossed