MPs Expenses affair - deep skullduggery afoot

[Jan Klimkowski]

That so many Labour and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally crooked is no more than a metaphor for the anti-democratic system they have forged together.
Their accomplices have been those journalists who report Parliament as “lobby correspondents” and their editors, who have “played the game” willfully, and have deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment on personalities and their specious crises, have reduced the “national conversation” to a series of media events, in which the withdrawal of popular consent — as the historically low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated — has been abused as apathy.

The "lobby correspondents" are the filthy grease that keeps the wheels turning. They're not journalists. They're propagandists and lackeys - fed bogus stories which they weave into pseudo-narratives to divert the somnolent masses.

The National Union of Journalists should withdraw their accreditation.

Marketing is the ultimate pseudo-science. And provides the spurious justification for much of this nonsense.